Women's Work

I write mostly about neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. That means I spend most of my time talking to and writing about men.In May of 2011 (chosen arbitrarily just because it was a year ago and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about this gender gap then), 89 percent of my phone interviews were with men.I can think of a few reasons for this. One is that journalists typically talk to the senior leaders of labs, rather than the graduate students or postdocs who actually do the work. As you climb higher up the ladder of academic science, the male-to-female bias grows. According to the latest stats from the National Science Foundation, women earn 57 percent of all science and engineering undergraduate degrees and 41.1 percent of doctoral degrees. Yet the number of male PhDs in science jobs outnumbers females by two and a half times.Another possible reason: Within science, the subfields with the most female-friendly sex ratios are: psychology (which employs twice as many women as men), political science (balanced ratio), and anthropology/sociology (balanced ratio). In contrast, for my pet topic, biology and life science, about twice as many jobs go to male versus female PhDs. Neuroscience, in particular, has a reputation for male domination. As of 2006, only 1 in 5 papers published in Nature Neuroscience — one of the field’s top journals — had a female corresponding author. A 2009 survey of neuroscience departments and programs reported that just 29 percent of tenure-track faculty are women. “So many of our best students and postdocs are women,” says Ben Barres, chair of neurobiology at Stanford. “But you don’t see them represented in our faculty. A lot of them are dropping out.”Still, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe neuroscience is undergoing a female revolution.Read more at...The Last Word on Nothing, June 2012.