Advanced Yet Primitive: Gender bias in neuroscience and beyond
Gaining perspective on gender bias in science can help us overcome it
Editor’s note (Michael W. Cole): This is a guest post by Nicole Lalta, a first-year graduate student in neuroscience at Rutgers University-Newark. Nicole has been instrumental in developing the Bias Research Initiative, and she is helping develop the Initiative’s efforts toward better understanding social biases, especially in science. Expect more guest posts in the future!
In brief: Relative to the social values shared by most scientists, neuroscience is socially advanced in many ways yet primitive in others. Focusing on gender bias, neuroscience has become much more gender balanced since the field began, but we are very far from the goal of equal representation. Here I will go over the momentum we have toward solving this problem, along with covering the current depth of the problem and how we can work together to solve it.
To recap the Advanced Yet Primitive game introduced in a previous post: this game involves looking or contemplating something, such as a book. First, does this book seem advanced? Consider the history of books and how it compares to what we consider a book today. Books have been around for centuries, first handwritten, then typed, and now digitized. People would have to go to libraries or bookstores to acquire them, but now we can access them on our cell phones with ease. Now consider how they are still primitive relative to our ideals? Books may be hard to read or inaccessible on certain platforms, especially older books. So they are still primitive.
How can we assess gender bias in academia in terms of the Advanced Yet Primitive game?
Historically, women have been completely excluded from many aspects of society that have been deemed “masculine.” It has been discovered that women have contributed to the arts and sciences as early as the fourteenth century (despite many downplaying those contributions at the time). Many people have used the contributions of women throughout ancient and modern history to argue for their admissions into established institutions (Schiebinger, 1987). Modern society is indeed advanced – relative to centuries ago – when it comes to recognizing the contributions of women in society, especially in science and technology.
However, modern society is still primitive in some aspects for women in science. According to the National Institutes of Health, women only account for 18 percent of leadership roles in medicine. However, in 2021, 46.2 percent of people earning their doctorate or medical degree were women. Further, many neuroscience conferences continue to lack gender balance for their major presentations. Clearly, a disproportionate number of qualified women are not being selected for leadership roles.
At what point in the career timeline do women drop out of these STEM fields? Or, at what point do women experience barriers because of their gender? According to a recent review paper (Dronkers et al. 2021), women hit a barrier at every career level in academia – from undergraduate to tenured faculty.
The barriers that women face at every stage of their academic career makes it less likely that they will continue to pursue a career in STEM and/or academia. I think this is because of the relationship between every stage. For example, after getting into graduate school, a female student may have trouble being included as a collaborator on projects that lead to academic publications. Such a student could also have issues getting her papers published in reputable journals due to editors and/or reviewers having bias based on the author’s name (Llorens et al., 2021). Without enough publications, she may have trouble finding a postdoctoral position at a university because universities are looking for candidates that have publications. Furthermore, funding agencies are less likely to give awards to women scientists (Singleton et al., 2021), and even those that do get awards tend to get less money than their male counterparts (Dworkin et al., 2020). All of these barriers that women scientists face lead to less (apparent) scientific productivity and less acknowledgement, which ultimately leads to fewer women reaching high positions in academia.
Implicit bias – a form of bias that occurs unintentionally but nevertheless affects decisions – seems to impact every aspect of a person’s journey through academia. Is it possible to reduce implicit bias? Yes, there is evidence we can reduce implicit bias, but it is challenging enough that progress will be slow. Therefore, we can consider our society to be primitive when it comes to promoting and supporting women in science and academia. However, the women who continue to contribute and advance our understanding of science and the men who use their positions to support these women, will continue to push society closer to gender equality in science and academia.
References:
Dworkin, J.D., Linn, K.A., Teich, E.G. et al. The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists. Nat Neurosci 23, 918–926 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0658-y
Anaïs Llorens, …, Nina F. Dronkers, Gender bias in academia: A lifetime problem that needs solutions, Neuron 109 (13), 2047-2074 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.002.
Kaela S. Singleton, De-Shaine R.K. Murray, Angeline J. Dukes, Lietsel N.S. Richardson, A year in review: Are diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives fixing systemic barriers?, Neuron 109 (21), 3365-3367 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.07.014.
Schiebinger, L. (1987). The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay. Signs, 12(2), 305–332. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173988
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