With increasing numbers of women completing PhDs in science, it’s only a matter of time before major scientific awards reflect the gender diversity of our world, right? Not so much, when women still earn much less than 50% of PhDs in some fields, so we have a whole lot of progress to make to even get a candidate pool that truly reflects the world around us. (Here and throughout the problems are even worse for women and men from other under-represented groups.)
If we shift our standards to having scientific award winners reflect the gender diversity of their scientific fields, we still fall significantly short of that benchmark. Nobel Prizes still go dominantly to men, in the past two decades, newly elected members of the US National Academy of Science are only 10-20% women, and the UK Royal Society does even worse. Look at the list of fellows for your favorite professional society, and you’ll probably find similarly dismal statistics. These overwhelmingly male roll calls aren’t just because of the long lag times built into that sort of late career recognition, but all of the large and small barriers and slights that women accumulate over their careers. Seemingly small things like women being less likely to be asked to speak at conferences and having lower rates of self-citation accumulate over time to produce less impressive CVs and lower H-indices for women than men at similar career stages. Continue reading
Tenure, She Wrote 