by ELIZABETH GIBNEY
Leading male researchers in the life sciences employ fewer women than do their female peers, according to a study of US laboratories. The effect is particularly pronounced in labs run by ‘elite’ male principal investigators, who train significantly fewer women than do other male professors, the authors have found. Their study appears in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Because a disproportionate number of assistant professors are appointed from such elite labs, the authors suggest that the skew could help to explain why women account for just 18% of full professors in the biological sciences, despite making up more than half of PhD graduates in the field.
Running a lab with a staff that is more than half male does not necessarily make someone sexist, says Jason Sheltzer, a cancer biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study. “We do think that maybe this shows the need for elite faculty members to make a stronger, more proactive effort to reach out to talented women.”
Scientific American for more