# Presentation: 348157

## Gender Equity in Science: Lessons from the Life Sciences

- Laurel Smith-Doerr
- National Science Foundation and
- Boston University

## NSF, Science & Engineering Indicators, 2008

## NSF, S&E Indicators, 2008

## Slide 4

## Calculated from NSF S&E Ind 2008, app table 5-19

## Donna Nelson, 2007, http://cheminfo.chem.ou.edu/~djn/diversity/Faculty_Tables_FY07/07Report.pdf 

- Donna Nelson, 2007, _[http://cheminfo.chem.ou.edu/~djn/diversity/Faculty_Tables_FY07/07Report.pdf](http://cheminfo.chem.ou.edu/~djn/diversity/Faculty_Tables_FY07/07Report.pdf)__ _

## Women as percent of scientists in 2003

- Life Scientists employed in business/industry: 42%
- Life Scientists employed in academia: 44%

- Physical Scientists employed in business/industry: 30%
- Physical Scientists employed in academia: 28%

- Calculated from NSF, 2006, *Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science & Engineering*, table H-19

## Understanding the gender gap in science

- Social psychological studies of cognitive bias
- Individual level studies of career attainment—socialization, work/family roles, discrimination
- Organizational level studies
- Most often focus only on academic settings
- My focus—looking at life science careers across academic and industry contexts

## Unconscious bias—one example

- Randomized experiment on 238 faculty members (Steinpres et al. 1999)
- Evaluating CV’s of tenure candidates,
- Evidence of bias by both male/female respondents when CV had female name
- Test yourself online: _[https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/)_

## Socialization and work/family roles

- Gendered expectations about family roles changing, but Gender distribution of household labor changing more slowly
- One study of faculty (Suitor et al. 2001), male faculty report same number of hours as US male avg (10 hours), but female faculty ‘only’ 50% more household hours.
- Family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities in academic science (Ginther and Kahn 2006).
- Single women do better at each stage than single men.
- For women: Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years
- For men: both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

## Women scientists receive 63 cents for every $1 men get from NIH

- In FY 2001-3, controlling for age, education, institutional and grant factors.
- Source: RAND study 2005, Hosek et al., *Gender Differences in Major Federal External Grant Programs*. (_[http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB9147/](http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB9147/)_)

## The double standard

- Life sciences (Wenneras and Wold 1997)

- Physics (Towers 2008)
- Fermilab experiment, Run II Dzero
- Women postdocs more productive than men postdocs, but awarded 1/3rd as many conference paper presentations on average

## Network Organizations v. Hierarchies

- Network Organizations:

- Hierarchies:

- Indefinite and sequential interaction structure, norms govern relations, partners pool resources, expectations foster collaboration but are not rule bound, flows of non-redundant “freer” info (Powell 1990).

- Life sciences example: biotechnology firms dedicated to human therapeutics (often locally clustered)

- Question for women in science—do old boy networks flourish in the absence of rules?

- Employment in formal authority structure patterns interaction, rules govern relations, resources (including info) distributed according to rank, mass production of reliable products of a given quality.

- Life sciences examples: multinational pharmaceutical corporations (global), universities (less clustered)

- Question for women in science—does bureaucratic procedure combat discrimination, or hide biased informal organization?

## Source: Smith-Doerr (2004, Women’s Work) based on logistic regression analysis controlling for years since PhD, prestige of PhD program; N=2,062

- Source: Smith-Doerr (2004, *Women’s Work*) based on logistic regression analysis controlling for years since PhD, prestige of PhD program; N=2,062

## Slide 15

## Why greater equity in biotech firms?

- Clues from interviews (Smith-Doerr 2004, N=47).
- 1. Flexibility in collaboration
- About a woman scientist friend: “left a tenured position at [an elite university] to go to [a biotechnology firm]...said the university department under [Chairman] was an autocracy...could do science there [at firm]—working with who they wanted to rather than dealing with [Chairman].”
- 2. Transparency
- “From my experience at [academic setting] I could tell you many a true story about political infighting...[at biotech firm] we are not compartmentalized—and get to work with many good scientists both here and outside the firm. And we choose who to work with based on nonfinancial considerations, like how good they are in their field.”
- 3. Collective rewards
- “While I was on maternity leave here [biotech firm] I could keep in touch with my colleagues who kept it moving forward...when I was a postdoc at [prestigious academic institute], people collaborated somewhat, on the fringes of their work, but still had their main turf which they guarded carefully.”

## Some lessons

- Environment matters—organizations with greater transparency and collaborative flexibility have greater equity
- Awareness matters—unconscious bias mitigated by attention to equity
- Diversity matters