Research reveals a gender gap in the nation’s biology labs

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

30-Jun-2014

Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Among the sciences, biology consistently attracts the greatest numbers of women to graduate school and academic careers. About half of all biology graduate students are women, and 40 percent of biology postdocs are female. However, those numbers drop dramatically among faculty members: Nationwide, only 36 percent of assistant professors and 18 percent of full professors are women.

A new study reveals a possible explanation for this discrepancy: In the labs of the highest-achieving male biology professors winners of the Nobel Prize, the National Medal of Science, and other prestigious awards women are greatly underrepresented, compared with their overall percentages in the field. Those labs serve as a major pipeline to junior faculty positions at top research institutions, the study found.

"What we found is that these labs really function as a gateway to the professoriate. So we think the fact that they're not hiring very many women is important for understanding why there are still so few female faculty members," says Jason Sheltzer, a graduate student in biology at MIT and author of the study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bringing attention to this imbalance offers an opportunity for faculty members and institutions to try to remedy the situation, says Angelika Amon, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research in MIT's Department of Biology, who is Sheltzer's PhD thesis advisor but was not involved in this study.

"Once you know what the problem is, you can actually do something about it. It's a great opportunity for these highly accomplished scientists to really reach out and make a very conscious effort to do something about the gender landscape of science at high-powered research institutions," Amon says. "A large segment of the population is being excluded from doing high-level research, and that can never be a good thing. We're losing out on bright and intelligent people."

'A very different picture'

Sheltzer and the paper's other author, Joan Smith, a software engineer and 2013 MIT graduate, studied the nation's top 24 biology research institutions, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. They focused on programs such as cell biology, molecular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, which typically attract many women. From individual lab web sites or departmental directories, they were able to determine the number of male and female postdocs and grad students in the labs of 2,062 faculty members.

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Research reveals a gender gap in the nation's biology labs