Publication Date:
2015-01-17
Description:
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Leslie, Sarah-Jane -- Cimpian, Andrei -- Meyer, Meredith -- Freeland, Edward -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jan 16;347(6219):262-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1261375.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. ; Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. ; Department of Psychology, Otterbein University, Westerville, OH 43081, USA. ; Survey Research Center, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25593183" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Achievement
;
African Americans
;
*Aptitude
;
*Attitude
;
Career Choice
;
Culture
;
Education, Graduate
;
Faculty
;
Female
;
Humans
;
*Intelligence
;
Male
;
Natural Science Disciplines/*manpower
;
Sex Characteristics
;
*Sexism
;
Social Sciences/*manpower
;
Stereotyping
;
Students
;
Surveys and Questionnaires
;
Women
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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