“It is a Woman’s Will, Everything Will Stand Still” – 30 Years of Gender Stereotypes in Academia

That if women will, everything will stand still has become obvious over the nearly 30 years which have elapsed since the first national feminist demonstration in Switzerland. What is true of all productive sectors is certainly true of academia. But what role do social stereotypes and individual biases play in the distribution of power and knowledge in academia?

On June 14, 1991, ten years after the principle of equality between men and women had become constitutional, half a million women hit the streets nationwide to protest against inequality. Almost 30 years later, all women in the country are called to strike again tomorrow. Across academia various committees have been preparing this day carefully. The Academic Manifesto has been signed by 1,641 largely female, academics until today. A public discussion on the issue of success in academia on the eve of the feminist strike will be hosted by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences in Berne.

If people in the most diverse social and productive environments were asked whether they think that gender imbalance and injustice is desirable, almost no one would answer positively. Discrimination is rarely a conscious decision, but this does not make it less pervasive. Long before the age at which people enter university, despite all the undeniable achievements of the last thirty years, gender stereotypes continue to rule education. They lead, together with other factors, to the discrimination of women in academia.

Could You Please Draw a Scientist?

A recent meta-analysis on data accumulated over five decades of administering the “Draw-a-Scientist-Test” shows that stereotypes have weakened over time, due, among various factors, to the increased female presence in academia. But this effect wears out as children grow older. Children will tend to draw someone of their gender when asked in generic to draw a person. At the age of 6 this is also true if girls are asked to draw a scientist (70% will draw a woman). But starting in the preadolescence, and at the latest by the age of 16, 75% of the girls will draw a man when asked to draw a scientist (Miller 2018).

These children’s drawings are very telling of the gendered images of science which academia and society are still projecting at large. They speak not only about who is a scientist, but most painfully about who can become one. Adult female researchers, among them many who have signed the feminist manifest, have been successful in deconstructing these stereotypes. It is not easy to believe that you can become a scientist if reality seems to refute you. Stereotypes continue often to lurk in the brains of successful female researchers themselves. And this is one of the many reasons why we need more women professors. The identificatory power of female professors has a positive effect both on individual and systemic biases. The convincing results of female peer-mentoring schemes prove that the model role of female professors is decisive for the career development of early stage researchers. If we do not manage to increase the number of female professors, and if we continue to normalize the leaky pipe, which starts in most disciplines after the doctorate, we will only have managed to postpone the age at which female researchers get excluded from academia. It is particularly pleasing for the nccr – on the move to see women who are aware of these issues successfully moving onto their postdoctoral phase now.

“She is a Conscientious Promising Young Researcher…”

Behavioral psychology has not only proved that the perception of science and their practitioners is gendered, but has furthermore done extensive research on the effects of gender stereotypes on career furthering. Is being “conscientious” good enough to receive a highly competitive grant? Not long ago an analysis of 1,244 recommendations, written by male and female from 54 countries showed that women were significantly less likely to be recommended for their “excellence”. These results confirm previous language analyses on recommendation letters for an academic faculty position which showed, back in 2007, that, whereas male candidates were more likely to be recommended using “standout” and “ability” words, female ones were more often described through adjectives such as “hardworking”, “dependable”, “thorough”, “dedicated”… or “conscientious” (Ellemers 2018).

Opposite to what one would expect, peer review does not seem to be the solution to a fairer awarding of grants. Robust evidence from a meta-analysis conducted in Switzerland shows that grant peer review is significantly flawed by gender considerations to the extent that men have statistically 7% more chances of receiving grants than women do (Bornmann 2007). The disparity is probably more acute in the cases in which the résumés make up an important part of the evaluation. The Canadian Institute of Health Research’s recent change of funding policy created a unique opportunity to compare project-based with researcher-based grants. The study showed clearly that male candidates were 1.4 times more likely to be awarded the funding in the researcher-based calls. The disparity vanished in the calls in which projects were evaluated (Raymond 2019). This would also partially explain why the Swiss National Science Foundation, which attributes the greatest weight to the projects themselves in their evaluations, scores better. Still, the male success quota among applicants to the Swiss National Science Foundation is higher than the female one and the discrepancies are significant in some disciplines. Even for the disciplines for which the grant award gender gap seems negligible, small disadvantages make up a big disadvantage when compounded over time (Amrein 2019).

The Paradox of Meritocracy

I belong to a generation of women and men who thought that, as women accessed massively higher education and scored so well academically – most often better than their fellow men –, the access of women to the professorate would only be a matter of time. Furthermore, academia was a meritocratic system and now that women had gained their entry ticket, they were increasingly able to display the same merits as their male colleagues and competitors.

What went wrong? Weren’t all conditions met? Why were not enough women becoming professors? Most of my colleagues in academia (surely me too) were victims of the so-called paradox of meritocracy (Castilla 2010). In a system based on merit, in which it is clear than men and women are equal, people become less vigilant, not least about their own stereotypes. But not being alert means that our decisions become even more biased.

A further reason why academia has been resistant to corrective measures is that equal opportunities policies have been accused of affecting or corrupting the very core of academic selection, excellence. The influential fallacy that equal opportunities policies hinder the selection of excellent candidates dies hard (Nentwich 2018). However, what the public and academic debate in the last thirty years has proved is that, not only do equality policies not hinder the selection of the best, but they make it possible in the first place. Which measures the nccr – on the move is taking to counter the power of stereotypes and fallacies in academic selection and promotion and to support female researchers in embarking upon a successful academic career is the topic of a future post in this series.

Raquel Delgado Moreira is the current Education, Careers and Equal Opportunities Officer of the nccr – on the move. Trained as a philosopher and a historian of science, she has doctorated, published and taught in the (very masculine) European history of natural philosophy in the 17th century, while at Imperial College London and ETH. She stepped out of academia after her postdoctoral phase and has held different non-academic positions ever since.

References:

– Amrein, Martin (2019). Schweizer Forscherinnen haben bei Fördergeldern geringere Chancen als Schweizer Forscher, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 March, 2019.
– Bornmann, Lutz et al. (2007). Gender Differences in Grant Peer Review: A Meta-analysis, Journal of Informetrics 1(3), 226-238.
– Castilla, Emiliio J. et al. (2010). The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations, Administrative Science Quarterly 55(4), 543-676).
– Ellemers, Naomi (2018). Gender Stereotypes, Annual Review of Psychology 69, 275-98.
– Kuo, Maggie (2016). Recommendation Letters Reflect Gender Bias, Science, 3 October 2016.
– Miller, David I. et al. (2018). The Development of Children’s Gender-Science Stereotypes: A Meta-analysis of 5 Decades of U.S Draw-A-Scientist Studies, Child Development 89 (6) 1943-1955.
– Nentwich, Julia (2018). Exzellenz und Chancengleichheit an der “managerial university”, 1. Diversity and Inclusion Tagung. Universität St. Gallen, 12 September 2017.
– Raymond, Jennifer L. (2019). Funders Should Evaluate Projects, not People, The Lancet 393 (10171), 494-495.