New study paints broad picture of difference in sexes’ skill sets

WASHINGTON: The difference between Sherlock Holmes and Hermione Granger may help explain why women don’t thrive as much as men in some fields of academia. One is brilliant by nature and the other has to work her butt off, and they represent the pervasive gender stereotypes of our age.

Surprise, surprise: There’s a gender gap in most academic fields, with men taking more advanced degrees in subjects like computer science and physics. A study published in Science suggests that the fields that favour men – in both the sciences and the humanities – have one cultural bias in common. They value innate brilliance over hard work and dedication. Unfortunately, that spark of brilliance is a trait that’s stereotypically assigned to white men above all others.

Researchers surveyed over 1 800 academics from 30 different disciplines and found that the value of brilliance (a spark of genius in the field, if you will) was a better predictor for underrepresentation of women in that field than any other hypothesis tested.

In addition to giving weight to their own hypothesis, the researchers were able to knock out some popular explanations for gender gaps by comparison: That women shy away from fields that require more hours of work, that women don’t make the cut in fields where only the top percentile of students are successful, and that women are less likely to choose fields that require analytical thinking than men are.

And the same held true when researchers applied the test to African-American representation, indicating that this bias for “brilliance” may keep those individuals out of such fields as well.

In the fields that valued brilliance, researchers were also more likely to agree that women and African-Americans were less suited to the work.

The study was led by two researchers in very different academic fields with very different gender gaps. Sarah-Jane Leslie, a philosophy professor at Princeton, collaborated with University of Illinois psychology professor Andrei Cimpian on several projects before the new study.

These two fields are a great example of how complex gender inequality in academia is. It would be simple to say that women favour the humanities and men favour the sciences, but that’s not true. Some scientific fields, like molecular biology and neuroscience, have achieved gender parity. And some fields in the social sciences and humanities, like economics and philosophy, favour men heavily.

Cimpian and Leslie frequently discussed issues of gender in their fields. Psychology seemed to embrace women, with female researchers earning 70 percent of all PhDs in the field. But in philosophy, less than 35 percent of such degrees went to women. Marked differences in the cultures of their disciplines came up a lot, too. Philosophy praised innate brilliance – in the 1980s, people spoke of “the beam” of enlightenment that had been bestowed upon those gifted in philosophy – but psychology emphasised hard work and study.

“At some point we were at a conference and these two ideas finally came together,” Cimpian said.

What if fields that idolised brilliance were favouring men and scaring women away as a result?

“After we mustered up the courage to actually do the study, we tested this idea empirically. The magnitude and strength of the relationship came as a surprise.” – Washington Post