Science· 2015Q1
Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines
- 1,510citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2015year
Short summary
Academic fields that emphasize innate talent for success show greater gender imbalance, with women underrepresented where 'brilliance' is prioritized over effort.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Fields emphasizing innate talent show greater gender imbalance.
- Women are underrepresented in disciplines valuing 'brilliance'.
- The 'field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis' is supported by a nationwide academic survey.
- Stereotypes about innate talent also contribute to African American underrepresentation.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Science, 2015 · DOI ↗
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Field: Gender Studies
Gender StudiesSocial Sciences