And the award goes to... a man. Perhaps we need to look more critically at the gender imbalance among scientific prize recipients, suggests Russ Swan.
It’s hard to believe this is still an issue in 2024, and in science of all spheres, but the goal of gender and racial equality sometimes seems to be getting further away rather than closer.
I’ve been collecting examples of reports into gender bias and stereotyping, and the results are a little disheartening.
Take the winning of awards: Many are named after men, a legacy of decades if not centuries of male domination of the sciences. Indeed, two-thirds of all scientific prizes carry the names of men, and a good chunk of the remainder are neutrally named.
An unanticipated consequence is that female academics are significantly underrepresented in these ceremonies. Only one woman wins a masculine-titled prize for every eight men. Even when a prize is named after a woman, a female scientist is less likely to win it than a man – although the difference is much smaller, at about 47 to 53, according to Professor Katja Gehmlich of the University of Birmingham.
Peer review is a bête noire of many a scientist, and may just be the worst possible system for establishing scientific credibility (except for every other system). I’m sure you’re on the same page as me by now: here again, the odds appear stacked against the already disadvantaged. A report in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Olivia Smith of Michigan State found that the peer review process systematically perpetuates barriers for historically excluded groups. Less than 16% of journals practised double-blind review; barely 2% had reviewer guidelines that mentioned social justice issues.
It’s hard to believe this is still an issue in 2024, and in science of all spheres
But it’s not all bad news. Analysis in PLOS of citation frequency for 5.8 million authors across all scientific disciplines, shows the gender gap is real but closing. Researchers led by John Ioannidis of Stamford found that men outnumbered women 3.93 times among those authors who started publishing before 1992, but only 1.36 times after 2011.
Male scientists at the top of their field outnumbered women 3.21 times among top-cited authors, but this is much more (6.41 times) in the older groups and only 2.28 times in the youngest. There may be hope for yet.
Even though the physical sciences, traditionally the most male-dominated, continue to lag behind the biological and chemical sciences in gender parity, some branches are leading the way. A relatively small but significant example is in astronomy, specifically in Australia.
A report in Nature Astronomy a few weeks ago announced with some pride that a concerted effort by the national astronomy centre ASTRO 3D (another of those acronyms we discussed in the last issue) resulted in gender parity in just five years. Five years!
Founding director Professor Lisa Kewley says the key steps included setting and monitoring diversity targets, appointing diverse team leaders, and in-person diversity training for all. So things can change, where there is recognition and determination.
This sort of meta-research into the science of research itself can quickly take the casual observer (in this case me, a cis white male) down a rabbit hole. But my own metameta-research into the topic has led me to a startling conclusion.
Eighty per cent of the studies into gender inequality that I perused here had a female lead author, or at least a lead whose name suggests a female identity.
I mean, that’s just not fair is it?
