The Akron Legal News

Scientists not immune from gender stereotypes

RICK ADAMCZAK
Special to the Legal News
Published: April 23, 2013

A scientist’s gender can have a big impact on how other researchers perceive his or her work, according to a new Ohio State University study.

The study found that young scholars rated publications supposedly written by male scientists as higher quality than identical work identified with female authors.

The research also found that graduate students in communication, both men and women, showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names such as “Brenda Collins” or “Melissa Jordan.”

These students gave higher ratings to the exact abstracts when the authors were identified with male names such as “Andrew Stone” or “Matthew Webb.”

The results also suggested that some research topics were seen as more appropriate for women scholars, such as parenting and body image, while others, like politics, were viewed as more appropriate for men.

These findings suggest that women may still have a more difficult time than men succeeding in academic science, said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” Knobloch-Westerwick said. “Even among young graduate students, the faculty of tomorrow, such stereotypes are still alive.”

She said the gender bias found in the study may not operate the same in other areas of science. In fields that are more male-dominated than communication, gender bias may be even more of a problem.

She noted that gender bias will have important implications over the course of a woman’s career in science.

“In grant proposals, promotion and tenure reviews, hiring decisions and so on, a scholar’s sex will be a relevant factor in how she or he is evaluated,” she said. “All of these small factors will add up over the course of career and may prevent some women from reaching the same career heights as men.”

She said this is the first experimental investigation she is aware of on a gender bias in science communication.

The findings of bias are significant because it didn’t take much to elicit these results, she said.

“The participants were reading abstracts of 150 words or so and rating their quality. The author names were not displayed prominently and the grad students probably barely glanced at them, but still they had this effect,” Knobloch-Westerwick said.

The study involved 243 graduate students in communication — 70 percent of them women — from universities around the country.

The participants were asked to read and evaluate 15 abstracts (short summaries) of actual studies that were presented at an academic conference in communication.

In some cases, two male authors were listed and in some cases two female authors.

The authors’ names were rotated so that the same abstract was listed with male authors for some participants and female authors for others.

Overall, participants rated abstracts with male authors higher than those with female authors.

Female participants did not differ from male participants in how they rated the abstracts.

However, Knobloch-Westerwick noted that nearly three-quarters of the participants were female, so they may not have had enough men in the study to find a difference.

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