She works really hard but he’s a genius! Why women are less represented in certain fields.

While there is often a call to get more women in the STEM fields, in reality one must look at the different sub-fields rather than the whole. By 2008 women earned more Ph.D.s in biology than men, but that number drops to less 20% for physics or computer science. The results of a study published January in Science help explain why certain fields within STEM and the humanities have much less women than others.

The authors started with three competing hypotheses and used questionnaires (a total of 1800 faculty, postdocs, and students) to determine people’s attitudes within the particular fields. The other variable was the percentage of women Ph.D.s in that field in the U.S. While the other two hypotheses, that the more time-demanding the field, the less women or the more selective the field, the less women, did not hold up, the third showed a strong positive correlation: The higher the emphasis on the need for brilliance to succeed in that field, the fewer women earned Ph.D.s in that field.

Fig 1 from Leslie et al. (2015).  Expectations of brilliance underlie gender
distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347 (6219).

The general public rarely hears a call for more women in the humanities or social sciences, but this area has a large distribution within the sub-fields. While women are the majority of those getting Ph.D.s in education and psychology, less than 35% of degree-earners are women in economics, philosophy, and computer science. These three fields, as well as physics and computer science are fields that more highly valued giftedness over dedication.

Questions such as, “Even though it’s not politically correct to say it, men are often more suited than women to do high-level work in [discipline],” examined biases about women’s intelligence in the different fields. Indeed, those fields that highly emphasized brilliance were more likely to hold these biases and therefore are likely less welcoming to women.

Interestingly, the same trend held true for African Americans, who the authors state are also stereotyped as lacking inherent intelligence. As a control, the authors showed that the trend was not true for Asian Americans, who, for better or worse are often stereotyped as the “model minority.”

The authors’ recommended that, “academics who wish to diversify their fields might want to downplay talk of innate intellectual gifted-ness and instead highlight the importance of sustained effort for top-level success in their field.”

This supports my previous argument, and post, for the role of imposter feelings in dissuading women from pursuing certain fields. Studies have shown that women are less likely to see themselves as brilliant and more likely to attribute their success to hard work. While I focused on science as a whole, it makes sense that insecurities over being an “intellectual fraud” would be magnified in disciplines where raw intelligence, rather than diligence, is emphasized.

Therefore it seems we need to target the fields themselves with a de-emphasis on “brilliance” (this will be hard to do as those within the field probably like to think of themselves as such) and put more emphasis on women’s intelligence from a young age.