Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women

Abstract

Women make up over one-half of all doctoral recipients in biology-related fields but are vastly underrepresented at the faculty level in the life sciences. To explore the current causes of women's underrepresentation in biology, we collected publicly accessible data from university directories and faculty websites about the composition of biology laboratories at leading academic institutions in the United States. We found that male faculty members tended to employ fewer female graduate students and postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) than female faculty members did. Furthermore, elite male faculty--those whose research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, or who had won a major career award--trained significantly fewer women than other male faculty members. In contrast, elite female faculty did not exhibit a gender bias in employment patterns. New assistant professors at the institutions that we surveyed were largely comprised of postdoctoral researchers from these prominent laboratories, and correspondingly, the laboratories that produced assistant professors had an overabundance of male postdocs. Thus, one cause of the leaky pipeline in biomedical research may be the exclusion of women, or their self-selected absence, from certain high-achieving laboratories.

Keywords: gender diversity; women in STEM.

Fig. 1.

The gender composition of elite biology laboratories in the United States. The weighted average percentages of female trainees in laboratories with (A) male PIs and (B) female PIs who have achieved certain career milestones are displayed. Major career awards that were counted for this survey are listed in Table S2. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.005; ***P < 0.0005 (Wilcoxon rank sum test).

Fig. 2.

Elite male PIs employ fewer women. The percent differences in (A) female postdocs and (B) female graduate students employed by PIs who have achieved certain career milestones are displayed. The axis at x = 0 represents employing female trainees at a rate proportional to their representation among all laboratories in this survey.

Fig. 3.

Feeder laboratories train fewer female postdocs. (A) The percentages of all faculty members (black bars) and faculty members who have recently trained new assistant professors (white bars) who have achieved certain career milestones are displayed. ***P < 0.0005 (Fisher exact test). (B) The percentages of female postdocs employed in different laboratories are displayed. The black bar represents all PIs, the gray bar represents PIs who have recently trained at least one new assistant professor of either gender, and the white bar represents PIs who have recently trained at least one new female assistant professor. **P < .005; ***P < 0.0005 (Fisher exact test). (C) The percentage of female postdocs employed in different laboratory types subdivided by the gender of the PI is displayed. ***P < 0.0005 (Fisher exact test). (D) The percentage differences in female postdocs employed by different PIs are displayed. The axis at x = 0 represents employing female postdocs at a rate proportional to their representation among all laboratories in this survey.