Women in science get awards for teaching and service proportional to their numbers but not for research, according to a new Association for Women in Science study funded by the National Science Foundation.
"Using data in the public domain on 13 disciplinary societies, we found that the proportion of female prizewinners in 10 of these was much lower than the proportion of female full professors in each discipline," they write. Well, that doesn't really tell much of a story since it is a snapshot - but there is no equivalent Association for Men in Science to argue that men are blocked out of sociology.
It's sexism, says Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Their analysis of selection practices found that selection committees carry out their duties with few guidelines, minimal oversight and little attention to conflict-of-interest issues. They found that the chances a woman will win an award for her research improve if a woman is serving on the committee - but not all committees have female members and there are few female chairs. Still, not a discrimination issue. And the authors feel words like 'cooperative' and 'dependable' in nomination letters are "stereotypically female adjectives" so you can already see where this is going - they started with an agenda and found supporting data and ignored everything else.
"Notices soliciting nominations, by contrast, tend to use language that fosters male images, such as 'decisive' or 'confident,'" they report.
Co-authors were Stephanie H. Pincus, founder of the RAISE Project, an advocacy group for women in science, and Phoebe S. Leboy of the Association for Women in Science and biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania. Seven U.S. science societies are working now with the Association for Women in Science on the basis of the findings to change selection committee practices, say the authors.
