Gender bias in (neuro)science: facts, consequences and solutions

[en] Women neuroscientists (please note that we refer to all who identify as such) are still underrepresented in various aspects of academic life. The efforts of the community to mitigate this issue are growing but can elicit adverse reactions (Moghaddam & Gur, 2016). In this opinion paper, we discuss the different approaches that have been taken at institutional, organizational and individual levels to counter gender bias and aim at addressing unfavorable comments. We base our reasoning on empirical data and on the feedback received after the release of the Women in Neuroscience Repository (WiNRepo, see Supplementary Table S1.a), an initiative we created to increase the visibility of women in neuroscience. While this feedback originated mainly from oral conversations and was not rigorously quantified, we believe the frequency of the comments justify their discussion, as performed in (Moghaddam & Gur, 2016). The aim of this piece (supported by a list of signatories, see Supplementary Table S2) is therefore to ‘debunk the myths’ related to gender bias and to affirmative actions in academia, as well as to propose concrete measures that can be implemented to counter such bias.

Disciplines :

Social & behavioral sciences, psychology: Multidisciplinary, general & others

Author, co-author :

Schrouff, Jessica

Pischedda

Genon, Sarah ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences cliniques > Neuroimagerie des troubles de la mémoire et revalid. cogn.

Fryns, Gregory

Pinho, Ana Luísa

Vassena, Eliana

Liuzzi, Antonietta

Ferreira, Fabio

Language :

English

Title :

Gender bias in (neuro)science: facts, consequences and solutions

Publication date :

October 2019

Journal title :

European Journal of Neuroscience

ISSN :

0953-816X

eISSN :

1460-9568

Publisher :

Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

3094-3100

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

European Projects :

H2020 - 654038 - DecoMP_ECoG - Decoding memory processing from experimental and spontaneous human brain activity using intracranial electrophysiological recordings and machine learning based methods.

Funders :

CE - Commission Européenne

Available on ORBi :

since 12 March 2019

Statistics

Number of views

197 (2 by ULiège)

Number of downloads

981 (0 by ULiège)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenCitations

OpenAlex citations

Bibliography

Asplund, M., & Welle, C. G. (2018). Advancing science: How bias holds us back. Neuron, 99(4), 635–639. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.07.045
Bain, O., & Cummings, W. (2000). Academe's glass ceiling: Societal, professional- organizational, and institutional barriers to the career advancement of academic women. Source Comparative Education Review, 44, 493–514.
Barbezat, D. A., & Hughes, J. W. (2005). Salary structure effects and the gender pay gap in academia. Research in Higher Education, 46, 621–641.
Bernard, C. (2018). Editorial: Gender bias in publishing: Double-blind reviewing as a solution? Eneuro, 5. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0225-18.2018
Besley, T., Folke, O., Persson, T., & Rickne, J. (2017). Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man: Theory and evidence from Sweden. American Economic Review, 107, 2204–2242.
Bolukbasi, T., Chang, K.-W., Zou, J. Y., Saligrama, V., & Kalai, A. T. (2016). Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings. In 30th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016), Barcelona, Spain.
Budden, A. E., Tregenza, T., Aarssen, L. W., Koricheva, J., Leimu, R., & Lortie, C. J. (2008). Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23, 4–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2007.07.008
Calisi, R. M., Working Group of Mothers in Science. (2018). Opinion: How to tackle the childcare–conference conundrum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115, 2845–2849. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803153115
Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 83–87.
Feldon, D. F., Peugh, J., Maher, M. A., Roksa, J., & Tofel-Grehl, C. (2017). Time-to-credit gender inequities of first-year PhD students in the biological sciences. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-08-0237
Goulden, M., Frasch, K., & Mason, M. A. (2009). Staying competitive patching America's leaky pipeline in the sciences. Berkeley, CA: Center for American Progress
Grens, K. (2017). Baby on board. Retrieved from https://www.thescientist.com/careers/baby-on-board-30991
Helmer, M., Schottdorf, M., Neef, A., & Battaglia, D. (2017). Gender bias in scholarly peer review. Elife, 6, e21718.
Holdcroft, A. (2007). Gender bias in research: How does it affect evidence based medicine? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100, 2–3.
Holman, L., Stuart-Fox, D., & Hauser, C. E. (2018). The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? PLoS Biology, 16, e2004956.
Irish Research Council (2018). Gender Strategy and Actions. Retrieved from http://research.ie/assets/uploads/2018/08/04108-IRC-Gender-flyer-proof03-single.pdf
Joëls, M., & Mason, C. (2014). A tale of two sexes. Neuron, 82, 1196–1199.
Kaatz, A., Lee, Y.-G., Potvien, A., Magua, W., Filut, A., Bhattacharya, A., … Carnes, M. (2016). Analysis of national institutes of health R01 application critiques, impact, and criteria scores: Does the sex of the principal investigator make a difference? Academic Medicine, 91, 1080–1088.
King, J. (2005). Benefits of women in science. Science, 308, 601.
LeWinn, K. Z., Sheridan, M. A., Keyes, K. M., Hamilton, A., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2017). Sample composition alters associations between age and brain structure. Nature Communications, 8, 874.
Macaluso, B., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, T., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2016). Is science built on the shoulders of women? A study of gender differences in contributorship. Academic Medicine, 91, 1136–1142.
Ministry for Women (2018). Gender pay gap. Nat., 2018 5537687, 2018.
Moghaddam, B., & Gur, R. E. (2016). Women at the podium: ACNP strives to reach speaker gender equality at the annual meeting. Neuropsychopharmacology, 41, 929–931.
Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109, 16474–16479.
Murray, D., Siler, K., Lariviére, V., Chan, W. M., Collings, A. M., Raymond, J., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review. bioRxiv, 400515.
Nittrouer, C. L., Hebl, M. R., Ashburn-Nardo, L., Trump-Steele, R. C. E., Lane, D. M., & Valian, V. (2018). Gender disparities in colloquium speakers at top universities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115, 104–108.
Parmar, B. (2013). Why I won't speak at women-only events. Guard. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/jul/03/why-i-wont-speak-at-women-only-events
Pohlhaus, J. R., Jiang, H., Wagner, R. M., Schaffer, W. T., & Pinn, V. W. (2011). Sex differences in application, success, and funding rates for NIH extramural programs. Academic Medicine, 86, 759–767.
Raymond, J. (2013). Most of us are biased. Nature, 495, 33–34.
Schiermeier, Q. (2018). Gigantic review of German science recommends more data and diversity. Nature, 560, 153–154.
Sheltzer, J. M. (2018). Gender disparities among independent fellows in biomedical research. Nature Biotechnology, 36, 1018–1021.
Shen, Y. A., Webster, J. M., Shoda, Y., & Fine, I. (2018). Persistent Underrepresentation of Women's Science in High Profile Journals. bioRxiv, 275362.
Steinpreis, R. E., Anders, K. A., & Ritzke, D. (1999). The impact of gender on the review of the curricula vitae of job applicants and tenure candidates: A national empirical study. Sex Roles, 41, 509–528.
University College London (2017). Gender pay gap and ethnicity. Retrieved from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/drupal/site_news/sites/news/files/ucl_gender_and_ethnicity_pay_report_2018.pdf
Vernos, I. (2013). Quotas are questionable. Nature, 495, 39.
Vlassoff, C. (2007). Gender differences in determinants and consequences of health and illness. Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition, 25, 47–61.
Wallon, G., Bendiscioli, S., & Garrnkel, M. S. (2015). Exploring quotas in academia. Retrieved from http://www.embo.org/documents/science_policy/exploring_quotas.pdf
Wennerås, C., & Wold, A. (1997). Nepotism and sexism in peer-review. Nature, 387, 341–343.
Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science (80-.), 330, 686–688.