Paradigms of Sex Research and Women in Stem

Abstract

Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields.

Decline Is Not Inevitable: Changes in Science Identity during the Progression through a U.S. Middle School among Boys and Girls

“…Identities also reflect a sense of group membership and the degree of conflict among valued identities. Several studies suggest that the gender composition of specific science fields matters for how much people see opportunities as open to them or not (Archer and DeWitt 2015; Gonsalves 2014; Leaper 2015; Lockhart 2021). The process of identity development involves the formation of social schemas, or cognitive shortcuts, about the groups one can belong to (Master, Markman, and Dweck 2012; Turner et al 1987).…”

Formación del profesorado en neuroeducación para promover la coeducación

“…Por lo tanto, teniendo en cuenta que la sociedad presenta unas bajas expectativas acerca de las competencias matemáticas de las niñas y que la cultura profesional de los ámbitos denominados STEM (acrónimo en inglés de Ciencias, Tecnología, Ingeniería y Matemáticas) es fundamentalmente masculina, se podría estar produciendo una discriminación de las mujeres que afectaría al aprendizaje y al rendimiento en estas disciplinas. Y ciertamente el número de mujeres que cursan estudios en los grados y postgrados STEM es muy inferior al de los hombres (Lockhart, 2021). Así, se observa que el enfoque que adopta la investigación sexista puede reforzar los estereotipos de género y los prejuicios, incitando a las chicas a descartar ciertas disciplinas.…”

Gender, Sex, and the Constraints of Machine Learning Methods

“…It is interesting. Gender/sex is a key part of everyday interaction; claims about sex differences get outsized public attention; and there is a very successful scientific / intellectual movement pushing for more use of sex in research (Lockhart 2021;Maney 2016;West and Zimmerman 1987). For many machine learning practitioners, like other methodologists and engineers, finding an interesting application of their methods is a fundamental challenge.…”