Nerdy Science Blog

Anna Kushnir, PhD wrote a letter to wired science.

Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?

Take my graduate school for example: My class was made up of eight people — seven women and one man, or 7 to 1. He was Snow White and we were the seven dwarves — each with a remarkably appropriate nickname. I was Grumpy, should you be curious to know.

Snow White and at least four of the dwarves have continued on to postdoctoral research jobs. That is a 4 to 3 ratio of women who went on to do a post-doc to those that chose alternate career paths.

Everything is adding up so far, right? Lots of women are around. Lots of science is being done. All is well.

The next set of numbers is slightly puzzling, however. That is the ratio of female to male professors in our department, at a well-respected academic institution, is 48 to 7 men to women.

Interesting reversal, isn’t it? We go from 7 to 1 in grad school to roughly 1 to 7 in professorships.

Perhaps the only way to solve this problem is made men pregnant.

John made a catchy comment, “Funny Anna thinks its fine for the grad program to be almost all women, but not okay for the senior professors to be mostly men.”

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