Libarkin has also, like many women in STEM fields, had her successes explained away by her gender. She has been told that it is easier for her to get grant funding or other opportunities because she is a woman. Even though funding in her area of research is relatively difficult to attain, colleagues have often used her gender as a rationale to explain away her funding success, she says.

Libarkin says it will take more speaking out on the part of upper administration to help resolve issues of sexism in academia. “I’ve heard a young female faculty member at a meeting say that she didn’t think that one of the candidates for a position was good—that she was a fine researcher, but she had taken off some time to have a child and follow her husband to a position, so she couldn’t be a serious researcher,” Libarkin said. “And the department chair didn’t say anything. That’s not ok.”

Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes about what women aren’t good at, or even stereotypes about what they are good at, can have real impacts on the success of women in science fields, as related by “S” below. “S” wished to remain anonymous for this article. She currently works at a NASA-affiliated laboratory and says that in general she has a positive work environment, at least on the surface. But while she has the expertise and experience to be directly involved in research within her program, her bosses have encouraged her toward more supportive roles including program facilitation, research budget management and event organization. These are not the roles she would prefer to be filling for her institution.

“I think the fact that I’m a woman plays into how some people interact with me,” S said. “I’m a scientist by training, I self-identify as a scientist, and I’m encouraged in such endeavors, but I get way more encouragement in support-style tasks than I do in my technical tasks. And I feel that a large part of that is that I am a woman. There are certain tasks that I’m asked to do that don’t create dissonance with my gender. It’s more normal to see a young woman taking notes or organizing meetings as opposed to speaking up with technical expertise.”

S has also experienced more overt instances of sexism, including colleagues calling her “sweetheart” and directing all technical questions posed in her presence toward other men, even though she clearly has the education and expertise to answer them. But these negative experiences are not as common, or as frustrating, as is the blatant encouragement she gets to pursue supportive over technical program tasks.

S is not alone in experiencing focus on her support-oriented work, as opposed to her technical roles and skills. Research sponsored by the NSF ADVANCE program has shown that when it comes to awards and recognition in STEM fields, female scholars are over-represented among winners of awards for ‘soft’ contributions to their field, including service, mentoring and teaching, but under-represented among winners of scholarly research relative to their male colleagues (Cadwalader, Herbers & Popejoy, 2014 ). The gap is widest for awards in the field of mathematics and might be due to implicit stereotypes that guide what kind of roles and skills women are recognized for in science. It is a tricky issue to address because it does not involve active discouragement, but rather the lack of encouragement, or even the over-encouragement of women to pursue particular scientific roles that others believe ‘fit’ their gender.

However, this bias is more pernicious than simply encouraging ‘appropriate’ career paths for women. It can impact hiring decisions from the outset. A study published in PNAS in 2012 revealed that a nationwide sample of biology, chemistry and physics professors given mock application materials rated a student applicant for a lab manager position as less competent, and offered a lower starting salary, when the student was presented as female. What is more troubling is that this gender bias was observed among both male and female faculty members, suggesting that implicit or unconscious male-science stereotypes are to blame. There are pervasive cultural stereotypes that “portray women as less competent but simultaneously emphasize their warmth and likeability compared with men” (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012).

The study results, while shocking, might not be surprising to many female scientists who have struggled with gender discrimination or the threat of gender discrimination throughout their careers. “Many people, including myself, were largely unsurprised,” Walden wrote in a 2013 Guardian article on the subject of sexual discrimination in science. “Several non-scientists found it hard to believe that the same CV could be evaluated so differently, and with such serious consequences in terms of pay and mentoring. Yet since the beginning of my career, I have always been acutely aware that I need to do better than a man to stand a chance of being hired ahead of him.”

Where We Go from Here

Given the clear issues of sexism, bias and discrimination that women face, even among highly educated colleagues, where do we go from here? How can we begin to break down gender stereotypes and promote women’s sense of value as scientists?

Structural changes and transparency are a good starting point. Julie Libarkin believes that academic departments should make data about faculty course load assignments, service assignments, merit raises, salaries, resource allocations and productivity in terms of research and grants publicly available. That way, anyone could compare themselves to the data and clearly see any disparities based on gender, race, etc. “Why not be transparent, unless you have something to hide?" she said.

Many of the structural barriers that exist within scientific institutions affect women more than men. For example, provisions for maternity leave, flexible tenure deadlines and childcare support programs are often minimal or non-existent in academic programs and especially research grant packages. “It’s very difficult for women to go for a career in science, or any profession, if they don’t have this kind of family care support,” said Beatriz Rico, a professor of developmental neurobiology at King’s College in London. Rico is outspoken about the impacts of cultural biases and the need for women to speak up more about their goals and expertise. But even where these structural barriers are beginning to change, many women remain under the impression that having children and having a successful career in academic research are somehow at odds with one another. Gender-science stereotypes and stereotypes about what it takes to be a scientist are likely at play in these beliefs.

Changing the systems and structures alone is therefore not enough; we need to do more to address unconscious biases and social expectations. David Miller is a researcher in the department of psychology at Northwestern University, where his research has broadly encompassed gender and science. Miller, along with Alice Eagly and Marcia Linn, recently published a rigorous cross-national study in the Journal of Educational Psychology revealing that national gender-science stereotypes follow trends in women’s representation in STEM fields. Gender-science stereotypes can come in two major flavors: explicit and implicit stereotypes. Researchers measure the explicit stereotypes by directly asking people how strongly they associate science or liberal arts with men or women. Implicit stereotypes are the subconscious reflections of culturally ingrained gender biases. These are measured by how quickly, in milliseconds, people can pair science-related words with male- or female-related words during a computer-based test.

The good news, according to Miller, Eagly and Linn’s analysis of cross-sectional data from 350,000 participants in 66 nations, is that gender-science stereotypes are weaker in nations where women represent a greater percentage of those employed in STEM fields. The authors found that higher female enrollment in college-level science education predicts weaker explicit and implicit gender-science stereotypes among college-educated participants across these nations. Higher female employment in the researcher workforce, however, did not predict weaker implicit national stereotypes connecting science with men, likely because female researchers are less frequently encountered.

The bad news, Miller says, is that a nation’s gender equity has only a minimal impact on the gender-science stereotypes its people endorse. Gender-science stereotypes are robust even in nations where the gender gap in STEM fields is narrow.

“Seeing examples of counter-stereotypical women can change our beliefs,” Miller said. “But it’s going to be a slow process.” The take-away is that exposure to counter-stereotypes specifically connecting science with women is necessary to shift gender-science stereotypes. But is taking a mathematics course from a female instructor sufficient to change culturally ingrained gender-science stereotypes? Not likely, Miller says. You can learn propositional information about women’s representation in science, for example that almost 50% of college graduates in chemistry programs are women (most people guess something around 20%). And you may update your explicit gender-science stereotypes according to this information. But the underlying implicit stereotypes are much more difficult to shake. Miller suggests that we turn our efforts to the ways that female vs. male scientists are represented in cultural artifacts such as textbooks, TV shows, movies and media articles, because his research suggests it takes repeated exposure to gender-balanced representations of science to move implicit stereotypes that associate science with men. And for college students, repeated exposure to science classrooms with equal numbers of women and men might also be key.

But exposure to counter-stereotypes is not in and of itself a solution to gender-science stereotyping. It also often takes the right counter-stereotypes to meaningfully change opinions and women’s identity with science. “If you don’t identify with your professor, having a female professor can actually lead to small increases in [gendered] stereotyping of science,” Miller said. “There is emerging research that addresses the attainability of role models. If you don’t see the position and accomplishments of a role model as possible for yourself, that is not likely to change your aspirations and stereotypes in the same way.”

This has important educational implications, Miller says. For example, in educational settings, Marie Curie may actually be a poor example of a female scientist role model. Having won two Nobel prizes, her accomplishments likely seem unattainable to most women just beginning their scientific careers. “That’s more likely to demotivate rather than to motivate diverse scientists,” Miller said.

Counter to the nature of many campaigns intended to guide girls toward careers in STEM, overly feminine science role models—for example wearing pink clothes and makeup and depicted as being into fashion—have also been found to demotivate young students (Betz & Sekaquaptewa, 2012). “Girls are already put to high standards in terms of beauty, that it’s seen as almost unattainable to achieve both that and intellectual prowess or scientific achievement,” Miller said.