Introduction

Women’s underrepresentation in academic science is a significant problem that contributes to the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. In life and social sciences, women now earn the majority of doctorates but make up a minority of assistant professors. From 2008 to 2010, 53.2% of doctorates went to women but only 31.6% of assistant professors were women. This gap persisted after controlling for demographics, degree characteristics, and field. This underrepresentation is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexism in hiring. However, minimal empirical research has evaluated this hypothesis directly.

Women considering careers in academic science are often confronted with many gendered challenges to becoming professors. Research identifies many of the obstacles standing between female graduate students and tenure-track positions, including inadequate mentoring and networking, downgrading of work products such as manuscripts, grant proposals, and lectures, and gender bias in interviewing and hiring. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, attitudes can affect the hiring process and negatively influence evaluations of female candidates and their scholarship, contributing to women’s underrepresentation within academia.

Here, the authors examine faculty-hiring preferences for hypothetical applicants in fields in which women are and are not substantially underrepresented to find out whether sexism in hiring contributes to the underrepresentation of women in STEM. Across five experiments, the authors use systematically varied profiles reflecting identical scholarship that differ only in gender pronouns and/or lifestyles to assess differences in faculty hiring preferences for assistant professorships in biology, economics, engineering, and psychology.