For the last decade or so there has been a clear trend towards more women in universities, and especially doing doctoral studies, than men.  Despite this, data also shows that these women also tend to get tenure less often and also get research published less frequently than their male peers.

A recent Stanford study suggests part of the reason for this might be because of an implicit bias against research that appears to be “feminine”.

Feminine research

The researchers analyzed around a million doctoral dissertations over a 40-year period and found that while there wasn’t overt prejudice against research specifically on feminine or gender studies, there was a subtle bias against topics and even research designs that were more associated with traditions of women’s work.  So studies into things like parenting or relationships were less likely to thrive than those on issues such as war or technology.

This bias even extends into particular fields, with more feminine-oriented computer science topics doing worse than more masculine takes on the topic.  What’s more, this bias has endured despite the fundamental change in the gender orientation of academia in the last 40 years.

“Everyone emphasizes that academia is based on meritocracy, that everything is neutral and based on the scientific value of research,” the researchers say. “It’s somewhat fake, and it’s somewhat impossible. There can be differences in men’s and women’s research interests, and some topics are already associated with women rather than men. The process cannot really be neutral.”

The researchers used natural language processing to analyze texts and measure how feminine or masculine the thesis was.  They did this by looking for words that were associated with women, such as school, culture, and child, and also for men, such as efficiency and algorithm.

Academic prospects

They then measured the academic prospects of the author by looking at the faculty positions they went on to hold.  They were specifically looking to see if the author went on to be named as the primary faculty advisor on another student’s doctoral thesis, which they regard as a strong indicator of the author’s long-term success.

Data suggests that just over 6% of PhDs go on to become faculty advisors, but that women were around 20% less likely than men to do so.

What was interesting, however, was that whereas academics who wrote explicitly about women did slightly better than those who explicitly wrote about men, this was not the case for those who implicitly did so.  Among those scholars, the chances of becoming a faculty advisor were 12% below the norm.  What’s more, this bias was even stronger in fields with a strong tradition of female study, such as sociology.

“As a society, we’ve made outstanding progress over the last century in transforming higher education and science institutions,” the researchers conclude. “But implicit biases against certain kinds of research undermines our current efforts to make the academy more diverse—in terms of who becomes university professors but also in terms of what’s considered valuable academic knowledge.”