Research Reveals Low Exposure of Excellent Work By Female Scientists

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the University of Sheffield have found that high quality science by female academics is underrepresented in comparison to that of their male counterparts. The researchers analyzed the genders of invited speakers at the most prestigious gatherings of evolutionary biologists in Europe — six biannual congresses of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and found that male speakers outnumbered women. Even in comparison to the numbers of women and men among world class scientists – from the world top ranked institutions for life sciences, and authors in the top-tier journals Nature and Science - women were still underrepresented among invited speakers."

Re:How does it compare?

[Dexter Herbivore]

I'm assuming (hoping) that your post was sarcastic in nature. My point was that the summary doesn't appear to match the article. The summary implies that less women are invited due to sexism, the article indicates that less women accept the invites and then provides a theory of why that's the case.

Re:How does it compare?

[jeffmeden]

Yes, it has been shown that women tend to spend more time having and raising children rather than developing expertise in a career. It has also been found that Women who don't follow that biological plan typically do better than men it is just much more rare.

Over one third of women (in the US at least) never have a single child, so the population is small but not what I would call "Rare".

Re:Not too shocking.

[Antipater]

If I understood GP properly, he was saying that for a given skill, while the mean level of ability may be the same between genders, the variance among men will generally be higher. There will be both more genius-level men and more retarded-level men, while women will generally be more concentrated around the mean. It's a point I've heard a couple times before, never with a cited source.