Even in countries where women make up roughly half of university science majors and employed researchers, people associate science with men more than women, according to a study by Northwestern University psychologists. These biases may be overcome, however, as more women take jobs in the science fields, the research finds.
Researchers collected data from nearly 350,000 people in 66 countries, who completed an online, publicly available association test on science and gender. The test measured explicit bias by asking participants to rate how much they associated science with men or women. Next, researchers calculated implicit bias by assessing how quickly participants associated science words such as "math" and "physics" with male words such as "boy" and "man." Their findings, in press in the Journal of Educational Psychology, show that participants on average completed the task more quickly when science words were paired with "male" rather than "female."
These results shows that implicit and explicit stereotypes associating science with men more than women are found across the world, says David Miller, a psychology doctoral student at Northwestern and the study's lead author. Out of all 66 nations, the Netherlands had the strongest explicit stereotypes and second strongest implicit stereotypes, Miller notes. The United States came in near the middle of the pack, scoring similarly to Singapore on implicit bias. Mexico, Portugal and Spain had some of the lowest implicit bias scores, though the respondents still associated science more with men than with women.
"These stereotypes are important because they can contribute to outcomes such as biased hiring decisions," Miller says.
The good news is that stereotypes were weaker in nations with more women working in science.
"This result is especially important because these stereotypes have been resistant to change in some prior psychological research," he says. "Our results suggest optimism that stereotypes will change as people see more women in science."
— Amy Novotney