Giving Compass' Take:

• Kathleen E. Grogan discusses the numerous areas where gender bias restricts the success of female STEM professionals and how the scientific community can address these biases.

• Grogan states that "the onus cannot be on women alone" to confront gender bias in the scientific community. How can the nonprofit sector encourage or incentivize men to act as allies in the face of discrimination?

• To learn about gender bias in the agricultural community, click here.

Increased gender and racial diversity benefits scientific progress through increased innovation; however, few would argue we have reached optimal diversity along gender or racial lines. Thus, we should be using data to understand the barriers that have prevented attainment of this goal, as well as the potential solutions. Recently, a Nature feature offered advice from female scientists on how to confront the barriers we face. Yet the assembled data suggest that it is impossible for the marginalized to solve these problems themselves. Women face biases and barriers at all turns within the scientific community, from publishing, funding and hiring, to promotion to more senior positions.

Less funding

Women submit significantly fewer grants than men to the National Institutes of Health (NIH; 30.7% of applications versus 69.1%, respectively) and National Science Foundation (24.2% versus 75.8%). Once submitted, women are equally successful in obtaining funding compared with their male colleagues.

Under-representation in publishing

Out of 115 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields ... only 28 have reached 50% female authors overall. In biology and molecular biology, with overall representation of 37–38% female authorship, these trends are driven by near gender parity in the first author position (43–45% female authors); however, women represent only 27–28% of last authors ... Although manuscripts with female first authors are equally likely to be accepted as those with male first authors, papers with a male last or corresponding author are 3.0% and 3.7% more likely to be accepted than those with a female last or corresponding author, respectively. Moreover, for high-impact journals, the likelihood a woman will be published as the first, last or corresponding author decreases significantly as the impact factor of the journal increases.

Read the full article about gender bias by Kathleen E. Grogan at Nature Research