An analysis of 1 million doctoral dissertations finds widespread bias against research that just seems feminine, even if it’s not explicitly about women or gender.

For more than a decade, women have earned more doctoral degrees than men in the United States. Despite that, women less often get tenure, get published, and reach leadership positions in academia than men do.

Much of the research into why that might be focuses on structural barriers and explicit prejudice. But a new study by a team of researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education finds a widespread implicit bias against academic work that simply seems feminine—even if it’s not about women or gender specifically.

Analyzing nearly 1 million doctoral dissertations from US universities over a recent 40-year period, the researchers found that scholars who wrote about topics associated with women, or used methodologies associated with women, were less likely to go on to get senior faculty positions than those who did not.

The issue wasn’t so much a prejudice against feminist studies or gender studies, which have expanded considerably since the 1970s. In fact, people who wrote their dissertations explicitly about women had slightly better career prospects than those who wrote explicitly about men.

The real problem was a more subtle bias against topics and research designs that were “feminized,” meaning they were more associated with traditions of women’s work. Scholars whose dissertation abstracts had words like parenting, children, or relationship, for example, had slimmer career prospects than people who used words like algorithm, efficiency, or war.

Read the full article about bias against "feminine" research by Edmund L. Andrews-Stanford at Futurity.