GONE are the days when researchers could spend all their time propping up the bar, or disappear for years on expeditions. Now their performance is closely monitored and the findings used to divvy out jobs and dollars.
This process has confirmed a worrying suspicion. When it comes to the number of research papers they publish, female scientists consistently appear far less productive than their male colleagues. What is the reason for this apparent slothfulness? Could it really be that women’s brains are not up to the job, as Larry Summers famously suggested during his short tenure as president of Harvard University. Or is something else stopping women scientists from keeping up with the men?
“Could it really be that women’s brains are not up to the job?”
Advertisement
Answer those questions and you would have solved the productivity puzzle. One possibility is that women siphon off their time and creative energy to raise children. The evidence is far from conclusive, but the hypothesis makes enough intuitive sense for Nobel laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard to have set up a foundation that provides grants to enable female scientists with children to hire help, buy dishwashers or whatever it takes to reduce the time they spend on household tasks.
Is, then, simple discrimination the answer to the productivity puzzle? Several studies have found that journals are as likely to accept papers from female as male scientists. But there is evidence for discrimination in the way research grants are doled out. One Swedish study found that women needed to be two and a half times as productive as men to be considered equally competent when applying for a grant.
Or do women simply favour quality over quantity, producing fewer publications, but ones that are more likely to cause a stir? There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest this – it’s even got a name, the “impact enigma” – but it is difficult to prove.
The reason, argued a team of Antipodean biologists in December, is that measures of research quality tend to be directly related to research quantity (PLoS ONE, vol 1, e127). Or to put it another way: publish lots of papers and you will create a reputation which ensures that your publications are more highly cited. So the team compared the citation rates for women and men who had published the same numbers of papers, and found as predicted that the women’s papers were cited 20 per cent more often than the men’s.
Which raises a delicate question: what counts as good science – oodles of publications containing piles of data that other researchers can use as jumping off points for their ideas? Or a few papers that change the way a field thinks?
