Report for: Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines

Title	Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines
Published in	Science, January 2015
DOI	10.1126/science.1261375
Pubmed ID	25593183
Authors	Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, Meredith Meyer, Edward Freeland, Leslie SJ, Cimpian A, Meyer M, Freeland E
Abstract	The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.

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Twitter Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 645 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	199	31%
United Kingdom	53	8%
Australia	18	3%
Canada	16	2%
France	15	2%
Spain	14	2%
Netherlands	10	2%
Japan	9	1%
Germany	7	1%
Other	66	10%
Unknown	238	37%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	379	59%
Scientists	217	34%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	30	5%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	19	3%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 1 Mendeley reader of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
Spain	1	100%
United States	1	100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	7	700%
Researcher	2	200%
Student > Bachelor	2	200%
Other	1	100%
Student > Master	1	100%
Other	4	400%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences	7	700%
Psychology	2	200%
Social Sciences	2	200%
Physics and Astronomy	1	100%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology	1	100%
Other	4	400%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1495. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 15 December 2018.

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#1,232

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Outputs from Science

#86

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#35

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Outputs of similar age from Science

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Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines

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Geographical breakdown

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Attention Score in Context