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	S.-J. Leslie, A. Cimpian, M. Meyer, E. Freeland
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 659 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	204	31%
United Kingdom	53	8%
Australia	19	3%
Canada	16	2%
France	15	2%
Spain	12	2%
Japan	10	2%
Netherlands	9	1%
Germany	9	1%
Other	68	10%
Unknown	244	37%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	392	59%
Scientists	218	33%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	31	5%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	18	3%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 19 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
Spain	1	5%
United States	1	5%
Unknown	17	89%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	7	37%
Researcher	2	11%
Unspecified	2	11%
Student > Bachelor	2	11%
Student > Master	1	5%
Other	5	26%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences	7	37%
Social Sciences	2	11%
Unspecified	2	11%
Psychology	2	11%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology	1	5%
Other	5	26%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1500. 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 11 February 2019.

All research outputs

#1,297

of 12,546,831 outputs

Outputs from Science

#100

of 59,097 outputs

Outputs of similar age

#36

of 324,243 outputs

Outputs of similar age from Science

of 1,039 outputs

Altmetric has tracked 12,546,831 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.

So far Altmetric has tracked 59,097 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 40.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.

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We're also able to compare this research output to 1,039 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.

Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines

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Geographical breakdown

Demographic breakdown

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Geographical breakdown

Demographic breakdown

Attention Score in Context