The Dr. Tim Hunt Guide to Gender Parity

Ok, Tim Hunt, you want to separate the sexes? Then you need to prioritize funding to female PIs.

If you missed it, Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt recently put forth in public his opinion that science labs should be gender segregated, apparently because he thinks men and women can’t handle working together professionally.

Here is what he said according to journalists in the audience: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry!”

He was subsequently encouraged to apologize and explain himself, but really just dug in deeper, saying he stood by his views on sex-segregated labs.

So, let’s pretend that we think this is a good idea – after all, there are sex-segregated schools (Tim Hunt’s long-winded Nobel Prize bio suggests he may not have attended strictly sex-segregated schools but perhaps didn’t exactly engage much with females during his schooling). So, let’s say we think that both men and women do better when supervised and taught by men and women, respectively (for the record, I think this is a horrible idea, and was very happy with my male PhD and Postdoc supervisors, who were totally non-sexist and non-terrible to me). Let's say we also want to go farther than Tim Hunt suggests (he “doesn’t want to stand in the way of women”), and reach gender parity at all levels in the sciences (not a bad goal, I think). How can that be done?

Men and women working together - yikes!

A number of surveys have been done on faculty gender balance in STEM fields. In general, women at this point make up about 20-35% of the faculty in the US. Of course, the mean does not represent reality completely – some departments are much more heavily skewed towards male representation (the Physics department at Caltech has 4 female professors of 41 total), and perhaps other departments are skewed towards women (maybe?).

A 2014 study found that Biology labs led by elite male scientists have disproportionately fewer female than male trainees (the numbers vary of course by trainee and elite-ness level, but let’s just go with approximately 30% women for now). Theoretically, these elite labs are procuring a majority of funding, while training fewer women and therefore exacerbating the gender imbalance at higher levels. Elite female-run labs had close to gender parity in female to male trainee ratios, but were not female-dominated; therefore they could not counteract the trainee output from male-dominated labs.

So, let’s say we want to shuffle all the male grad student and postdoc trainees from female-run labs into male-run labs and vice versa. What can we do to result in gender parity at the end of the trainee pipeline (those completing postdocs)? Let’s pretend at the moment that all PIs are receiving the same amount of funding per lab and are training the same number of students and postdocs with that funding, proportionally:

Current Status	Male PI (~70% of labs)	Female PI (~30% of labs)
Funding Proportion	70%	30%
Male Trainees	70%	50%
Female Trainees	30%	50%
Female Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	21	15
Male Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	49	15
Total Trainees	70	30

The above scenario naturally results in a larger proportion of men completing the trainee program and applying for jobs as PIs.

If genders are segregated but funding proportions remain the same, the output of male and female trainees remains unchanged:

Gender-Segregated Labs at Current Funding Rate	Male PI (~70% of labs)	Female PI (~30% of labs)
Funding Proportion	70%	30%
Male Trainees	100%	0%
Female Trainees	0%	100%
Female Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	0	30
Male Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	70	0
Total Trainees	70	30

Therefore, in order to achieve gender parity in trainee output with segregated labs, female PIs need to be granted 70% of the available grant funds so they can train a larger number of female trainees per PI, while male PIs need to be granted just 30% of the funds. This means that for every dollar an individual female PI is granted, male PIs should receive only receive $0.18.

Gender-Segregated Labs at Adjusted Funding Rate	Male PI (~70% of labs)	Female PI (~30% of labs)
Funding Proportion Needed	30%	70%
Male Trainees	100%	0%
Female Trainees	0%	100%
Female Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	0	50
Male Trainees Produced per Hundred Trainees Total	50	0
Total Trainees	50	50

So, Tim Hunt, do you still believe in gender-segregated labs, yet also ostensibly supporting women in science?