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?
