Sex differences in academia

Women are scarce in some, but not all, academic disciplines. New work suggests the cause may be a special kind of prejudice – one that also applies to black people, reports The Economist.

The authors of a paper just published in Science, led by Sarah-Jane Leslie of Princeton University and Andrei Cimpian of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US, hypothesise that the crucial variable is something they call field-specific ability (basically, innate talent) – or, rather, a belief in this quality by those already entrenched in a discipline.

They have found that the more existing professors think some special talent, beyond intelligence and hard work, is required to do their subject well, the lower will be the percentage of PhD students in that subject who are women.
Full report on The Economist site