Monthly Archives: May 2013

Women just don’t like doing research, right?

Lockwood et al. report that, for ecologists,

The sources of [career] satisfaction for men and women are notably different. Women report that they obtain substantially greater satisfaction from classroom teaching (20% of females listed this as a source of satisfaction, as compared to 13% of males), while men derive significantly greater satisfaction from data analysis and written communication.

Might that be because a paper is considered lower quality when written by a woman? If women are rewarded less for their papers than men, it makes sense that they’d get less satisfaction from writing them.

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Jeffrey A Lockwood, Derek S Reiners, and William A Reiners 2013. The future of ecology: a collision of expectations and desires? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 188–193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/120271

The Matilda Effect in Science Communication: An Experiment on Gender Bias in Publication Quality Perceptions and Collaboration Interest,” Science Communication, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Carroll J. Glynn and Michael Huge, DOI: 10.1177/1075547012472684