Gender Disparities in Nobel Prize Winning Labs. A Look into Glass Ceilings, Maternal Walls and Bottlenecks
Moaraj Hasan

TL;DR
This study analyzes gender disparities in Nobel Prize-winning labs, revealing bottlenecks in academic progression for women, especially in physics, and suggests cultural shifts could promote gender equality.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis of gender representation in elite labs and identifies specific bottlenecks and cultural factors influencing disparities.
Findings
Larger gender disparities in physics labs
Gender bias during transition from postdoc to junior faculty
Generational cultural shifts may improve gender equality
Abstract
In this study, headcounts of all personnel in Nobel Prize-winning labs were collected and sorted by gender. These results are used to determine gender representation of graduate students in elite institutions on the pipeline towards higher academic positions. Larger gender disparities are seen in physics and physical chemistry labs and are reduced in biologically focused labs. These differences are greater in Nobel Prize-winning institutions when compared to the USA and EU averages. The gender bias in hiring during the transition between postdoctoral fellow and junior faculty seems to be the bottleneck for women; exacerbated by family formation. Women who surpass this hurdle achieve tenure at the same rate and do not perform any worse than men in such fields. Reduced participation in mathematically intensive fields can also be traced to propensities of girls preferences to deviate from…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsClimate Change Communication and Perception
