The Subtle Ways Gender Gaps Persist in Science
When it comes to science, women and men remain unequal. And while stories about overt harassment dominate the news, a host of researchers are teasing out the subtle reasons for why inequalities exist. Cassidy R. Sugimoto is one of them. An associate professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington, Ms. Sugimoto is an expert at prying stories from the data hidden in the authorship pattern of studies. She has now discovered a way to peer back into the structures of labs themselves. And she’s been surprised by what she’s seen. As a forthcoming paper by Ms. Sugimoto and three others will show, women are disproportionately performing the experimental work involved in producing science — the pipetting, the centrifuging, the sequencing. Men, meanwhile, are more likely to be credited for analyzing data, conceiving experiments, contributing resources, or writing the study. Women, it seems, are providing the labor of science.