he could be treated differently by people who think of him as a woman, as a man or as a transgendered person makes Barres angry. What's worse is that some women don't recognize that they are treated differently because, unlike him, they've never known anything else.
The irony, Barres said, is that those who argue in favor of innate differences in scientific ability do so without scientific data to explain why women make up more than half of all graduate students but only 10 percent of tenured faculty. The situation is similar for minorities.
Yet scientists of both sexes are ready to attribute the gap to a gender difference. "They don't care what the data is," Barres said. "That's the meaning of prejudice."
Blinded them with bias
Barres doesn't think that scientists at the top of the ladder mean harm. In fact, quite the opposite. "I am certain that all of the proponents of the Larry Summers hypothesis are well-meaning and fair-minded people," he wrote in his Nature commentary. Yet because we all grew up in a culture that holds men and women to different standards, people are blind to their inherent biases, Barres said.
In his commentary Barres points to data from a range of studies showing bias in science. For example, when a mixed panel of scientists evaluated grant proposals without names, men and women fared equally well. However, competing unblinded, a woman applying for a research grant needed to be three times more productive than men to be considered equally competent.
Further evidence comes from Mahzarin Banaji, PhD, professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues have devised a test that forces people to quickly associate terms with genders. The results revealed that most people - men and women - are less likely to associate scientific words with women than with men.
Given these and other findings, Barres wondered how scientists could fail to admit that discriminat
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