Nancy Hopkins started Googling her colleagues in spring 2012. She mentally scanned the hallways of her institution at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge — along with the campuses of other elite institutions — for the offices of men she knew who had founded companies. Then she clicked on the websites of their firms, and counted the number of men and women serving on their scientific advisory boards (SABs), a prestigious position for researchers who steer the company's scientific direction.

It was an informal exercise, rather than a systematic survey. But Hopkins, a molecular biologist at MIT and a long-time campaigner for women in science, found the results shocking. A sample of 12 of the companies she examined had a total of 129 SAB members; only 6 were women. “I was completely stunned,” says Hopkins. “And it made me sad. I thought, 'gee, why don't these men want to work with [MIT] women?' We have such incredible women faculty.”

Nature special:
nature.com/women

The proportion of women in industrial and academic science has shot up over the past 20 years. According to the US National Science Foundation, women make up 25% of tenured academics in science and engineering and more than 25% of industry scientists in research and development. But when it comes to academics engaging in commercial work — patenting their discoveries, starting biotech companies or serving on SABs — the picture is less progressive. Studies have confirmed Hopkins' impression that even leading female scientists are often absent from these roles. “The secret club [of men] used to be going to the lab and conferences,” says Fiona Murray, who studies life-sciences entrepreneurship at MIT. “That world has changed a lot, but we have a new venue where it is still difficult for women to play a similar role.”

Experts in industry and academia speculate that the disparity could reflect the small numbers of women in certain specialized fields; the demands of family life; or a residual male clubbiness. Whatever the reasons, this stubborn gender gap hurts everyone, says Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. “I think the companies would do better science by having the best people on their board. And I think these women, who are great scientists, would do better science in their labs by having access to these ideas.”

“Everybody's losing,” says Bassler.

Hidden problem
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, there were more than 11 men for every one woman in the science faculty at MIT. Things started to change 20 years ago, when Hopkins, as the first chair of MIT's Committee on Women Faculty in the School of Science, and her team drove through major increases in the hiring of women. By 2006, one out of every five biology faculty members on the MIT campus was a woman.

At a dinner last April to honor these achievements and mark her retirement from the lab, Hopkins spoke about the work still to be done. She talked about a list she had been given by a graduate of Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, showing the names of scientists in the area who had received funding from a local venture-capitalist firm. Among 100 names, only one was a woman. The list would not have surprised Hopkins more than 30 years ago, when she had been told by a colleague that “women aren't allowed” to found biotech companies. But to see such a dearth of academic women in modern biotechnology was upsetting.

5 Comments

1. 1. NateWeeks 10:35 PM 3/6/13

   I don't know what "Alnylam" is meant to mean, but in an amusing bit of irony it is an anagram for "Man Yall".

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2. 2. Archimedes 08:25 AM 3/7/13

   There is a mean difference in mean IQ in favor of men of about 5 points. The further you go up the distribution the more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120 plus as there are women, There are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women. (Irwing 2006)
   Above a score of 700 on the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (Mathematics) there are only 7 per cent females against 93 per cent males (Benbow an Stanley 1983).
   
   Apparently, the IQ gives a good indication of the occupational group that a person will end up in, though not, of course, the specific occupation. In their book, Know Your Child's IQ,
   Glen Wilson and Diana Grylls outline occupations typical of various IQ levels:
   
   140 Top Civil Servants; Professors and Research Scientists.
   130 Physicians and Surgeons; Lawyers; Engineers (Civil and Mechanical).
   120 School Teachers; Pharmacists; Accountants; Nurses; Stenographers; Managers.
   110 Foreman; Clerks; Telephone Operators; Salesmen; Policemen; Electricians.
   100 plus Machine Operators; Shopkeepers; Butchers; Welders; Sheet Metal Workers.
   100 minus Warehouse men; Carpenters; Cooks and Bakers; Small Farmers; Truck and Van Drivers.
   90 Laborers; Gardeners; Upholsterers; Farm hands; Miners; Factory Packers.
   
   Given the relative and absolute number of men in the higher IQ ranges, one would expect a disproportionate relative and absolute number of men in those occupations associated with the same. However, feminists, jurists, and the political body of the USA and other nations have unjustly attributed this disparity to intentional and or unintentional gender discrimination against women.
   Dramatic Orwellian Affirmative action and other overt and covert programs to unjustly give women those educational and employment opportunities that justly, because of both ability and effort, belong to men have resulted in significant decreases in productivity and efficiency through out the American economy and those of other nations which had adapted these authoritarian and Machiavellian precepts.
   

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3. 3. NateWeeks in reply to Archimedes 11:45 PM 3/7/13

   I could expound upon the statistical fallacy of referencing IQ test results as an indicator of gender-based intelligence, competence, skill, or career choice ad nauseum, however, it is unnecessary. The article is not concerning the lack of women with sufficient credentials, but rather how women are underrepresented in the area of private industry science advisers compared to the percentage of those qualified (roughly 5% to 25%).

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4. 4. phalaris 04:06 AM 3/8/13

   NateWeeks :
   You are assuming that all women in faculty are equally qualified for business roles requiring more than academic achievement.
   And that they would not be handicapped by child-bearing.
   
   And, yes, you do well to hold back with the usual obfuscation on whether men and women are identical in cognitive, psychological (and many other) attributes.
   

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5. 5. bucketofsquid in reply to Archimedes 05:56 PM 3/15/13

   What you really mean is that there is a mean difference of 5% in outdated IQ tests designed by male academics to benefit male academics. It really isn't relevant to the topic of the article.
   
   When 25% of the available pool of qualified potential SAB members are women and only 5% of actual SAB members are women there is an obvious disparity. That doesn't mean the reasons for this are nefarious. It only means that something surprising is happening and there is a possibility that it may be conscious or unconscious gender bias.
   
   By the way, quoting a source that is 4 decades old doesn't really help your credibility. It also fails to help when the "careers" book you cite fails to specify economic and educational opportunity limits in rather large regions. I know more than a few lawyers and engineers that ended up working factories because that was where the work was.

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