Stewart-Williams and Halsey argue persuasively that gender bias is just one of many causes of women’s underrepresentation in science

Abstract

Stewart-Williams and Halsey provide an unusually broad synthesis of the enormous literature on gender gaps in hiring, letters of recommendation, mathematical and spatial abilities, email appointment-making, people vs things orientation, within-gender variability, salaries, occupational preferences, and employment discrimination. They argue that sociocultural factors, while important, cannot by themselves account for the entirety of these gaps. In addition, they argue that factors resulting from evolutionary origins, cognitive ability gaps at the extreme right tail of the distribution, and underlying gender differences in abilities, preferences, and values are needed to explain why women are less well represented in the most math-intensive fields. In our commentary, we reprise our own recent synthesis (unpublished) of gender gaps in six domains (letters of recommendation, academic hiring, salaries, teaching evaluations, journal acceptance rates, grant funding success) and put our results in the context of these authors' arguments.