Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
Science. 2015 Jan 16;347(6219):262-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1261375.
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.
在 STEM 学科中的性别失衡主导了当前关于女性在学术界代表性不足的讨论。然而，在某些科学领域，女性在博士层面的代表性很好，而在某些人文学科领域的代表性则很差（例如，在 2011 年，美国分子生物学博士中有 54%是女性，而哲学博士只有 31%）。我们假设，在整个学术界，在那些从业者认为天赋是成功的主要要求的领域，女性的代表性不足，因为女性被刻板印象为不具备这种天赋。这一假设也适用于非裔美国人的代表性不足，因为这一群体也受到类似的刻板印象的影响。一项针对学者的全国性调查的结果支持了我们的假设（称为特定领域能力信念假设），而不是三个竞争假设。
