Explaining the Academic Gender Gap: Comparing Undergraduate and Graduate/Faculty Beliefs about Talent Required for Success in Academic Fields

The persistent gender imbalance in many academic fields has been the topic of much recent research. One recent study found that when graduate students and faculty of a given field believe that their field requires talent for success, male students tend to be overrepresented in that field. This, in conjunction the persistent stereotype that women have less innate talent, was proposed to cause fewer women to pursue disciplines believed to require more talent. It has yet to be established, however, whether those field-specific beliefs are shared by the undergraduate population, where they can play a role in the decisions made by undergraduates. Without this established, it seems pre-mature to propose a causal connection between how women tend to select disciplines and these field-specific beliefs by those within the field. Using a large survey of undergraduates, this study aims to determine whether undergraduate beliefs about which fields of study require talent for success matches the attitudes of those within those fields. This study also examines whether a student’s degree of exposure to and familiarity with a discipline leads him or her to more closely share the opinion of those within the discipline. These findings will help direct future research to ask the right questions and propose plausible hypotheses about gender imbalance in academia

Decline of long-range temporal correlations in the human brain during sustained wakefulness

Sleep is crucial for daytime functioning, cognitive performance and general well-being. These aspects of daily life are known to be impaired after extended wake, yet, the underlying neuronal correlates have been difficult to identify. Accumulating evidence suggests that normal functioning of the brain is characterized by long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) in cortex, which are supportive for decision-making and working memory tasks. Here we assess LRTCs in resting state human EEG data during a 40-hour sleep deprivation experiment by evaluating the decay in autocorrelation and the scaling exponent of the detrended fluctuation analysis from EEG amplitude fluctuations. We find with both measures that LRTCs decline as sleep deprivation progresses. This decline becomes evident when taking changes in signal power into appropriate consideration. Our results demonstrate the importance of sleep to maintain LRTCs in the human brain. In complex networks, LRTCs naturally emerge in the vicinity of a critical state. The observation of declining LRTCs during wake thus provides additional support for our hypothesis that sleep reorganizes cortical networks towards critical dynamics for optimal functioning

STEM/Non-STEM Divide Structures Undergraduate Beliefs About Gender and Talent in Academia

Research and popular debate on female underrepresentation in academia has focused on STEM fields. But recent work has offered a unifying explanation for gender representation across the STEM/non-STEM divide. This proposed explanation, called the field-specific ability beliefs (FAB) hypothesis, postulates that, in combination with pervasive stereotypes that link men but not women with intellectual talent, academics perpetuate female underrepresentation by transmitting to students in earlier stages of education their beliefs about how much intellectual talent is required for success in each academic field. This theory was supported by a nationwide survey of U.S. academics that showed both STEM and non-STEM fields with fewer women are also the fields that academics believe require more brilliance. We test this top-down schema with a nationwide survey of U.S. undergraduates, assessing the extent to which undergraduate beliefs about talent in academia mirror those of academics. We find no evidence that academics transmit their beliefs to undergraduates. We also use a second survey “identical to the first but with each field's gender ratio provided as added information” to explicitly test the relationship between undergraduate beliefs about gender and talent in academia. The results for this second survey suggest that the extent to which undergraduates rate brilliance as essential to success in an academic field is highly sensitive to this added information for non-STEM fields, but not STEM fields. Overall, our study offers evidence that, contrary to FAB hypothesis, the STEM/non-STEM divide principally shapes undergraduate beliefs about both gender and talent in academia