Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience?

This was the question posed by University of Chicago professor Dario Maestripieri in a Facebook post after surveying the women at the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last week.

Obviously, nobody was up to his standards. As he noted, “the super model types [were] completely absent.”

What a pity.

Maestripieri’s comments are emblematic of a larger problem: soft biases make science unappealing to women. And with scientists and engineers critical to economic growth, anything that makes science unappealing needs addressing.

Since the post, many female scientists have been speaking about their experiences. One writer on the blog “On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess,” commented that she always expects a certain amount of “overt assgrabbery” at certain scientific receptions.

Beyond anecdotes, there is empirical evidence of bias. In a recent paper, University of Arizona researchers Matthias Mehl and Toni Schmader had male and female scientists wear audio recorders at work. They found that when women talked to other women about their work, they sounded confident and competent.

But when women talked to men about their work, they reported feeling more disengaged. They also sounded less competent.

Mehl and Schmader attribute this to stereotype threat, the phenomenon in which a group, when it suspects it’s being judged based on stereotypes, begins to monitor its speech, typically with the effect of confirming the stereotype.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to interactions between different genders, but women fall victim because they are often considered to be less able in math and science.

While Maestripieri wasn’t directly saying women are dumb, implicit in his post was the idea that a smart, attractive woman probably isn’t a scientist. And while there was no maliciousness, his statement is indicative of an overall insensitivity toward stereotype threat and the effects it can have on women considering entering science.

Ultimately, nobody is immune to soft biases, even a trained scientist. Thus, science education needs to embrace a proactive approach to ending these stereotypes.

At Pitt, one session of the freshman seminar could focus on dispelling myths about women in science.

The facts are that, in many scientific fields, like biology and behavioral science, there are actually more women than men. Nearly equal numbers of men and women are accepted into medical school. In engineering, women earn higher grade point averages than men.

Also, instructors should explicitly teach about stereotype threat, a possibly counter-intuitive idea, but one which research shows can mitigate its effect.

Until the issue is addressed directly, men and women will not be more equitably represented in the sciences. And this misrepresentation is not only detrimental to women, but to our society as a whole, which is desperately in need of scientific advances.