Women are extremely underrepresented in the elite range of performance.

What is it about?

We found that that incremental differentiation is more constrained among women stars than among men stars. Female star researchers may accumulate productivity components at similar rates as their male colleagues but experience smaller increments in productivity due to a myriad of gender biases. According to our results, women stars may need to over-accumulate or “do more” (e.g., acquire more knowledge, build more relationships, put in more research hours) to achieve the same level of increase in outputs as their male counterparts.

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Why is it important?

Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM and other scientific fields. For example, in early (K-12) education, boys and girls display similar participation rates in mathematics and science. However, large gender imbalances in representation occur in higher-level academic fields and in the workforce. For example, although women make up half of the college-educated workforce in the U.S., they only make up 29% of the STEM workforce. Also, according to a survey by the Association of American Universities, women chair only 2.7% of engineering departments, 5.9% of math or physical science departments, and 12.7% of life science departments. The question posed by many companies—and echoed by the media—is: Why are women underrepresented in the U.S. technology industry?