To the Editor

The Feature by Holmes et al. (Nature Geosci. 1, 79–82; 2008) provides important data and observations about the low percentages of women professors in academic geoscience. However, there may be other explanations than those given by the focus groups.

The best explanation for what I've observed (as a female associate professor) comes from the gender schemas work of Virginia Valian, a cognitive scientist at Hunter College. The basic idea is that people's expectations influence their perceptions of others (and of themselves), and these little differences in perception add up. So the statements about “intrinsic female attributes” mentioned by the focus groups (such as “women are choosing a different career path,” “females don't like field work,” “females in general have a low interest in the subject matter,” “females lack self-confidence,” and “females in general prefer to teach”) are the problems in themselves. Even when they aren't true about a particular job applicant (or woman coming up for tenure, or grant applicant, or paper author, or woman who is not even nominated for a Young Scientist award), the expectation that they will be true influences the people making the judgments.

The structural issues are real. Yes, it is incredibly difficult to juggle a small child and new teaching and research responsibilities. But it is even harder when you've also got to disprove flawed hypotheses (“she was only a courtesy co-author on that paper”; “she doesn't want to do field work”; “she is more interested in teaching than research.”).

Changing the tenure clock to accommodate childbirth only helps if the committee doesn't think less of a woman for taking that option — or doesn't assume that the woman should write twice as many papers in that time.