What is the extent of gender bias in bioinformatics? Please help me find out.

[kbradnam]

Hi,

I’m curious about the extent of gender bias in bioinformatics, so if you consider yourself as someone who does bioinformatics at any level (including studying for a degree/PhD), please complete this very short form (only 3 required questions).

You can find out more about why I'm doing this on my ACGT blog (where I will also be sharing results).

Feel free to share this form with anyone who doesn't view SEQanswers.

Regards,

Keith

[mgogol]

While I don't think my gender has limited my career prospects exactly (how would I know unless it was blatant), that's not to say I haven't been treated differently a few times because of my gender and it has made me feel bad. But there was no place on the form for that.

Also, gender (or any other kind of) bias can sometimes be subtle and not necessarily perceived by the person on the receiving end, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I don't know that a survey like this really gets to that point...

e.g.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.long

[kbradnam]

Hi mgogol,

I completely agree that a short, informal survey like this will not provide answers about the pervasiveness of subtle biases. I deliberately wanted to keep the survey very short and simple, in order to get a decent response rate.

The main thing I'm curious in finding out — and something that I think I will have enough responses to show — is whether there is a notable gender bias at senior career positions. If there is, one might assume that this occurs at Associate Faculty level (as seems to happen in many fields), but maybe the bias starts even earlier? I don't want to pre-judge my results so I'm keeping an open mind.

I am also curious to see what the degree of perceived career limitation due to gender bias is and how many people say that they have faced moderate to substantial limitations.

Finally, if I get some more responses over the coming week, I may be able to contrast the situation between different countries (at least between the UK and USA).

Regards,

Keith

[swbarnes2]

There is a lot of research out there on related topics already. As far as computer science goes, yes, the problems start much earlier as girls are told that programming is boy stuff, and not for them.

My guess is, you'd want to split people by how they came to bioinformatics. Biology in general seems to be more women friendly, (I think female bio undergrads are about 50%, maybe a bit higher), so there may be more women who came to bioinformatics from a pure bio background than women who came to it from a more computational background.

[kbradnam]

Hi swbarnes2,

It gets very tricky to do things like you suggest. Historically, there was a clearer division between bioinformaticians who came from biological backgrounds, and those who came from computational backgrounds. But now bioinformatics *— a field that seems to keep getting broader in scope —*attracts people from many disciplines (physics, mathematics, statistics, computer graphics, database administrators etc.).

Furthermore, we are finally —*albeit slowly —*starting to see more and more people learn coding and basic data processing skills as part of their degrees and PhDs. In many ways, bioinformatics represents a set of skills that you learn throughout your education.

Regards,

Keith

[kbradnam]

Just a quick update that I've published an analysis of this survey (which had over 370 responses).

The Extent of Gender Bias in Bioinformatics - Blog post summary, with links to report
The full report on Figshare
The raw survey responses (also on Figshare) - in case anyone else wants to play around with the data

[mgogol]

Wow, worse than I thought it would be.