(This post was co-authored with Debra Titone)

In most of today’s Psychology undergraduate classes, the majority of students are women. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that many women are entering the “pipeline” to academic careers in psychology. Yet, as others have repeatedly documented, women are in the minority with respect to positions of leadership and distinction in our discipline.

The “leaky pipeline” is an often-used metaphor for the general attrition of women across successive stages in the academic career. Of particular importance, the leaky pipeline has a self-sustaining quality in that the absence of women in top positions negatively influences women at earlier career stages who are looking for senior role models and mentorship.

While the leaky pipeline phenomenon and its negative consequences are well known in STEM fields in general, there is much we do not yet know about how this works in our discipline. As co-founders of Women in Cognitive Science – Canada (WiCS-Canada, see below for more information), and long-standing members of Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS, see below again), we are keenly interested in better understanding the nature of the problem and what we might be able to do to address it.

Our Analysis of Canadian Funding Data

Recently, in collaboration with graduate student Mehrgol Tiv, we set out to map women’s attrition in the context of our academic ecosystem: Canadian cognition and cognitive neuroscience. We took advantage of publicly-available funding data from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). NSERC supports cognitive science research in Canada from undergraduate to senior career stages, and publishes information about successful funding applications. We examined the distribution of NSERC awards to women and men at each stage in order to better understand the proportions of women and men funded at each career stage.

We analyzed data for the period 2009-2016 for awards made at each of the following career stages: undergraduate (Summer Research Awards), graduate (MSc and PhD Scholarships), postdoctoral (Fellowships), and faculty (Research Grants). We restricted analysis to awards made in subject areas that fall within cognitive science. We classified applicant gender using the R package “gender”, since it is not listed in the NSERC funding data.

As illustrated in the figure below (We thank Mehrgol Tiv for creating this figure), we found that more women than men received undergraduate and graduate awards, but that this pattern changed at the postdoctoral stage, where more men than women received postdoctoral awards. When we next considered awards to individuals in faculty positions, we found that many more men than women received Discovery Grants (the lifeblood of research funding in Canadian cognitive science).

We also considered the proportion of funded grants that received the prestigious “Discovery Accelerator Supplement”, additional funds awarded to those Discovery Grant applicants who are judged to have a “superior research program that is highly rated in terms of originality and innovation, and who show strong potential to become international leaders within their field” (NSERC). We found that men were more likely to be awarded Accelerator Supplements, as a proportion of all Discovery Grants awarded within each year.

These data (available here) represent the distribution of funding within our discipline in Canada over the last 7 years. They show that more women than men are entering the pipeline as undergraduates, where they are engaged in undergraduate research experiences. More women than men are funded to pursue graduate training in cognitive science, but at the postdoctoral level more men are funded than women, and this gap widens for faculty research grants and particularly for the prestigious Accelerator Supplements.

These data suggest that the leak (or perhaps more appropriately, the “rupture”) is most acute after graduate training. There are plenty of women in the system at early stages but they are less likely to continue to postdoctoral fellowships and research-focused faculty positions.

Of course, the data we analyzed here are best considered cross-sectional, as the 7-year window we studied is not long enough to allow any individual to move through all of the career stages we examined. As such, one might argue that we are comparing fundamentally different cohorts rather than a typical career progression. Certainly, this could be addressed with analysis of longer-term data. We think it is telling, however, that the ratios in the preceding figure show little systematic change over the 7 years examined. While different individuals are represented here at the undergraduate and faculty levels, there is little evidence of change within stages where the same individuals are represented; for instance, there is little evidence that the ratio of women to men faculty receiving research grants is changing over time.

An important caveat is that the NSERC data we analyzed do not include information about numbers of applications, only numbers of funded awards. Thus, we cannot tell whether lower numbers of awards for women at the postdoctoral and faculty levels are the result of lower numbers of applications from women, or lower rates of success for women. If the former, this would suggest that women are leaving the system in large numbers at the postdoctoral and faculty levels. If the latter, this would suggest there may be biases or other factors in the adjudication process that disproportionately disadvantage women. Both possibilities are concerning. (More comprehensive analyses of these and other data will appear in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.)

There are a number of strategies that could be adopted to address attrition of women in cognitive science careers.

Repairing the Pipeline

In terms of the adjudication process, there are contexts in which anonymizing applicants can be effective, but this approach is not really viable for NSERC or other agencies that rely on an evaluation of applicants’ past research contributions. Instead, NSERC and other agencies have adopted unconscious bias training for adjudication committees. Where possible, NSERC uses gender-neutral language in committee deliberations. In addition, there is evidence that if adjudication committees are encouraged to focus on the science rather than the applicant, gender differences in funding success are attenuated. This kind of evidence is helpful for addressing issues related to the leaky pipeline, and depends on granting agencies making detailed success rate and other data available to the research community. With these data, we can continue to track progress in our discipline. Applicants can help granting agencies in this regard by indicating gender on their grant applications. This is something that NSERC does not currently require and is indicated by only about 2/3 of applicants.

In broader terms, there is much we can do to encourage diversity and inclusion in our discipline. This can include deliberately attending to diversity when devising panels, inviting keynote speakers, seeking expert commentary, nominating individuals for awards, choosing editors, academic leaders, and other influential and high-visibility roles.

As individuals, and on behalf of organizations like WiCS-Canada and WiCS, we can make efforts to ensure that everyone has access to the same information and opportunities. This includes clear information about research-related opportunities but also clear policies on professional matters such as family leave, hiring practices, promotion, and sexual harassment (More discussion and strategies can be found here). These measures are important for women and perhaps especially for women who have other intersecting aspects of their identity (e.g., race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability).

Our discipline and our science will benefit from hearing and learning from these diverse perspectives.

Women in Cognitive Science – Canada (WiCS-Canada)

WiCS-Canada is the Canadian chapter of Women in Cognitive Science, the highly successful NSF-funded Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS) group in the US. Our objectives are to support and encourage women who are interested or engaged in cognitive science careers and to promote opportunities for networking, mentorship, and professional development. WiCS-Canada was established early in 2016.

We obtained a Unique Initiatives Grant from NSERC to support activities in our first year, and then partnered with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) for longer-term support. We hold WiCS-Canada Meetings during the CSBBCS Annual Meeting (our next meeting is July 4 at 3 pm in St John’s, Newfoundland).

You can find WiCS-Canada on Twitter (@WiCSCanada) and Facebook, and you can also find the US-based WiCS on Twitter (@WomenInCogSci) and Facebook.