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Writer's pictureGiulia Lima
Oct 814 min read

Sex and Gender Disparities in Neuroscience

Updated: Oct 9

Disclaimer: Gender is a self-described characteristic, whilst sex is biologically determined. The term ‘women’ can refer to either or both definitions, and this may vary according to the study cited. At Women in Neuroscience UK, we tackle both sexism and gender biases in neuroscience, by covering topics of sex/gender discrimination in neuroscience workplaces and sex differences in neurological conditions. Our current activities primarily support female-identifying neuroscientists but we actively encourage people of all gender identities to our community. We believe everyone can benefit from learning and peer support towards more diverse and inclusive neuroscience.


Despite growing movements toward equality, women continue to face barriers in society and in neuroscience spaces. From skewed representation to unequal pay, this piece aims to expose injustices facing women in neuroscience and calls for action towards a fairer, more inclusive future.


Underrepresentation in senior roles

Women are awarded over half of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in neuroscience worldwide. At the postdoctoral level, there is an equal split between men and women (Euraxess, 2018). Yet, women are not fairly represented at senior career stages; for example, less than 14% of tenured neuroscience faculty in the US are female (Sibener et al., 2022) and men account for around 75% of professors in Europe (Gibney, 2022).

Figure 1. Proportion (%) of men and women in a typical academic career, students and academic staff, EU-28, 1999-2016 |Source: She Figures 2018 and 2015 (Euraxess 2019).

While men and women may possess identical educational backgrounds, statistically, men are more likely to progress in their career paths more quickly, leading to a disproportional underrepresentation of women in senior roles. Some contributing factors include unconscious gender biases, sexual harassment and the pressure to take on home duties. Women are more likely than men to take on primary carer roles for children and the elderly (including people with dementia), resulting in less time to invest in their careers (Sharma et al., 2016). Furthermore, women who have children are less likely to be promoted compared to men who have children (NCT, 2022).


Furthermore, male academics tend to receive greater recognition from their university, be more respected by their students, and obtain administrative assistance more easily (Greene et al., 2010). In other words, the underrepresentation of women is not a matter of competence or aptitude, but rather a number of barriers that reduce the likelihood of women being promoted or hired for higher-earning positions – this phenomenon is referred to as the ‘glass ceiling’.


Reasons for underrepresentation of women in senior roles:


Sexism in the workplace and its broad detriments

The authority gap impacts women across workplaces, due to harmful and ongoing sexist stereotypes and biases. Women are more likely to be interrupted, talked over, and not taken seriously by their male co-workers. Attempts by women to overcome these barriers, by being confident or assertive, can instead be viewed as aggressive and abrasive (Doyle-Morris, 2021). 

Women are nearly three times more likely than men to be sexually harassed at work (Kearl, Johns, & Raj, 2019), and 1 in 7 of these women opt to change jobs (Kearl, Johns, & Raj, 2019). According to a study, approximately 78% of female STEM undergraduate students have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the previous year (Leaper & Starr, 2018). As a consequence, women may feel uncomfortable in their work or study environment and be discouraged from investing time and effort in their careers. 


Gender pay gap: hiring

Male faculty members tend to hire 10-40% fewer women than female faculty members (Sheltzer & Smith, 2014). This can, in part, be attributed to conscious and unconscious gender bias, as well as the prospect of maternity leave, which discourages men from hiring young, and/or newlywed, women or cause them to lose their jobs (Topping, 2015). The percentage of women hired decreases further if the male faculty is high achieving (Sheltzer & Smith, 2014). 


Female academics also tend to be allocated more teaching and service roles (Greene et al., 2010), which was considered to be one of the departmental obstacles to recruiting and hiring women faculty. With reduced employment opportunities and visibility in the field, women face greater barriers to progressing their careers, becoming high achievers and reaching their full potential. 


Gender pay gap: grant funding

There are clear disparities in the allocation of grant funding. In dementia research, for example, women make up 60% of researchers in the UK but are only awarded 37% of grants (Alzheimer’s Research UK, 2022). This could result in female researchers struggling to afford high cost experiments and high-impact factor journals to publish their work, leading them to opt for lower-visibility outlets and resulting in the underrepresentation of women authors in high-impact journals. 


Underrepresentation in journals

A 2022 study (Son & Bell, 2022) looked at 119,592 manuscript submissions by scientists before, and during, the pandemic. The study concluded that women contribute fewer manuscripts than men for all world regions, for both the pandemic and pre-pandemic periods, although there is a slow increase. Before the lockdown in 2020, female authors made up 16.5% of submitted manuscripts. During the pandemic, the rate of increase slowed, but we still saw a 2.3% rise (to 18.8%) in the number of manuscripts submitted by female scientists. However, in most countries, except for China, South Korea, and Taiwan, the number of female first authors has seen a decline in recent years (Son & Bell, 2022). Fewer women in senior roles and leading research projects, along with gender biases in grant funding and article reviewing may contribute to fewer female first and last authors.

In addition, female scientists are significantly less likely to be cited, particularly in articles published by high-impact journals, and they are more likely to report that their contributions were underestimated by the team (Ross et al., 2022).


Imposter syndrome in an environment that was not built for women

Lack of self-confidence can be detrimental to women’s career advancement in several ways. Compared to men, female applicants are less inclined to apply for positions when they do not meet all of the criteria because of self-doubt (Mohr, 2014). This lack of confidence also contributes to the pay gap, with women being less likely to ask for a raise, often due to fear of backlash from not conforming to society’s stereotype. Lack of self-confidence is also thought to contribute to underrepresentation in high-profile journals. A survey, completed by over 4,800 scientists, found that only 37% of women reported submitting papers to Nature, Science, and PNAS, compared with almost 49% of men (Chawla, 2023). It was concluded that women tended to only submit their best work to high-profile journals, whereas men were more likely to submit papers of lower quality or novelty. In addition, men were more likely to cite their own work than women who, in contrast, tend to underrate their contributions to academic papers (Chawla, 2023).


Similarly, a meta-analysis of clinical journal articles concluded that papers with a male first or last author were more likely to present their own  findings in a positive light within titles and abstracts, relative to articles with female first and last authors. This was particularly prominent in journals with a higher impact rating. Presenting research findings more positively was also correlated with a greater number of article citations (Lerchenmueller, Sorenson & Jena, 2019).


“Growing up, we’re socialised to be accommodating, not disrupt, be the ‘good girl,’ and always be grateful. In other words, to stay small. Self-promoting feels like it’s bragging, and that’s outside of how we’ve been raised to be.” Claire Wasserman, Founder and Chief Branding Officer of Ladies Get Paid, Forbes.

Many women report feeling intimidated (Clarke, 2022) entering male-dominated spaces due to the aforementioned factors, such as sexual harassment and discrimination, reducing chances of speaking out and/or seeking support in cases of workplace harassment. When an individual feels doubtful and like they don’t belong in a space, this is often described as ‘imposter syndrome’, "The frequent feeling of not deserving one's success, and of being a failure despite a sustained record of achievements", as per Cambridge Dictionary. A recent meta-analysis, combining data from over 42,000 participants and 108 studies, found that women consistently scored higher than men in measures of impostor syndrome. This sex disparity did not reduce over time, despite gradual increases in female representation at more senior career stages and some positive advancements in societal views.


Altogether, this increases the likelihood of women leaving neuroscience workspaces in a vicious cycle.


Lack of recognition

Women often do not receive the recognition and visibility they deserve. Less than 6% of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureates are women, despite making up a substantial fraction (33%) of researchers worldwide (UNESCO, 2021) and having made groundbreaking discoveries. There have even been instances of female researchers who have had their research plagiarised, and as a result, received no credit for it. One great example is Maria Manasseina, a pioneer neuroscientist, specialising in the impacts of prolonged sleep deprivation. Prior to that, she worked in a lab at the Polytechnic University of Vienna where she investigated the role of yeast in alcoholic fermentation. 25 years later, the male scientist, Eduard Buchner, published a very similar paper to hers replicating the same results, without crediting her work. In 1907, Buchner won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Manasseina’s name was obliterated (WINEU, 2017). 



Impacts of underrepresentation of women in senior neuroscience roles:


Gender pay gap: salary

Despite the UK achieving a high parity score of 0.789, according to the World Economic Forum (Pal, Piaget and Zahidi, 2024), a clear pay gap remains. On average, female full-time workers are paid 10.7% less than their male counterparts. and it is estimated that the gender pay gap will not close until 2051 (Fawcett Society, 2023). The pay gap also extends to race, with black women earning almost 25% less than white women, which is a result of systemic racism. 


One factor that contributes to the overall gender pay gap is the underrepresentation of women in senior roles, however there also lies pay disparities between men and women doing the same jobs. In the medical field, for example, the mean annual income for a male GP between 2016 and 2017 was £93,760, while female GPs of the same level were paid just £75,671, which is a 19% difference (Russel, 2020). 


Of women who, despite societal pressures, pursue a raise, approximately 15% are successful, relative to 20% of their male counterparts (Artz, Goodall & Oswald, 2018). Pay gaps have the potential to significantly impact mental health during the cost of living crisis, especially in the case of single mothers. A study by the charity Mind estimates that 74% of women in England and Wales feel that their mental health has suffered from the rising cost of living (Nicholls, 2023; Rosseninsky, 2024).


Underrepresentation in clinical trials

Historically, the female body has been grossly understudied. Back in ancient Greece, physicians believed uteruses were able to ‘wander’ around the body and cause a wide range of neurological symptoms such as anxiety, headaches, and tremors – they named this condition hysteria (Tasca et al., 2012). This was used by clinicians as an excuse to dismiss symptoms of female patients and, therefore, prioritise men’s health. Nowadays, while we have an increasing understanding of female anatomy, we still see sex and gender discrepancies in women’s health, treatment and ongoing research.  

From 1977 to 1993, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline was in effect, prohibiting most women of childbearing age from taking part in clinical trials. This guideline followed the thalidomide scandal, to protect women from possible side effects and to prevent birth defects in their children (NIH, 2020). However, this meant many medications and treatments were released to the public without undergoing clinical testing on women, resulting in unfavourable side effects and outcomes for women. 


Currently, clinical trials supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate the inclusion of female participants, but privately funded trials have no such requirements. Additionally, NIH funding trends reveal a greater financial commitment to conditions predominantly impacting males (Mirin, 2021).  


In clinical and preclinical trials today, women often continue to make up less than half of participants. In dementia research, women constitute 58% of participants, despite making up 64% of dementia patients (Pinho-Gomes et al., 2022). Furthermore, only 1 in 6 of the rodents featured in pre-clinical research are female (Brookshire, 2019). Female mice have been thought to display greater variability than male mice due to hormonal fluctuations as per their oestrous cycle. Some scientists claim that female mice require more funds and labour to mitigate the effects caused by the oestrous cycle, which has proven to be a major impediment to the inclusion of female subjects in research.  However, more recent research seems to suggest that male rodents are just as variable as their female counterparts (Kaluve, Le & Graham, 2022). 


The historic, and to an extent continued, exclusion or underrepresentation of women in animal and human clinical trials, and the lack of sex-specific analysis, is of great concern. With less data on treatment impacts on women, we have poorer evidence-based healthcare for women and greater risks of poorly understood adverse effects for women from treatments.


Two-thirds of people with dementia are female, but due to a lack of research, we don’t know why this is and whether there are sex-specific disease pathways (Alzheimer’s Research UK, 2022). With limited research, women’s health is so poorly understood that doctors more frequently misdiagnose their female patients: women are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack (BHF, 2016) and 33% after a stroke (Newman-Toker et al., 2014), both of which can be life-threatening. Women also report waiting longer than 10 months after their first GP visit to receive a brain tumour diagnosis, when early diagnosis and treatment are essential for a good prognosis (Dusenbery, 2018). On the other hand, women are more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders such as depression (Sundbom et al., 2017). They are overprescribed antidepressants, despite having identical depression symptom scores as their male counterparts, which results in unwanted mild to severe side effects for women (Leonard & Biggers, 2021).


Similarly, women are at a much higher risk of overdosing on prescribed drugs due to incorrect dosage, stemming from lack of research and female underrepresentation in clinical trials. Moreover, over 90% of human trials do not report sex-specific outcomes and side effects, which could be key to improving understanding and treatment of womens’ health (Martinkova et al., 2021). Each year, it is estimated that 40,000 to 80,000 people die as a result of diagnostic errors in the US alone (Dusenbery, 2018). This is a major issue that must be addressed to prevent further unnecessary deaths in the future. 

 

Final thoughts

The world of neuroscience is often more difficult for women, especially when dealing with neurological conditions, as individuals or as carers, but also as neuroscience researchers. For most of history, science has been done by men for men, while women have been perceived as the secondary sex. Consequently, women are expected to work harder and confront deeply ingrained societal constructs to climb the career ladder. In spite of all that, neuroscience is slowly evolving and becoming more inclusive towards women. Women now have platforms, like WiNUK, to voice their concerns as well as to share their stories and inspire other fellow scientists, and we hope that things will only get better for researchers, their environments, and their work. It is fantastic to see grant funds being developed to support sex-stratified neuroscience research, for example: AARG-D Research Grant| Alzheimer's Association. With specific funding pots, the increasing interest in women’s health, and efforts like WiNUK working towards closing the gender gap in neuroscience senior career positions, we hope to see a future of neuroscience free from sexism.


 

This article was written by Giulia Lima and edited by Rebecca Pope, Lizzie English and Ailie McWhinnie, with graphics produced by Lilly Green. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.


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