MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The stereotype of the lone genius, generally in popular culture and the real world, is expected to be a man. As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, that gender stereotype may have an impact on women in some academic fields.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Sarah-Jane Leslie works at Princeton University as a philosopher.
SARAH-JANE LESLIE: Which is a humanities discipline that has very few women.
BRUMFIEL: She says philosophy is also one of those disciplines where the word genius gets thrown around a lot.
LESLIE: We wondered if there might be a connection between philosophers' disposition to place all this emphasis on the need for brilliance and the discipline's large gender gap.
BRUMFIEL: So she and some colleagues surveyed philosophers and asked them; to be really good at philosophy, do you need natural talent? They asked the same question of scholars in 30 other fields, the result published in the journal Science.
LESLIE: To the extent that a discipline expresses the belief that you have to have a special spark of brilliance to really be successful, we found that those disciplines had larger gender gaps.
BRUMFIEL: There were fewer women in fields where genius was a perceived prerequisite. That rule didn't apply to just the usual genius-y fields like physics and math.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOZART SONG, "EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK")
LESLIE: Music composition was definitely towards that end of the spectrum, and correspondingly has very few women in it.
BRUMFIEL: Genius composers like Mozart, genius physicists like Einstein - these icons are male. And Leslie believes that image is keeping women out.
LESLIE: Even though women are just as likely as men to have what it takes.
BRUMFIEL: But not everyone thinks this genius effect is to blame. Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist at Harvard. She says the problems women face in science are no different than they face in other professions.
LISA RANDALL: I remember a long time ago, there was a cartoon in The New Yorker. A bunch of guys and one women around a desk, and they said this is a very good comment, Miss Tribbs, would one of the guys here like to make it?
BRUMFIEL: She thinks academia has the same problems as, say, business. Men talk over women at meetings. Some women feel marginalized, and eventually, they give up.
RANDALL: Is it really that it's because it's being associated with genius that this is happening, or is it simply that people aren't listening to their ideas?
BRUMFIEL: Hard to say. But in physics, at least, the number of women earning degrees is rising, slowly. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.