This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

As in many other fields, gender bias pervades the sciences. Men score higher starting salaries, they have more mentoring, and they have better odds of

being hired.

Studies show they're also perceived as more competent than women in STEM fields, and new research

reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation to.

Say, you know, this is the best student I've ever had.

Kuhayley Dutt, a social scientist and diversity officer at Columbia University's Lamont campus.

Compare those excellent letters, she says, to a merely good letter.

The candidate was intelligent or productive or a solid scientist or you know or whatever something that was clearly

solid praise but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one of a

kind done and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for post-talk positions in geoscience.

And they were all redacted for gender and other identifying information,

so Dut and her team could assign him a score without knowing the sex of the student.

They found that female applicants were only half as likely to snag superlative letters

compared to their male counterparts.

That includes letters of rec from all over the world and written

by yes, men and women. The findings are in the journal Nature Geoscience. Dut says they were not able to evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of the applicants using the archival data,

but she says the results still suggest women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their careers,

starting with those less than outstanding Letters of Wreck.

We're not trying to assign blame or criticize anyone or call anyone consciously sexist or something like that.

Rather, the point is to use the results of this study to open up meaningful dialogues on implicit gender bias, be it at a departmental level or an

institutional level or even a discipline level.

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