The 'One-and-a-Half Bind'.

• Author: Parker, Michael
• Position: UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

A NUMBER OF STUDIES have shown that both minority and female scientists face disadvantages in reaching the highest levels of their careers. It then makes sense to conclude that minority women face a "double bind" that would particularly disadvantage them. An article coauthored by Gerald Marschke, associate professor of economics at the University at Albany (N.Y.), suggests that what more accurately exists for minority women researchers in the biosciences is a "one-and-a-half bind"--a worse situation than other groups in research, but less than the sum of the disadvantage of being black or Hispanic and of being a woman.

Marschke, along with coauthor Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics and public administration at Ohio State University, and UA graduate students Allison Nunez and Huifeng Yu used a massive database of scientific articles to produce their study, which received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Bureau of Economic Research, and appears in the American Economic Association's Papers and Proceedings.

Marschke notes that the findings are particularly timely, since "the underrepresentation of women and minorities [in STEM--science, technology, engineering, mathematics--fields] is a huge concern to policymakers and is the focus of many commissions and initiatives."

The researchers looked at the journals where these scientists publish their results, and where the last author listed on an article often is the principal investigator who garners the highest level of prestige. "Being last author is the height of a research career in bioscience, implying independence, leadership, and stature," notes Marschke.

The researchers compared how many minorities and women were listed as last author on papers compared to white men. Computer software categorized author names by race, ethnicity, and gender and also identified individual authors so that the researchers could follow how scientists' authorship position on papers changed over the course of their careers.

Considering 486,644 articles with two to nine authors published in medical journals by U.S. scientists between 1946-2009, the project's results showed that the probability of being a last author increased from 18% during the first four years of a scientist's career to 37% after 25 and up to 29 years. Black scientists were substantially less likely to be last authors compared to...