Currently reading Månefjord et al. (2025) on “Mind the Gender Gap: Implicit bias in STEM education”

Beautiful day to read about the gender gap at LTH! Or at least about the implicit biases found in the environment I work in every day, and where I try to work for equitable learning opportunities. In a nutshell, it is as bad here as it is everywhere else…

The study by Månefjord et al. (2025) starts out with a recap of what we know about gender gaps and biases in academia — there is a grading bias against female students, teaching evaluations are biased against female teachers, letters of recommendation for women focus on soft skills whereas for men they are about leadership and intelligence. Women are also less likely to receive mentorship, to receive grants, to be promoted. They need to publish twice as much as men to be seen as equally competent, and the list goes on (I have compiled a lot of literature here, including even an earlier version of this article!). But since a lot of the research mentioned above is from the US, there is a slight hope that in Sweden, commonly ranked in the top 5 countries in measures of gender equality, things might be different?

Turns out that for the approximately 50 LTH teachers that responded to Månefjord et al. (2025)’s questionnaire, including reporting on their “Implicit Association Test (IAT) on Gender-Science relations” test results, the distribution looks very similar to the distribution of the 600,000ish responses collected with that test worldwide over years. Which is both not surprising given the daily experience in the system, and yet surprising on an individual level (as many participants report in the study, and I vividly remember my own surprise when I first took an IAT tests and turned out biased in areas where I really did not expect it). And I wonder if this isn’t also an indication that things are even worse than the data shows: Would people really (accurately) self-report their biases if they are much worse than they thought? Maybe some of the people invited to participate in the study took the test and then chose to not report the results at all. Also, I would assume that there is a bias in who even voluntarily engages with a test that is designed to measure your biases — you would have to at least be open to the idea that you might have biases in the first place? But that is probably also a problem with the IAT tests in general, that despite their sad results, they are probably still underestimating the problem.

This study still make me hopeful, because there are teachers that have continued engaging with this topics for at least four years from the initial report to this publication, and because teachers in their study also show awareness of the problem, and also suggest possible solutions (all kinda well-known in the literature already — why haven’t we implemented all of them yet?). As the authors conclude: “There is a need to continue addressing the issue of gender bias within Swedish STEM higher education to avoid discriminating against female students and staff”. So let’s do it! :-)

And in other news: Today’s lunch break dip! Water is beautiful above…

…and mesmerising below…

Cold water is the best!

Månefjord, J. L., Åström, J., & Allansson, J. (2025). Mind the Gender Gap: Implicit bias in STEM education. Nordic Journal of STEM Education, 9(1), 118-132. https://doi.org/10.5324/njsteme.v9i1.5102