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Organizers of a survey of early-career scientists in the UK say they are shocked by the picture it paints of gender bias in British science. Women principal investigators (PIs) who have started their own lab in recent years are paid thousands of pounds a year less than men at the same stage of their career, the results show.
“There’s simply no excuse for that difference in starting salaries at this level. We’re all coming in on the same types of fellowships and the same types of lectureships,” says Sophie Acton, a molecular biologist at University College London who helped to run the survey. “When you take a snapshot of people at the same level and find such a difference it’s shocking.”
Acton and her colleagues collected responses from 365 PIs who started labs at UK universities between 2012 and 2018. Most worked in the life sciences ...
