I write mostly about neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. That means I spend most of my time talking to and writing about men.

In May of 2011 (chosen arbitrarily just because it was a year ago and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about this gender gap then), 89 percent of my phone interviews were with men.

I can think of a few reasons for this. One is that journalists typically talk to the senior leaders of labs, rather than the graduate students or postdocs who actually do the work. As you climb higher up the ladder of academic science, the male-to-female bias grows. According to the latest stats from the National Science Foundation, women earn 57 percent of all science