Monthly Archives: October 2016

Ads in New Scientist


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The 1st October edition of New Scientist included, as usual, various job adverts or adverts for New Scientist itself. Where these ads included a picture of people I have reproduced these pictures below. All such pictures are included. I have left none out.  (Click to enlarge).

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DoE Ad for physics teaching

The last one has been run almost every week for many months. The previous issue of New Scientist (24th September 2016) included some of the same ads. The totality of pictures of people from other ads were as follows,

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and one which, shock horror, included a man – this one,

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This concentration on girls, to the exclusion of boys, is, of course, justified because girls are under-represented in STEMM subjects.

Err…really?

But the 2015 Higher Education entrance data show that women outnumber men in STEMM by 8% (STEMM = science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine).

And, of course, in everything else, women outnumber men by a far greater percentage, women now gaining 35% more degrees per year than men.

So, what, exactly, is the excuse for the flagrant gender bias of these New Scientist ads? There isn’t one. In UK universities now…

  • There are four-and-a-half times as many women studying psychology as men.
  • In pre-clinical veterinary medicine, women outnumber men four-to-one.
  • In law, there are now twice as many female students as male students.
  • In languages and cultural studies there are approaching three times as many women students as men.
  • In Teaching & Education there are nearly six times as many women as men.
  • The most extreme case is nursing, where there are nearly ten times as many women as men.
  • But even excluding nursing, there are twice as many women as men studying medical and dental sciences.
  • Women even outnumber men in Agriculture (1.4 to 1).

So I leave you (or rather those responsible for placing these ads) with the following thought – taken again from the same edition of New Scientist,

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