Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields.

科学家的身份和社会位置会影响他们的工作，但科学工作的内容也会影响科学家。来自女权主义科学研究、民族志研究、访谈和实验的理论表明，科学研究的实质可以对同事如何对待科学家以及他们在科学中的归属感产生深远的影响。我在专业文化的框架下汇集了这些不同的文献。借助对获得博士学位的调查和科学网络，我使用计算社会科学工具来论证科学家在他们的研究中撰写关于性的方式会影响未来在生命科学的 53 个子领域获得博士学位的性别比例。 47岁。具体来说，