Who earns more, and why: two new studies test the academic gender gap
A PNAS study returns to one of the most-debated numbers in higher education and finds that productivity, not discrimination, does most of the explanatory work, while a separate German-led project shows how colonies of bees solve their own labour puzzle without anyone in charge.
On a different desk in the same journal week: a separate study from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the universities of Cologne and Frankfurt/Main shows how bee colonies divide labour without any central planner. The researchers tracked which tasks individual bees performed and read out the neural activity underlying the choice. The model that emerges is striking in its ordinariness: each bee reacts to local cues, what is needed nearby, what its body is wired for, and the colony-level pattern falls out for free. It is a useful counter-image to the PNAS finding. Insect nervous systems, working with far less information than a hiring committee, produce a division of labour that no one could call inequitable. The cost is they have no-one to sue.