Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research which sh

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问题     Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research which showed that senior women professors in the institute’s school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study conducted in Sweden, of all places—showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men in order to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities.
    Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia’ s school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year’s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around £ 1,500 a year.
    That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men’s and women’s lives mean the gap is caused by something else: women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over £4,000 a year more than female ones.
    To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination.
    Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect—namely that at all stages of a woman’s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1. 04 and 2. 45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair.
    Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Different from the previous studies, Dr. Connolly’s compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts , than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. In other words, private enterprise delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.
The phrase "crop up" in the first paragraph most probably means

选项 A、thrive.
B、plant.
C、elevate.
D、happen.

答案D

解析 本题是一道词汇题,考查考生的词汇辨析和理解能力。本文第一段第二句中的“crop up”,其含义是“发生,出现”,是一个固定用法。因此可以得出本题的正确答案应该是D。此外,本题也可以从上下文中推断出正确答案,前文讲的是马萨诸塞州一个机构内部的关于男女科学家待遇不同的研究,下文讲的是瑞典的一个类似的研究,女科学家受到歧视的事情在别的地方也有发生,因此我们可以得出“crop up”应该是发生的意思。故选D。
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