Sir

Natasha Loder's article and the accompanying cartoon on gender discrimination (Nature 402, 337; 1999) shed little light on this vexed issue. Some people have no doubt that discrimination, sexual and otherwise, does exist in academic institutions, as it does in most other human endeavours. Others consider this merely a reasonable working hypothesis requiring clear evidence, the type of evidence that the European Technology Assessment Network report attempts to provide.

The excerpt from the report presented in the article, concerning the low proportion of women in national scientific academies, is unconvincing to anyone, male or female. It is clear that there are fewer women in the upper echelons of academic research, but there are many possible reasons. The most parsimonious of these is that the long climb up the academic ladder takes a few decades, and the present demographics in national scientific academies reflect newly trained scientists emerging 20 or 30 years ago.

If we accept that gender-based discrimination is wrong, we should at least try to examine the problem more rigorously before suggesting sexually discriminatory policies aimed at ensuring a gender balance on public bodies. If, indeed, time-lags are responsible for the gender disparities, they will disappear in due course, independently of changes in hiring and funding practices. Discrimination is the problem, not the solution.