The strong effect of culturally defined gender roles persists in science and other traditionally male professions through the social meanings attached to gender. Rather than a fluid perspective of human attributes that can be held by members of either sex, behavioral characteristics are frequently presumed to be innate and immutably ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in the same way as one's biology.

The thesis that science is masculine, with ‘masculine’ understood as a cultural rather than as a biological term, ties issues of women in science to broader questions of gender roles and how they are culturally defined and transmitted from birth (Ruskai, 1990; Hyde, 1994). As Howell (private communication) points out, ‘Sex, which is concrete and universal, specifies no role whatsoever.’ Rather, it is cultural prescriptions and proscriptions, delineating which behaviors are appropriate to one sex and not the other, that creates the ‘psychological meaning’ of what it is to be male and female.

Thus gender as a concept was created to understand ‘the social quality of distinctions between the sexes … for the explicit purpose of creating a space in which socially mediated differences can be explored apart from biological differences’ (Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1988). However, the concepts of sex and gender become easily entwined and socialization becomes confused with biology. Taking this a step further, ' … it would be illogical to say that being male or female would, in itself, make someone a good or bad scientist.