Lessons from the Stories of Women in Neuroscience.

Women have been contributing to the field of neuroscience since its inception, but their accomplishments are often overlooked. Lack of recognition, among other issues, has led to progressively fewer women at each academic stage; although half of neuroscience graduate students are women, women comprise less than one-third of neuroscience faculty, and even fewer full professors. Those who reach this level continue to struggle to get their work recognized. Women from historically excluded backgrounds are even more starkly underrepresented and face added challenges related to racial, ethnic, and other biases. To increase the visibility of women in neuroscience, promote their voices, and learn about their career journeys, we created Stories of Women in Neuroscience (Stories of WiN). Stories of WiN shares the scientific and personal stories of women neuroscientists with diverse backgrounds, identities, research interests, and at various career stages. From >70 women highlighted thus far, a major theme has emerged: there is not a single archetype of a woman neuroscientist, nor a single path to "success." Yet, through these diverse experiences run common threads, such as the importance of positive early research experiences, managing imposter syndrome, the necessity of work-life balance, and the challenges of fitting into-or resisting-the "scientist mold" within a patriarchal, racialized academic system. These commonalities reveal important considerations for supporting women neuroscientists. Through the lens of women highlighted by Stories of WiN, we explore the similarities among their journeys and detail specific actionable items to help encourage, support, and sustain women in neuroscience.

Comparison of discrete ratios by rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Perceiving and comparing ratios are crucial skills for humans. Little is known about whether other animals can compare ratios. We trained two rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to choose arrays that contained the greater ratio of positive to negative stimuli, regardless of the absolute number of stimuli in each of the two choice arrays. Subjects learned this task, and their performance generalized to novel ratios. Moreover, performance was modulated by the ratio between ratios; subjects responded more quickly and accurately when the ratio between ratios was higher. Control conditions ruled out the possibility that subjects were relying on surface area, although the ratio between ratios of surface area did seem to influence their choices. Our results demonstrate that rhesus monkeys can compare discrete ratios, demonstrating not only proportional reasoning ability but also the ability to reason about relations between relations.