PI will study reports on women's participation in scientific fields, and develop a set of criteria for evaluating existing data bases on this topic. Although the literature contains numerous reports on people involved in science, reports dealing specifically with women in these fields are scattered and vary widely in the purposes of the report, the samples included, data reported, reliability of facts, and quality of inferences made from the data. This project will assess the state of the litera- ture, identifying ways to find existing data, and presenting ways to determine quality and generality of information contained in them. The outcome of this project will be a rating instrument usable by the PI and other investigators to judge the usefulness of existing data bases on women in science.
