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This report shows the main researches, the academic debates and the public policies about gender equality in science and technology in Latin America.

This paper from The International Food Policy Research Institute is an investigation about gender differences in agricultural productivity using data collected in 2005 from Nigeria and in 2003 from Uganda. Results indicate that lower productivity is persistent from female-owned plots and female-headed households, accounting for a range of socioeconomic variables, agricultural inputs, and crop choices using multivariate Tobit models. These results are robust to the inclusion of household-level unobservables. However, productivity differences depend on the type of gender indicator used, crop-specific samples, agroecological region, and inclusion of biophysical characteristics. More nuanced gender data collection and analysis in agricultural research spanning diverse regions are encouraged to identif y interventions that will increase productivity and program effectiveness for male and female farmers.

Women constitute approximately 45% of the postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences at universities and research institutions in the u S a , but a much lower percent - age of women hold faculty positions. i n the u S n ational i nstitutes of Health ( ni H; Bethesda, MD) i ntramural r esearch p rogram, for example, women make up only 29% of the tenure-track investiga - tors and hold just 19% of the tenured sen - ior investigator appointments. a similar disparity between the ratio of men and women in independent faculty positions exists in most academic institutions across the u S a ( n elson, 2005; n SF, 2004, 2006), and statistics from Europe show a similar trend of women disappearing from the higher echelons of academia (E c , 2006). t he transition from postdoctoral fellow to faculty is a period during which a wor - rying number of women leave academic research. Several recent surveys have tried to identify factors that lead to the attrition of women from the life sciences and engi - neering ( u niversity of c alifornia, 2005; p rinceton u niversity, 2003; u niversity of Michigan, 2004; Baltimore et al , 2005), but these have not addressed the important question: why are female postdoctoral fel - lows falling off the academic bandwagon in greater numbers than male postdoctoral fellows?

Gender bias and the role of sex hormones in autoim- mune diseases are well established. In specific pathogen-free nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice, females have 1.3–4.4 times higher incidence of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Germ-free (GF) mice lost the gender bias (female-to-male ratio 1.1–1.2). Gut microbiota differed in males and females, a trend reversed by male castration, confirming that androgens influence gut microbiota. Colonization of GF NOD mice with defined microbiota revealed that some, but not all, lineages overrepresented in male mice supported a gender bias in T1D. Although protection of males did not correlate with blood androgen concentration, hormone-supported expansion of selected microbial lineages may work as a positive-feedback mechanism contributing to the sexual dimorphism of autoimmune diseases. Gene-expression analysis suggested pathways involved in protection of males from T1D by microbiota. Our results favor a two- signal model of gender bias, in which hormones and microbes together trigger protective pathways.