Surprise, surprise: There's a gender gap in most academic fields, with men taking more advanced degrees in subjects like computer science and physics. A study published Thursday in Science suggests that the fields that favor men -- in both the sciences and the humanities -- have one cultural bias in common. They value perceived innate brilliance over hard work and dedication. Unfortunately, that spark of brilliance is a trait that's stereotypically assigned to white men above all others.

Researchers surveyed over 1,800 academics from 30 different disciplines and found that the value of presumed brilliance (a spark of genius in the field, if you will) was a better predictor for under-representation of women in that field than any other hypothesis tested.

In addition to giving weight to their own hypothesis, the researchers were able to knock out some popular explanations for gender gaps by comparison: That women shy away from fields that require more hours of work, that women don't make the cut in fields where only the top percentile of students are successful, and that women are less likely to choose fields that require analytical thinking than men are.

And the same held true when researchers applied the test to African-American representation, indicating that this bias for "brilliance" may keep those individuals out of such fields as well.