Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.

As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.

The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.

“I think we were all just a little bit surprised at how powerful the results were — that not only do the faculty in biology, chemistry and physics express these biases quite clearly, but the significance and strength of the results was really quite striking,” said Jo Handelsman, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale.

Dr. Handelsman was the senior author of an article reporting the findings, published online on Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I believe that we simply can’t have a setting where the teachers’ unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids.

There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom,” she writes in Teach Your Children Well. “Take a room full of five-year-olds and you will see creativity in all its forms positively flowing around the room. A decade later you will see these same children passively sitting at their desks, half asleep or trying to decipher what will be on the next test.

One of the many reasons I’m voting for Obama this November is for his commitment to making higher education more affordable. The president understands this issue on a personal level. When he and Michelle Obama were first married, they had a combined $120,000 of student loan debt. (Not as much as my husband and me, but still.) More importantly, his student loan reforms greatly increase federal funding for Pell Grants, which are given on a needs basis to low-income undergraduate students to pay for college. Legislation in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act invests in community colleges, eliminates subsidies charged to the federal government by private lenders like Sallie Mae and Citibank acting as student loan middlemen, spends billions of dollars saved by that action on Pell Grants, extends support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority Serving Institutions like City College, and helps many student borrowers manage their debt by making loan repayments proportionate to their incomes.