Nobody who is familiar with the literature on this will be surprised, but it’s good to accumulate new evidence and also to keep the issue in the public eye: academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.
That’s the conclusion of a new study in PNAS by Corinne Moss-Racusin and collaborators at Yale. (Hat tip Dan Vergano.) To test scientist’s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.
Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.
This lurking bias has clear real-world implications. When asked what kind of starting salaries they might be willing to offer the applicants, the ones offered to women were lower.
I have no reason to think that scientists are more sexist than people in other professions in the US, but this is my profession, and I’d like to see it do better. Admitting that the problem exists is a good start.
ac:
“my (admittedly sexist!) bias is that women tend to be more conscientious and organized…”
Yes, that’s been my general observation too! In fact, in a bio-lab setting I’d probably prefer to hire women for precisely this reason. I’ve also observed that men generally tend to have stronger skills in the areas of algebraic manipulation and computer-programming. So for those types of jobs I’d probably prefer men. Assuming the resumes are otherwise identical, of course 😉
@Statistical Discrimination: By far the most interesting comment.
However, I can see how you and the authors of the study (or others) would end up talking past each other, as they might be working under a different assumption. You admit the possibility that there could be an overall statistical difference in the performance of men and women, whereas they might assume that cannot be the case. If they are correct, then the results of their study can be due only to (unwarranted) bias. (And yes, you do admit that possibility, and suggest that blinded applications would then be appropriate.)
@Drake,
So what you are saying is, to make up for unethical actions that may or may not have occurred in the past (the woman in question possibly getting her job based on legal threats rather than skill), you are willing to purposely choose to behave in ways that necessitate those legal protections (ie: hiring the man instead because he must have “earned” his way)?
Yep, makes sense to me.
We clearly have some way to go, although I would also be very interested in seeing whether and how these attitudes change after actual interviews with the candidates. That could indicate an even more sexist bias.
@TW,
I am a female scientist who does not ever plan on having children. I use multiple forms of contraception (birth control pills and condoms). In the incredibly unlikely event that both forms of birth control failed and I became pregnant, I would have an abortion.
Would you require me to list the intimate details of my personal life on my CV to consider hiring me?
I hope you can see the issues with your attitude. You claim to be being pragmatic by devaluing female candidates due to the chance that they may get pregnant and become less productive or leave the position as a result, but by doing so you are essentially reducing every female scientist, regardless of her ability, to a walking uterus.
@TW are you serious?!?! If two people perform the same it doesn’t make any difference in the job they’re doing. If one is working below their capability and one at the top of their capability, what does it matter if they get the same results? I see more problems with the candidate who is lazy as he/she is clearly not interested in personal growth no matter what their potential. I think laziness is a far greater handicap than a uterus. I knew plenty of lazy boys at university that were ‘naturally smart’ but utterly lazy. Not a one of them graduated and I would never hire them as they lack the drive to work. Just for clarity, I have known my fair share of females like this too, and wouldn’t hire them either.
Unfortunately I do see your point with pregnancy, but most women I have worked with in this community have taken minimal time off work and shared maternity leave with their partners, so the men take almost as much time off as they do. Me and my boyfriend are both finishing off PhDs in physics and have agreed to share maternity leave (when the day comes) as much as possible as we have similar aspirations. I would expect both of us to be considered equal for any job.
@cory and others, you’re doing a great job with your comments. All power to you.
@TW The law (in Australia, and I suspect in a lot of other places) does not forbid open discussion. Why do you say it does? In fact, the law requires that an employer makes reasonable adjustments to avoid discrimination on the basis of gender, race, disability, etc. Making such reasonable adjustments would usually require discussion with the affected people.
@Drake You’re comment about legal threats is illogical, and defies the evidence in the cited paper. This paper would suggest (if you were going to assume anything) that Bob got his previous positions because he was male, while Fiona got her previous positions against the odds. Therefore, Fiona will have “earned” her way, as you put it, to a greater degree than Bob. For your comment to have any weight, we would need evidence that “legal threats” give women an unfair advantage. But I doubt such evidence exists.
@cory
My life is actually much more pleasant if I hire and retain the best people possible, so I’m always selfishly going to strive to hire the best, based on the info available to me. If I have the luxury of being able to conduct detailed 1 on 1 interviews with every plausible candidate, then that’s wonderful. If, as is more likely, I have a pile of 200 plausible applications, all boasting their rather homogeneous achievements to the max, then I have to whittle that pile down with quick, efficient choices. So yes, a nerdy white guy, with no affirmative action protection and no obvious powerful friends greasing his way, is more likely to make that first cut than someone with ostensibly identical qualifications but who I suspect has had other “factors” helping them in previous applications, whether social connections or legal statutes.
Even more importantly, if I’m wrong and he turns out to be a disastrous hire, I’ll be able to fire him without having to worry about being hit by some fake discrimination lawsuit. Have you ever tried firing a lazy, dishonest, incompetent? It’s a real pain. How about one that also happens to be pregnant? Now, that’s basically impossible.
Think of it this way. At least the trolls have moved on from “there is no discrimination” to “discrimination is rationally justified.” Progress!
This is what is so grossly wrong with all academic research. Somewhere down the line the bias to prove my hypothesis makes me do all kinds of manipulations. This is more like political lobbying or my marketing exec trying to get his idea to work rather than anything else. Four irresponsible made bar graphs can lead to the conclusion? I am inclined to think the conclusion is correct, however the graphs do nothing, absolutely nothing to prove it.
@Surya
The result reported here agrees with lots of similar results previously. Change only the name of the person on a resume, and you can change the assessment of that person. Some of the research is summarized in this brochure…
http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/BiasBrochure_2ndEd.pdf
“So yes, a nerdy white guy, with no affirmative action protection and no obvious powerful friends greasing his way, is more likely to make that first cut than someone with ostensibly identical qualifications but who I suspect has had other “factors” helping them in previous applications.”
Drake Sullivan, you are the *reason* for affirmative action – because you are making the (erroneous) judgement that the white guy must neccessarily be better. In other words, you are making decisions based on racist and sexist logic (I’m sure that you, personally, do not consider yourself racist or sexist, and have friends of many different races and at least one other gender who you treat equally etc etc). If you are consciously admitting to yourself and others that you assume that, all things equal, the white man is necessarily better than other candidates (the reverse is likely to be true, in fact, owing to people with your mindset being in positions of power), then you are making racist and sexist decisions.
@Michael
“…we would need evidence that “legal threats” give women an unfair advantage…”
Well, every successful sex discrimination lawsuit clearly comes from one of two things: either (A) a real example of sex discrimination that was justly reversed, or (B) a fake claim of sex discrimination that unjustly prevailed. Unless you believe in the omniscience of (say) the US legal system, you presumably acknowledge that (B) at least sometimes occurs. Since there are basically zero sex-discrimination lawsuits brought by males, I believe this is an existence proof. QED.
As one measure of this, I know examples of women being denied tenure who sued based on sex-discrimination and had the decision reversed. I personally can not think of any examples of men having an unfavorable tenure decision reversed for any reason whatsoever. (Can you?) Were all these reversals justified? It certainly didn’t look that way from where I sat.
But the influence of legal threats is far greater than can be measured by the number of lawsuits that are actually filed. Almost no sane person wants to go through the cost and uncertainty of litigation. Often they settle out of court after a nasty letter from a lawyer, and they strive to avoid anything that might even expose them to it in the first place. These effects are unreported.
This kind of ideologically-driven research must be DISMANTLED and DISCREDITED. As scientists you should study issues like this scientifically, and not allow yourselves to be bullied by ideologues who seek to impose “diversity” by force. You of all people need to FIGHT the leftist takeover of American academia, FIGHT for freedom from intellectual Stalinism, not become its stooges! Universities today are becoming little more than leftist indoctrination centers; the hard sciences are the one place they haven’t penetrated, but you’re next on their agenda!
Wake up! This is not about constructive research or scholarship, it’s about POWER! Stalinism has come to America through our once-liberal academic institutions. Scientists, don’t allow Stalinists to control the narrative and control your minds!
@Sean
I’m genuinely confused. What exactly is the definition of a troll please?
@Statistical discrimination:
Definitely the most interesting comment.
It’s a shame the rest of the discussion has completely ignored it.
As many people have said, if women are both (a) as good on average as men and (b) consistently underrated, then someone should just start a lab with an all-female policy and produce more citations/research excellence per unit funding. Why has this not happened?
Regarding figure 2, although that conversation seems to have been left behind:
The assertion by #8 and #9 is that the y-axis is misleading. I agree that the y-axis beginning at 0 would constitute a great improvement. However, the figure could be made equally clear and honest, albeit with a different emphasis, by plotting with points instead of bars and preventing the axes from physically meeting (which implies an origin, at which y=0), while leaving the scale intact.
There are a variety of ways to show data correctly, even though there are vastly more ways to do so incorrectly.
@Siobhan:
“you are making the (erroneous) judgement that the white guy must neccessarily be better…”
No, no, no, not at all. I’m simply saying that in my experience, with identical resumes, he’s *probably* better. Perhaps about 70 percent of the time. It’s just statistics. But when you’ve got a huge pile of applications and insufficient time and resources, you need to use statistics. That’s what it’s for. I make many statistical cuts, based on schools, GPA’s, outside projects, etc. etc., and this wouldn’t even be a particularly important one. But it would be there.
@Statistical Discrimination @TW etc:
The giant factor you’re missing is that the discrimination you advocate has long-lasting, far-reaching, self-perpetuating effects. If you don’t give jobs to qualified women, people’s biases about about female scientists will be strengthened; there will be fewer female role models for young, qualified women; etc. This is very much a two-way street, where reality and perception reinforce each other.
There are tons of examples of gender [and race, religion, etc.] stereotypes that seemed to accurately describe biological differences but were then showed to be purely effects of widespread bias. Women were thought to be too emotional to vote reasonably; if you keep telling them they’re too emotional, and keep them from getting informed, it kinda becomes true.
By discouraging promising young female scientists, we not only hurt the women themselves but impede science as a whole: they could be doing a lot of good research if we encourage them to participate. It would be a shame to continue to waste all that human capital by leaving lots of subtle obstacles in their way.
Sean – The problem discussed in this post is exactly why you were (I think) mistaken to say in the recent discussion of atheism on The Point, when the scarcity of visible women was the subject, that the goal is equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.
That sounds good, but the reality is that equality of opportunity breaks down if hidden biases are at work.
I would be relieved if the only thing that causes this change in evaluation were “she might get pregnant,” because at least that can be addressed with proper maternity/paternity leave, etc. (one would hope). My fear is that this is more pervasive, that people actually believe women are less capable.
Honestly, as a women with a newly-minted PhD, I’m already exhausted. I don’t want to deal with this. Funding is so tight, and knowing that these same attitudes will be looming over my grant proposals… Ugh.
By TW’s logic, it’s not rational to hire men. Men get prostate cancer, women don’t, and when someone gets prostate cancer they can’t do the job as well as someone who doesn’t have prostate cancer.
Sorry, guys. It’s just biology. Sucks to be you, but it’s not my problem. Life’s unfair.
As a woman and a scientist, I’m very disappointed to hear so many of my male colleagues imply that only women should be punished, career-wise, for procreating (or even just having the presumed biological capacity to do so!)
Kris, there’s a very famous example in the sciences of women being hired partly because the pay differential allowed for a larger workforce at the same price:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
I would like to both make a joke and a serious comment.
1.)
Veronica Corningstone: Mr. Burgundy, I am a professional and I would like to be able to do my job.
Ron Burgundy: Crack a wank!
Veronica Corningstone: Mr. Burgundy, you are acting like a baby.
Ron Burgundy: I’m not a baby, I’m a man! I am an anchorman!
Veronica Corningstone: You are not a man. You are a big fat joke!
Ron Burgundy: I’m a man who discovered the wheel, and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn! That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of ours. It’s science.
2.) seriously though. This is the result of thousands of years of cultural conditioning across the globe. It’s getting better for women, but it’s going to take a slight bit longer for it to be 100% equal between the sexes. It starts with “girls are princesses and boys like to play in the mud” and ends with inequality. Until all the old school Ron Burgundys out there die off or are fired for it, then everyone has to unfortunately deal with it or put up a fight to get rid of them. And the fact that we are getting most of our STEM majors from H1b visas (India & Asia specifically where women are not nearly considered anywhere near as equal to a man) means it’s not going to be easy ladies.