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Study: Women Twice as Likely to be Hired in STEM Tenure-Track Positions
- tomp 11y agoDespite the title, the first sentence asserts > Researchers in a recent study found no sexism in STEM faculty positions as more women are now hired for STEM tenure-track jobs at a 2:1 ratio. So I'm not exactly sure how to interpret this (nevertheless interesting) result.
- coldtea 11y ago>found no sexism in STEM faculty positions as more women are now hired for STEM tenure-track jobs at a 2:1 ratio. It's only sexism if it benefits men.
- Rangi42 11y agoPresumably the article's author is so used to "sexism" meaning "women are under-represented" that they don't realize "men are under-represented" is equally sexist. Not that under-representation is necessarily evidence of bias, which is what the word "sexism" implies. The study's authors, Ceci and Williams, are aware of this: > This led to their conclusion that gender bias did not cause the small number of women in STEM fields. They said the small representation of women in the sector was caused by their own reluctance to enter these fields.
- tomp 11y agoI don't think under/over-representation is necessarily sexism; typical "correlation does not imply correlation". My point was that the first statement ("no sexism") was in direct contradiction to "Women Twice as Likely to be Hired Over Equally-Qualified Men". Of course, even that is not necessarily sexism; it could simply be that women are/expect to be paid less than equally-qualified/capable men, so it's a no-brainer to hire only women.
- duaneb 11y agoPresumably they mean discrimination against women, which has been the predominant form of sexism. It's not even clear this is firmly sexism, it could be effects from 20 years ago trickling up to today. Our current educational pipeline is long and involves literally thousands of people making their own decisions about how to teach you.
- clarkevans 11y agoI believe that PhD graduation in STEM is close to 50/50% now, yet, female tenured faculty in STEM is closer to 20-30%. If an organization wishes to have an equal gender representation in its faculty, wouldn't a short term hiring preference be a reasonable thing to do? There is certainly no lack of qualified candidates these days. Even so, there's another aspect here -- service. Women are disproportionally assigned service roles in academic departments (men eschew such assignments if they can). Hence, existing male staff may prefer to tenure female colleagues to reduce their own future service burden. Sexism (in this conversation meaning male preferential treatment) is still quite an issue in academia. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/new_study_finds_unequal_distribution_by_gender_in_academic_service_work https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/new_study_fin...
- supdog 11y agoIs it common in academia for sexism to be defined as male preferential treatment?
- clarkevans 11y agoIn a male dominated field, no. In a female dominated field, such as nursing or primary education, sexism to many has the opposite meaning. For example, there is lots of sexism regarding "house-husbands". I have a charming gentleman who babysits my daughter, he was very worried about sexism, and, well, for good reason.
- duaneb 11y agoI disagree about the men eschewing service roles, I haven't seen any clear gender line opinions about them. This strikes me as delving dangerously far into assigning motives to a group of people when looking at symptoms.
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- clarkevans 11y ago
- danharaj 11y agoSomewhat old article; one study not corroborated by other studies. Interesting, but only as a single observation in a corpus of observations.
- throwaway13337 11y agoAre there other studies that deal with this specifically? I don't doubt you're right - it seems reproducibility is tough these days - but a link would be nice.
- danharaj 11y agoHere's one off the top of my head: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract#aff-1 http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract#aff-1 Abstract: Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.
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- brerlapn 11y agoSlateStarCodex had an essay in April that examined this study pretty carefully: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-the-hallway/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-th... He looks at some odd experimental choices in the study, and goes into some depth about other contradictory studies. I thought it was a pretty balanced and thorough analysis.
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- dang 11y agoA dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481. We're thinking about building software for users to link posts like this together. It would be especially helpful where the story is the same, but the articles are different, as here.