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The study shows that the gender bias at the point of tenure approval is the opposite of what is claimed by some interest groups. That doesn't prove that gender
by Veen 9y ago
The study shows that the gender bias at the point of tenure approval is the opposite of what is claimed by some interest groups. That doesn't prove that gender bias isn't a factor in the number of women in STEM fields.
Some fields are majority male, and some fields are majority female. There are two possible causes: that women and men have, on average, different preferences, or that there is a bias problem earlier in the process than the point at which tenure is considered.
There is evidence that men and women do have different preferences and so we'd expect to see a gender imbalance in some fields. But we should still try to ensure that anyone with the ability and the inclination is able to enter the career path of their choice — that means schools, families, and the media not discouraging girls and boys from entering "non-typical" fields, something these studies don't address.
They do, however, show that the way many ideologically motivated individuals go about achieving their aim of gender balance is based on misconceptions about the world and is therefore likely to be counter-productive.
- tictacttoe 9y agoSTEM positions have a long pipeline with appreciable attrition along the way. Any losses upstream propagate down stream so it's somewhat obvious that we'd have less women in physics national lab positions if we have less women studying physics in general. People need to address the issue at each stage of the pipeline. I would argue that early stage imbalances are even more important than late stage imbalances (post-graduate) because upstream imbalances necessarily propagate downstream but not vice versa.