5 ms·

Discrimination starts even before grad school, study finds

42 points by nkrumm 12y ago

nkrumm 12y ago
For those interested in what the text of the email was, from the study [1]: ----- Subject Line: Prospective Doctoral Student (On Campus Today/[Next Monday]) Dear Professor [Surname of Professor Inserted Here], I am writing you because I am a prospective doctoral student with considerable interest in your research. My plan is to apply to doctoral programs this coming fall, and I am eager to learn as much as I can about research opportunities in the meantime. I will be on campus today/[next Monday], and although I know it is short notice, I was wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research. Any time that would be convenient for you would be fine with me, as meeting with you is my first priority during this campus visit. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Sincerely, [Student’s Full Name Inserted Here] [1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- danieltillett 12y ago
  This email lacks any personalisation and looks exactly like spam to me. I am wondering if the study should have been entitled "Generic emails containing minority names are classified as spam at higher frequencies."
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    That problem is difficult to solve for a controlled experiment; as soon as you personalize the messages then two outreaches to two professors become incomparable to each other.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      This is true, but as a former professor if I got an email from a possible candidate requesting to meet with me that did not show that they had at least bother to investigate my research area I would tend to ignore them. If you don't personalise your email mails then they really do look like spam. The way to solve this study would be to do a delayed crossover. I would send the same personalised email (just changing the name), but send them 3 months apart. No professor is going to notice the two emails were identical after this length of time.
    - emiliobumachar 12y ago
      I disagree. You could write personalized letters to each of thousands of professors, as long as each contained a slot for the student's name. If you then randomly assign the different student names to the letters, you still have a perfectly valid controlled experiment. No need to compare two outreaches to each other. Being said that, the study as it is is already very solid proof of discrimination. So what that the email looks spammy? If it looks just as spammy from each and every group, and not every group is equally rejected, that's textbook discrimination.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Those personalized letters won't be comparable unless they are so generic that they're still spam. After randomizing which name goes to which letter, you're stuck with an infinite number of dimensions of variation, where one dimension is the ethnicity of the name signed at the bottom of the letter, and the other infinity represent the "quality" of the personalized letters. You won't be able to conclude anything about the influence of the name.
        emiliobumachar 12y ago
        I still disagree. If there are only two letters, than, sure, the relative quality of them will dwarf the influence of the name. But if there are thousands of letters, assigned randomly, the Law of Large Numbers does its magic. No name gets assigned significantly lower or significantly higher quality letters than the average. (something like that could happen, but the odds are small enough to be ignored). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
  - emiliobumachar 12y ago
    Very interesting hypothesis. If it's true, I'm not sure if it makes it better or worse. Are we unintentionally programming our computers to automatically filter out messages from minorities? Talk about dystopia...
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    What kind of spam says 'I want to meet you in real life today/Monday' ? I would guess dating sites, but there's no URL whatsoever in the email and those professors have a lot of experience with a lot of real emails that follow the format.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      >What kind of spam says 'I want to meet you in real life today/Monday'? Student spam :) Actually I used to get around a dozen of these emails a week from potential "students" wanting to study with me. What these people seem to be doing is sending the same email to every professor in the department (could be the whole university for all I know). They seem to be scraping the emails either from the department websites or getting them out of the corresponding author detail of my published papers. If I was not too busy I would send back a reply asking why they wanted to work with me. I have to say that I go very few coherent replies. Advice. If you actually want to study under a particular professor spend the time to actually learn about their research. Ask them intelligent questions that show that you have read their papers. If you show that you are bright and keen and have decided that this is the area you want to work in then the professor will be much, much more willing to meet with you.
alexeisadeski3 12y ago
What's the relative proportion of men in prison to women?
- Anechoic 12y ago
  If there are more men then women in prison, it can only be because men commit more crime, right?
  - tsotha 12y ago
    Women get laughably light prison sentences compared to men.
    - Mangalor 12y ago
      Here we go...
pervycreeper 12y ago
Peculiar why women were bunched together with minorities. I wonder how the results would look if they were decoupled. I also wonder what their reasoning was in attributing the small effect linking different names to differing response rates to 'implicit bias' was.
- alexeisadeski3 12y ago
  Maintain unity within the political coalition.
- pcurve 12y ago
  The study does break it down further, and the result actually made feel ill. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code488996.pdf?abstractid=2063742&mirid=1 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code... Go to Page 55+ Things aren't so bad if you're white female. If you're hispanic female, you even enjoy advantages in field of science. But the numbers for Chinese and Indian (both genders) look absolutely atrocious. I'm seeing on average 30 percentage point difference, but as much as 60%+ in some fields. This is just disturbing.
  - monochr 12y ago
    Have you had to deal with the number of Indian or Chinese students trying to push into a program they have no place being in? I get it's the poverty back home that makes them desperate and nothing to do with race, but the one time my former department accepted a Chinese student from mainland China it was a disaster, he was rude, hardly spoke English, his credentials were most likely fake and made the whole thing incredibly unpleasant to everyone with how pushy he was. Needless to say he was kicked out after a year because he kept failing his classes. This isn't racism, this is people not wanting to be scammed.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Isn't biased stereotyping exactly what racism is though? A few bad apples can spoil it for everyone else? "Hey watch the black guy, I was mugged by once...", if you find that sickening, this is quite similar to that.
gojomo 12y ago
EDIT: With regard to what I pointed out in my original comment (below for reference), I believe the Nature article chart is in error. Reading the actual paper (p.55), the gap in "engineering and computer sciences" (while smaller than some other fields) is actually more statistically significant than some of the other results. I suppose that may be because they were able to trial more professors. I guess that means, be careful trusting charts, even from Nature's blog. The smaller gap may still count for something compared to a few worse fields, but it's not among the statistically-unclear results of the fields studied. --original below-- From the graph, "engineering and computer sciences" was one of the smallest measured gaps, and further didn't feature the "*" which indicated a statistically-significant result. So in all the often-justified criticism, the fact that CS/engineering are better than many other fields-of-practice should count for something. (Interestingly also per the chart, in 'Fine Arts' the faculty discrimination ran in favor of women/minorities, to a statistically-significant level.)
- tomp 12y ago
  Why does it matter if one result is more or less statistically significant than another, assuming that they are both sufficiently significant?! (Note: I don't think that 5% or 1% chance of error is sufficiently statistically significant, but I'm a mathematician/programmer, and I know that most social studies researchers disagree.)
mjfl 12y ago
some of the differences aren't statistically significant?
- blahzay 12y ago
  Same thing I'm wondering. Would've been trivial to add error bars to this figure.
midas007 12y ago
I worked at a dept with ~2.5% acceptance rate. There were two, subtle factors in play: soft ageism and PI's hiring their clones (in thought, gender and race). So the dept gravitated to predominantly two minorities, at least in terms of staff, faculty, visiting researchers and grad students.
TTPrograms 12y ago
In the main plot in the paper they plot the absolute differences in response rates as opposed to plotting relative differences. 90% vs 80% for a given department seems drastically different from 5% vs 15%, but those would get equal value bars. I also tend to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the phrase "reverse-discrimination" as it evokes the "you can't be sexist against men!" etc. type of ideas. This sort of feeling is enhanced by the splitting of the data set into white males and non-white/non-males for significant parts of the analysis. It's interesting that they didn't find that percentage minorities or women on faculty had significant impact on response rates (with the exception of small results for asian-asian support). That seems to suggest that any discriminatory tendency is fairly uniform across individuals, reinforcing that policy changes to reduced discrimination must be collective effort. Otherwise this seems like a good experiment and a good paper. The email thing just seems really clean and a realistic depicter of reality. Let's see if there are any significant changes after peer review, I suppose.
tzs 12y ago
> Most would acknowledge that women and minorities already face more hurdles in academia than their white, male peers. A lack of mentors, occasionally overt discrimination and the academy’s poor work-life balance, are well-documented issues. OK, I'm stumped. I can't figure out how poor work-life balance is more of a hurdle for women and minorities than for white males. Anyone know?
- wfjackson 12y ago
  That part wasn't intended for minorities. As for women, they need a lot of time off for pregnancies and typically want/need to spend more time with kids. Also, they have a biological clock for fertility unlike men, so it's more important for them to have time to socialize to find a partner unlike men who can procreate well into their nineties.
- scottfr 12y ago
  "poor work-life balance" is a greater issue for women than men due to childbirth and general fact that childcare and elder care burdens generally fall primarily on the woman in a couple. "lack of mentors" and "occasionally over discrimination" affect both women and minorities more than white males.
  - analog31 12y ago
    I suspect elder / disabled care may be an issue for minorities too, of both sexes, if they come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  Women tend to choose professions with better work-life balance more often than men. Not sure this holds for minorities (the stereotype is actually that immigrants work extra hard, but I have no specific data). The author of the article likely believes that women and minorities are united by facing oppression or discrimination, and consequently groups them together as a single category. This cavalier approach to analysis also enables them to appropriate the oppression of certain groups for the others.
btoptical 12y ago
When I was a physics undergrad all 12 physics majors in my graduating class were given a "talk" by a senior white faculty member about the "realities" of the physics pyramid. Basically we were told that our Chinese competitors made much better grad students and we should basically not bother applying to grad school because we couldn't compete against the "better" Chinese.
- Balgair 12y ago
  Really?!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- WWLink 12y ago
  In grade school at least one of my teachers made a comment along the lines of this. For a little backstory, my town was roughly 30% white, 25% asian, 25% black, the rest spanish or other races. Shoot I'll go one further. When I was in 5th grade I offered to help get their huge donation of 486s ready for use (installing windows on them and the like). Most of the teachers didn't know how to use computers at the time, and they were happy with my work so they tasked me to fix/maintain all of them after class. That was pretty cool! I picked a filipino classmate to help out, and one day at honor roll ceremony the principal accidentally introduced him as the computer guy and me as the assistant -_-. A physics teacher pulled that stunt once too at my community college. He told us the only people that would get As in his class were "real Asians. Not white guys that think they're Asian." He regularly made borderline racist and sexist comments though. The reality is (at least in my experience) that no one race or gender is better at science subjects, engineering, or math. Most people in those subjects work their butts off to get where they are. The part I dislike is when someone stumbles, there's a lot of pressure on them to quit when there should be encouragement to try again. Sometimes things can be like pounding out a sword on an anvil, it doesn't happen instantly. Instead it looks like there's always encouragement to kick people out and discourage people from studying a subject.
glbrew 12y ago
No shit?
alexeisadeski3 12y ago
How many American women receive selective service notification? https://www.sss.gov/ https://www.sss.gov/

42 points by nkrumm 12y ago

For those interested in what the text of the email was, from the study [1]: ----- Subject Line: Prospective Doctoral Student (On Campus Today/[Next Monday]) Dear Professor [Surname of Professor Inserted Here], I am writing you because I am a prospective doctoral student with considerable interest in your research. My plan is to apply to doctoral programs this coming fall, and I am eager to learn as much as I can about research opportunities in the meantime. I will be on campus today/[next Monday], and although I know it is short notice, I was wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research. Any time that would be convenient for you would be fine with me, as meeting with you is my first priority during this campus visit. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Sincerely, [Student’s Full Name Inserted Here] [1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
danieltillett 12y ago
This email lacks any personalisation and looks exactly like spam to me. I am wondering if the study should have been entitled "Generic emails containing minority names are classified as spam at higher frequencies."
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  That problem is difficult to solve for a controlled experiment; as soon as you personalize the messages then two outreaches to two professors become incomparable to each other.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    This is true, but as a former professor if I got an email from a possible candidate requesting to meet with me that did not show that they had at least bother to investigate my research area I would tend to ignore them. If you don't personalise your email mails then they really do look like spam. The way to solve this study would be to do a delayed crossover. I would send the same personalised email (just changing the name), but send them 3 months apart. No professor is going to notice the two emails were identical after this length of time.
  - emiliobumachar 12y ago
    I disagree. You could write personalized letters to each of thousands of professors, as long as each contained a slot for the student's name. If you then randomly assign the different student names to the letters, you still have a perfectly valid controlled experiment. No need to compare two outreaches to each other. Being said that, the study as it is is already very solid proof of discrimination. So what that the email looks spammy? If it looks just as spammy from each and every group, and not every group is equally rejected, that's textbook discrimination.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Those personalized letters won't be comparable unless they are so generic that they're still spam. After randomizing which name goes to which letter, you're stuck with an infinite number of dimensions of variation, where one dimension is the ethnicity of the name signed at the bottom of the letter, and the other infinity represent the "quality" of the personalized letters. You won't be able to conclude anything about the influence of the name.
      - emiliobumachar 12y ago
        I still disagree. If there are only two letters, than, sure, the relative quality of them will dwarf the influence of the name. But if there are thousands of letters, assigned randomly, the Law of Large Numbers does its magic. No name gets assigned significantly lower or significantly higher quality letters than the average. (something like that could happen, but the odds are small enough to be ignored). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
- emiliobumachar 12y ago
  Very interesting hypothesis. If it's true, I'm not sure if it makes it better or worse. Are we unintentionally programming our computers to automatically filter out messages from minorities? Talk about dystopia...
- wfjackson 12y ago
  What kind of spam says 'I want to meet you in real life today/Monday' ? I would guess dating sites, but there's no URL whatsoever in the email and those professors have a lot of experience with a lot of real emails that follow the format.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    >What kind of spam says 'I want to meet you in real life today/Monday'? Student spam :) Actually I used to get around a dozen of these emails a week from potential "students" wanting to study with me. What these people seem to be doing is sending the same email to every professor in the department (could be the whole university for all I know). They seem to be scraping the emails either from the department websites or getting them out of the corresponding author detail of my published papers. If I was not too busy I would send back a reply asking why they wanted to work with me. I have to say that I go very few coherent replies. Advice. If you actually want to study under a particular professor spend the time to actually learn about their research. Ask them intelligent questions that show that you have read their papers. If you show that you are bright and keen and have decided that this is the area you want to work in then the professor will be much, much more willing to meet with you.

alexeisadeski3 12y ago

What's the relative proportion of men in prison to women?

Anechoic 12y ago
If there are more men then women in prison, it can only be because men commit more crime, right?
- tsotha 12y ago
  Women get laughably light prison sentences compared to men.
  - Mangalor 12y ago
    Here we go...

pervycreeper 12y ago

Peculiar why women were bunched together with minorities. I wonder how the results would look if they were decoupled. I also wonder what their reasoning was in attributing the small effect linking different names to differing response rates to 'implicit bias' was.

alexeisadeski3 12y ago
Maintain unity within the political coalition.
pcurve 12y ago
The study does break it down further, and the result actually made feel ill. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code488996.pdf?abstractid=2063742&mirid=1 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code... Go to Page 55+ Things aren't so bad if you're white female. If you're hispanic female, you even enjoy advantages in field of science. But the numbers for Chinese and Indian (both genders) look absolutely atrocious. I'm seeing on average 30 percentage point difference, but as much as 60%+ in some fields. This is just disturbing.
- monochr 12y ago
  Have you had to deal with the number of Indian or Chinese students trying to push into a program they have no place being in? I get it's the poverty back home that makes them desperate and nothing to do with race, but the one time my former department accepted a Chinese student from mainland China it was a disaster, he was rude, hardly spoke English, his credentials were most likely fake and made the whole thing incredibly unpleasant to everyone with how pushy he was. Needless to say he was kicked out after a year because he kept failing his classes. This isn't racism, this is people not wanting to be scammed.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Isn't biased stereotyping exactly what racism is though? A few bad apples can spoil it for everyone else? "Hey watch the black guy, I was mugged by once...", if you find that sickening, this is quite similar to that.

gojomo 12y ago

EDIT: With regard to what I pointed out in my original comment (below for reference), I believe the Nature article chart is in error. Reading the actual paper (p.55), the gap in "engineering and computer sciences" (while smaller than some other fields) is actually more statistically significant than some of the other results. I suppose that may be because they were able to trial more professors. I guess that means, be careful trusting charts, even from Nature's blog. The smaller gap may still count for something compared to a few worse fields, but it's not among the statistically-unclear results of the fields studied. --original below-- From the graph, "engineering and computer sciences" was one of the smallest measured gaps, and further didn't feature the "*" which indicated a statistically-significant result. So in all the often-justified criticism, the fact that CS/engineering are better than many other fields-of-practice should count for something. (Interestingly also per the chart, in 'Fine Arts' the faculty discrimination ran in favor of women/minorities, to a statistically-significant level.)

tomp 12y ago
Why does it matter if one result is more or less statistically significant than another, assuming that they are both sufficiently significant?! (Note: I don't think that 5% or 1% chance of error is sufficiently statistically significant, but I'm a mathematician/programmer, and I know that most social studies researchers disagree.)

mjfl 12y ago

some of the differences aren't statistically significant?

blahzay 12y ago
Same thing I'm wondering. Would've been trivial to add error bars to this figure.

midas007 12y ago

I worked at a dept with ~2.5% acceptance rate. There were two, subtle factors in play: soft ageism and PI's hiring their clones (in thought, gender and race). So the dept gravitated to predominantly two minorities, at least in terms of staff, faculty, visiting researchers and grad students.

TTPrograms 12y ago

In the main plot in the paper they plot the absolute differences in response rates as opposed to plotting relative differences. 90% vs 80% for a given department seems drastically different from 5% vs 15%, but those would get equal value bars. I also tend to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the phrase "reverse-discrimination" as it evokes the "you can't be sexist against men!" etc. type of ideas. This sort of feeling is enhanced by the splitting of the data set into white males and non-white/non-males for significant parts of the analysis. It's interesting that they didn't find that percentage minorities or women on faculty had significant impact on response rates (with the exception of small results for asian-asian support). That seems to suggest that any discriminatory tendency is fairly uniform across individuals, reinforcing that policy changes to reduced discrimination must be collective effort. Otherwise this seems like a good experiment and a good paper. The email thing just seems really clean and a realistic depicter of reality. Let's see if there are any significant changes after peer review, I suppose.

tzs 12y ago

> Most would acknowledge that women and minorities already face more hurdles in academia than their white, male peers. A lack of mentors, occasionally overt discrimination and the academy’s poor work-life balance, are well-documented issues. OK, I'm stumped. I can't figure out how poor work-life balance is more of a hurdle for women and minorities than for white males. Anyone know?

wfjackson 12y ago
That part wasn't intended for minorities. As for women, they need a lot of time off for pregnancies and typically want/need to spend more time with kids. Also, they have a biological clock for fertility unlike men, so it's more important for them to have time to socialize to find a partner unlike men who can procreate well into their nineties.
scottfr 12y ago
"poor work-life balance" is a greater issue for women than men due to childbirth and general fact that childcare and elder care burdens generally fall primarily on the woman in a couple. "lack of mentors" and "occasionally over discrimination" affect both women and minorities more than white males.
- analog31 12y ago
  I suspect elder / disabled care may be an issue for minorities too, of both sexes, if they come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
pervycreeper 12y ago
Women tend to choose professions with better work-life balance more often than men. Not sure this holds for minorities (the stereotype is actually that immigrants work extra hard, but I have no specific data). The author of the article likely believes that women and minorities are united by facing oppression or discrimination, and consequently groups them together as a single category. This cavalier approach to analysis also enables them to appropriate the oppression of certain groups for the others.

btoptical 12y ago

When I was a physics undergrad all 12 physics majors in my graduating class were given a "talk" by a senior white faculty member about the "realities" of the physics pyramid. Basically we were told that our Chinese competitors made much better grad students and we should basically not bother applying to grad school because we couldn't compete against the "better" Chinese.

Balgair 12y ago
Really?!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
WWLink 12y ago
In grade school at least one of my teachers made a comment along the lines of this. For a little backstory, my town was roughly 30% white, 25% asian, 25% black, the rest spanish or other races. Shoot I'll go one further. When I was in 5th grade I offered to help get their huge donation of 486s ready for use (installing windows on them and the like). Most of the teachers didn't know how to use computers at the time, and they were happy with my work so they tasked me to fix/maintain all of them after class. That was pretty cool! I picked a filipino classmate to help out, and one day at honor roll ceremony the principal accidentally introduced him as the computer guy and me as the assistant -_-. A physics teacher pulled that stunt once too at my community college. He told us the only people that would get As in his class were "real Asians. Not white guys that think they're Asian." He regularly made borderline racist and sexist comments though. The reality is (at least in my experience) that no one race or gender is better at science subjects, engineering, or math. Most people in those subjects work their butts off to get where they are. The part I dislike is when someone stumbles, there's a lot of pressure on them to quit when there should be encouragement to try again. Sometimes things can be like pounding out a sword on an anvil, it doesn't happen instantly. Instead it looks like there's always encouragement to kick people out and discourage people from studying a subject.

glbrew 12y ago

No shit?

alexeisadeski3 12y ago

How many American women receive selective service notification? https://www.sss.gov/ https://www.sss.gov/