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 departmen

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.