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Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
- efaref 12y ago“Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded,” Interesting conclusion.
- learnstats2 12y agoI gather you are claiming that there is sexism but in the other direction? I disagree, strongly. "female Ph.D.s are disproportionately less likely to apply for tenure-track positions, yet when they do they are more likely to be hired" These two statements are strongly connected. Women with equivalent qualifications are not applying for the same jobs that men are. I suggest this is because female candidates are self-selecting themselves out of positions they are less suitable for, but equivalent male candidates are applying anyway. As such, male candidates must be selected out by the hiring committee instead (where they will contribute even more to these statistics by applying elsewhere). It's not evident to me that women are being treated equally here, even leaving aside their disadvantage from historical sexist practices.
- okasaki 12y agoNo, the applicants in the study had the same qualifications.
- pervycreeper 12y agoFrom the paper: > In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships who shared the same lifestyle (e.g., single without children, married with children). The effect you are proposing, even if true, does not apply to the result in the article.
- learnstats2 12y agoYes, it still applies. If I know that women are typically more realistic in assessing their own skills (including skills outside of qualifications), and given no access to other information or investigation, I should prefer to hire the woman who looks the same on paper. I believe this to be an objective argument based in probability theory.
- pervycreeper 12y agoWhich would be bias. You have merely given a justification for that bias.
- learnstats2 12y agoI understand why you think that but I don't agree. I made a clear argument that there was no bias here - this is a sensible, rational practice on the part of employers. Besides, this is "news" for a reason - nobody would be shocked if the result was in the other direction, because that would be normal and expected in a lot of society. There should be more examples like this, in this direction, because it represents a minimal counterbalance to all the thousands of advantages that men have in STEM/skilled jobs.
- pervycreeper 12y ago>There should be more examples like this, in this direction, because it represents a minimal counterbalance to all the thousands of advantages that men have in STEM/skilled jobs. "Yes, it's bias, but it's for a good cause!"
- rjdagost 12y agoMuch like racism, sexism appears to only go one way in the mainstream media
- pervycreeper 12y agoIt depends what is meant by the word "sexism", which to the public usually means something like "discrimination based on sex", but to those in the know refers to some putative destructive ideology, or even "absence of sufficiently favorable conditions for women". Hence their use of peculiar monikers such as "reverse sexism" to mean discrimination against men, rather than simply "sexism". An illustrative example of this attitude is in the UN's Gender Inequality Index, where, in factors in which women are advantaged (such as lifespan), larger gaps push the figure down rather than up (so larger gaps are considered as more "equal" in those areas that already favor women).
- artnep 12y agoNot surprising to me. I've participated in admissions committees (for a graduate program) and hiring committees (for new faculty) at a top US STEM program, and women do get a significant boost. This preference is usually explicit -- to look for "diversity hires", and so forth.
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- mpweiher 12y agoAlso on CNN: "The low numbers of women in math-based fields of science do not result from sexist hiring, but rather from women's lower rates of choosing to enter math-based fields in the first place, due to sex differences in preferred careers and perhaps to lack of female role models and mentors." http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-science/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-wom...
- yrlson 12y agoYou can't really say that until you have studied other fields' hiring practices.
- drcross 12y agoIt's been an ambition of mine to work in some certain tech companies that are notoriously difficult to get into. The type of job I am going for I am easily capable of doing. While i'm working hard to better myself the thought hasnt escaped me that if I was a woman who had the same experience and qualifications that I have I would have a far better chance of getting the position. This is the definition of sexism.
- humanfromearth 12y agoGiven the underrepresentation of women in tech I think I'm ok with them being chosen over satisfying your ambitions. Also working hard to better yourself is a continuous process and it doesn't stop when you get hired at BigCorp, continue doing so and you'll get results no matter your gender.
- steamy 12y agoGiven the underrepresentation of women in tech I think I'm ok with them being chosen over satisfying your ambitions. What's this supposed to mean? Is this some sort of reverse sexism? Reparation in kind for the gentle sex?
- timwaagh 12y agoits called feminism and its pretty scary
- josinalvo 12y agobefore you downvote this preciding comment (or mine, for that matter), allow me a challenge: If you pick 10 woman who self-identified as feminists at random, how many do you predict will find this 2:1 ratio a good thing ? I predict 7 or more.
- cmiles74 12y agoPerhaps the poster was pointing out that the under-representation of women in technology is an actual, real world problem that needs to be solved. This one male's ambitions is not really comparable.
- cbd1984 12y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297
- 1971genocide 12y agoI know that this might be frustrating to men out there but there is important silver lining. Trust and Talent are finite things. These institutions of "higher learning" became what they became because people trusted them to be impartial. The more they continue with this type of shenanigans the more they will lose their relevance in the 21st Century. This is amazing opportunity for the crowd who read HN. These left out talented men are a market ! especially for businessmen looking for talented and driven people. Also this 2:1 ratio is terrible news for women ! Now women won't be taken seriously even with a degree from some fancy place.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago> Trust and Talent are finite things. > These institutions of "higher learning" became what they became because people trusted them to be impartial. > The more they continue with this type of shenanigans the more they will lose their relevance in the 21st Century. I wouldn't call it silver lining. Yes, it may be good for some in the short term, but it's another case of people fucking up institutions and destroying trust for some random fashion-driven goals. Lack of social trust is already a serious problem (see the rise of anti-vaccine movements as an example) and we will pay hard for that in the future.
- VLM 12y ago"destroying trust for some random fashion-driven goals" Trust destruction has been the dominant economic model (outside tech) for a generation or two now. "Oh the shopkeeper would never screw me over". "Oh my banker would never screw me over". "Real estate agents never screw over their neighbors". "All stock brokers can be trusted". "I can trust my doctor/hospital" "I trust if I get an advanced degree an upper middle class job for me at that edu level will magically be created with great salary for me, by magic, because thats how it always used to work" "I can trust cops" Screw em over, keep the profits, wait for the federal bailout money to roll in, and do it over again.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago> (outside tech) And that's probably only because tech industry is barely two or three generations old. We're seeing the signs here too. I have my pet theory that every market gets dominated by frauds as it matures. You can compete on the actual value you provide to people when the product/service is young, but after all low-hanging fruits are picked and there are no easy / significant improvements to be made, you still need to grow - and so the search for new methods of extracting money begins. Business models get more complicated, companies start to invest more and more into marketing and PR, and suddenly as a customer you can't trust your vendor anymore.
- stared 12y agoRelated: "Impact of gender on career prospects According to the survey, male students were more likely than female students to feel that their gender will hold them back in academia. The proportion of men who said they were very disadvantaged in their academic career because of their gender ranged from 77% to 91% across the countries surveyed, compared with 36% to 61% of women." From "Major survey of PhD students in Europe sheds light on working life", http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/10/04/major-survey-of-phd-students-in-europe-sheds-light-on-working-life http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/10/04/major-survey-o...
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- dylukes 12y agoThis is sarcasm... right? If not then... I'm not even sure where to start with the problems in that plan.
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- dylukes 12y agoMen (and many women) would strike and refuse to go to work in the first place, because they know they have absolutely no job real security, and run the risk of being shot at work purely because of their gender. So, it wouldn't solve the problem... probably because it's fascistic and sexist? How would you feel if it were the other way around, and it was insufficient white people relative to blacks, and we just killed off the excess if their employers try to shield them and replace them with white workers? You know: Apartheid?
- ryanx435 12y agoi know you are being hyperbolic, but in all seriousness there is the potential for quotas to be put in place. if I was fully qualified for my job, working hard, and than the government fired me in order to employ someone else simply because they were a different [characteristic ] than me I would quite literally take up arms as it would be obvious that the social contract had become null and void.
- timwaagh 12y agothe scary thing is they are proud of this.
- yuashizuki 12y agoIt scares me to. How can you expect productivity and fairness if you prefer one gender over another ? I also feel if they conducted a study in other professional fields like lawyers and financial jobs they would find similar results.
- Humjob 12y agoEggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Every psychological dynamic you see playing out in mass societies liberated from artificial constraints on the sexual market flows from this premise. This means, as a systemic matter, women are coddled, men are upbraided. Women are victims, men are victimizers. Women need a leg up, men need to man up. Women have advocacy groups, men have equal opportunity violations. A woman subjected to the indignity of eavesdropping on a tame joke about dongles makes national news, while the chilling fact that 95% of all workplace deaths are suffered by men barely pings the media consciousness. It is what it is, and it will never change so long as humans are a sexually reproducing species. All the laws in the world can at best only paper over the very primal compulsion of people to value the life of the average woman more than the life of the average man, and sympathize accordingly. Railing against it is akin to shaking a fist at sunspots and gamma rays. It’s therefore folly or self-serving disingenuousness to act like there’s some moral high ground to stake out by imparting culpable agency to an indifferent, organically emergent biomechanical phenomenon. Rationalizing favoritism toward women as some sort of payback for male privilege, or refusing to acknowledge this favoritism altogether, is an example of the cognitive calisthenics and evasive sophistry most people will indulge to avoid grappling with the cold, black void of an uncaring evolutionary replication machine.
- leoc 12y agoDoes this study break out hiring for top-20ish departments in, say, theoretical physics? I could certainly envisage women being favoured in general but still disadvantaged when it comes to prestige institutions, particularly if the reports that hiring for those best positions comes down to "he's better than Smith, but not as good as Jones" assessments passed along the social grapevine are true.
- pervycreeper 12y agoStraight from the abstract: >National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
- leoc 12y agoYes, I had read that. What I asked was whether the survey provided a breakout for the (kinds of) subgroup I specified.
- pervycreeper 12y agoSomewhat. They found that male economists lacked that bias. There wouldn't be enough info to make conclusions about top-20 physics depts specifically.
- brudgers 12y agoThe domain of the study is higher education at US institutions. Actual hiring is typically done by committee. The hiring process is often protracted with long application Windows and substantial gaps between offer and start date. The hiring committee typically is made up of line workers [professors] and subject to administrative and executive oversight. Public institutions may get political oversight as well. Candidates for STEM professorships will often have already gone through previous academic hiring cycles as postdocs...that is there has been a previous screening with less oversight and less balanced power relations. What this means is that we should use caution extrapolating the results of a study that models academic hiring on individuals reviewing CV's without collective and institutional input. We should also be cautious extrapolating from the academic world to ordinary commercial hiring due to the variances in goals, constraints and processes.
- pervycreeper 12y agoWhat it does reveal is a specific area of bias. Whether there are checks against it, and whether there ought to be, are different questions.
- brudgers 12y agoWhat it shows is that if all things are equal then there is bias. Of course if the premise of a material implication is false, the entire proposition always evaluates true. That hiring processes in US academic institutions are subject to sex gender bias doesn't require more than looking at the diversity among the highest paid employees in US higher education, coaches.
- pervycreeper 12y ago>What it shows is that if all things are equal then there is bias. Not quite, in a scientific study, it is preferable to control for a single variable, which in this case was gender. The bias in faculty member's decision making is shown clearly (as evidenced by the consistency of the effect size across groups). Whether or not men and women are on a level playing field in the first place is irrelevant to the question of whether faculty members are biased against one or the other. >That hiring processes in US academic institutions are subject to sex gender bias doesn't require more than looking at the diversity among the highest paid employees in US higher education, coaches. I'm not sure what argument you're making. "hiring in academic institutions" seems to be too broad a category for making useful generalizations, and I'm not sure how coaches' salaries relate to gender discrimination.
- hedgew 12y agoThe widely unacknowledged paradox is that eradication of sexism will actually increase occupational gender imbalances. Gender equality and national wealth will lead people to choose careers that most appeal to them. The likely truth is that most women would rather work as nurses and teachers than as programmers and engineers. Equal opportunity causes unequal results. Until we accept this, we'll waste most of our time fighting shadows instead of actual sexism.
- innguest 12y agoYou're right, but feminism (and leftism in general) is guided by Social Marxism and Critical Theory and those are tools being used to divide and conquer the people. So it won't stop. But yes you're right, look at Sweden with their +70% female nurses and +70% male engineers in university. Also watch Hjarnevask to have an idea of the strength of the hallucination and reality-denial that SM and CT provoke on people. Also watch how many HNers will instantly downvote this upon reading it because it provokes cognitive dissonance on them (hence the lack of arguments).
- cmiles74 12y agoThis desperately needs some kind of sourcing. In my opinion it is way too over-the-top to take seriously without some factual backing. Personally, it sounds like sexist male wish fulfillment and I will be very surprised if there is any factual basis for this idea.
- mpweiher 12y agoYes, the result is surprising to say the least, but it is apparently well-researched, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374516 I think one explanation for the data is that in less affluent societies, there is more economic pressure for women to go into fields that do not match their preferences.
- gphil 12y ago> The likely truth is that most women would rather work as nurses and teachers than as programmers and engineers. How could you possibly know this? Even if this is true in today's society, there's no way to know whether or not it would be true in a counterfactual society where gender equality exists.
- strictnein 12y ago> "science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions" Uhmm... science and engineering faculty are mainly men. So isn't this study saying that older male faculty members like to have young female faculty members as their underlings?
- 2510c39011c5 12y agoas the question raised in another thread here at HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297), on this very same topic "what are the real benefits and downsides (commercial and noncommercial) for the hiring preference of female over male, for microsoft and for the whole society?" One of the reasons I could come up with is, "the industry hiring process starts to favor women than men, is to add more feminine elements in the product/service they sell, through increasing the women ratio in their team, and hence to attract more women consumers and also perhaps the feminine side of straight and gay men."
- ausjke 12y agoMaybe we should have another study that shows "Man preferred 2:1 over women for non-STEM faculty positions(liberal arts, special speech, whatever)", to just balance it a bit? I think it's time to encourage more boys into non-STEM fields, they're totally underpresented (sarcasm)
- MollyR 12y agoI found it extremely interesting when they said " faculty in all four disciplines preferred female applicants to male candidates, with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference." Why did male economists show no gender preference ?
- nickysielicki 12y agoSomething I've been meaning to do, but lack the time to do, is to grep through CVS and git logs for the top 300 open source projects, map names to genders, and see how many women are contributing to open source. Obviously, there will be more men. What I'm interested in is seeing if the ratio of men to women is greater than the general computer engineering industry.
- stillsut 12y agoThese studies seem so prevalent in today's age, maybe the participants know they are being studied, know what the outcome the study is looking for, and might overcompensate their behavior to make sure they "pass" the test. I mean what kind of administrative academic can you show a set of "hypothetical resumes", and they don't say hmmm I think I've heard this one before.
- brudgers 12y agoThe actual study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full... It's worth noting that lifestyle was one of the factors explicitly included in the broader portions of the study and that the only portion of the study where candidates were represented by their CV involved 37 engineering professors (engineering being an area (unlike psychology and biology in the broader experiments) where attracting more female students is a direct vector to department growth).
- undersuit 12y ago1: STEM faculty positions are dominated by men of all ages. 2: We fix this by hiring more women. 3: In 40 years STEM faculty positions are dominated by women of all ages. We need to phase out the old guard, which consists mostly of men, while not hiring along gender lines for their replacements else we will be right back where we started.
- random854 12y agoAssorted thoughts: 1. While it is certainly good that this study does not show an anti-female bias (not saying the 2:1 preference is necessarily good), I'm seeing this hailed as 'proof sexism doesn't exist,' which it is not. Several studies, the most notable one being from 2012 (Moss-Racusin is the author iirc), found that at the undergraduate level, men are preferred and given a high salary. If both of these studies are true, it means that as women age/gain higher degrees/prove themselves, this bias disappears. This makes sense when you think about it, but is still a good thing. 2. While I don't like this bias against men, I don't think men need to worry about it yet. Probably, the only reason the preference is so high is because so few women apply for these positions. Were an equal number of men and women applying for the position, it'd likely be a different story. 3. No one against the broad goal of 'sexism in tech' that I've heard at least is vying for 50-50 representation. If 70% of engineers are men, fine. The problem is that many girls who would become engineers are never exposed to it or are pushed away (some by the attitude that 'women just naturally don't like STEM'—read 'Unlocking the Clubhouse.') Much of the barriers to women in STEM come from childhood (women being less likely to take STEM classes due to low confidence in math etc)—it's good to see women don't need to worry about bias in academia, don't get me wrong. But I see strawmen here. As a woman in tech who got a late start because "math is hard for girls," and who had a programmer cousin who admitted to me that he never showed it to me because he assumed girls didn't like it, despite knowing I enjoyed math/physics—I'm not trying to build a 'fempire' in which women are preferred to men and the 1950s repeat themselves in reverse. I just want girls like me who love what they do to have the opportunity to do what I do.