
Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions - okasaki
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions
======
stared
Related:

"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-o...](http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/10/04/major-survey-of-
phd-students-in-europe-sheds-light-on-working-life)

------
artnep
Not 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.

------
hedgew
The 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.

~~~
gphil
> 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
So conversely, you can't argue the opposite, i.e. that gender equality would
lead to women making identical career choices as men.

~~~
gphil
Nope, you're right. I can't argue the opposite and I'm not. I'm just sick of
all the generalizations that get made on HN with no evidence or supporting
data.

------
efaref
“Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have
succeeded,”

Interesting conclusion.

~~~
rjdagost
Much like racism, sexism appears to only go one way in the mainstream media

~~~
wantab
Where are the protests? The marches? Were any buildings burned down?

~~~
josinalvo
we'd need to do that ... and we should!

~~~
josinalvo
(not burning buildings, though =P)

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drcross
It'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
Given 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.

~~~
jstedfast
What happened to hiring people based on merit?

~~~
briandear
There are folks of certain political persuasions that would suggest that you
are ignorant of the struggle and your white privilege is manifesting itself.
This is exactly why I don't understand the "we need a woman president"
malarkey. No, we need competent people regardless of their color or genatalia.
This idea that we 'need' more this or more that is actually sexist and/or
racist by definition.

------
1971genocide
I 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
> _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
"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
> _(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.

------
mpweiher
Also 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-
wom...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-
science/index.html)

~~~
yrlson
You can't really say that until you have studied other fields' hiring
practices.

------
cbd1984
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372297)

------
brudgers
The 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
What 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
What 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
>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.

~~~
brudgers
The study is here:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full.pdf)

The claim that it was controlled for a single variable indicates a general
misconception of statistical methods and miscomprehension or nonreading of the
study itself.

The study did not just present candidates qualifications, it was explicitly
designed to include "lifestyle" factors such as marital status, number and
ages of children, and spouse's occupation. To ensure this information
unrelated to qualification was included, the study used summaries rather than
CV's. The portion of the study which used CV's in lieu of the summaries was
only 35 professors in a discipline (engineering) where women tend to be
significantly under-represented.

The broader studies looked at economics (a dubious member of STEM in much the
same way political or sports science would be) psychology, biology and
engineering.

------
2510c39011c5
as 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."

------
MollyR
I 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 ?

------
timwaagh
the scary thing is they are proud of this.

~~~
yuashizuki
It 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.

------
brudgers
The actual study:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.full.pdf)

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).

------
leoc
Does 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
Straight 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
Yes, I had read that. What I asked was whether the survey provided a breakout
for the (kinds of) subgroup I specified.

~~~
pervycreeper
Somewhat. They found that male economists lacked that bias. There wouldn't be
enough info to make conclusions about top-20 physics depts specifically.

------
stillsut
These 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.

------
nickysielicki
Something 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.

------
undersuit
1: 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
Assorted 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.

------
ausjke
Maybe 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)

------
strictnein
> "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?

