
Study: Women Twice as Likely to be Hired in STEM Tenure-Track Positions - tomp
http://www.ischoolguide.com/articles/11133/20150428/women-qualified-men-stem-tenure.htm
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dang
A dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481).

We're thinking about building software for users to link posts like this
together. It would be especially helpful where the story is the same, but the
articles are different, as here.

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tomp
Sorry, I didn't realize it was such an old research. Btw, how did you find the
other article, from memory or using some sort of search?

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dang
I vaguely remembered seeing it and mucked around with searches until it came
up.

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brerlapn
SlateStarCodex had an essay in April that examined this study pretty
carefully:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-
th...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-the-hallway/)

He looks at some odd experimental choices in the study, and goes into some
depth about other contradictory studies. I thought it was a pretty balanced
and thorough analysis.

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tomp
Despite the title, the first sentence asserts

> Researchers in a recent study found no sexism in STEM faculty positions as
> more women are now hired for STEM tenure-track jobs at a 2:1 ratio.

So I'm not exactly sure how to interpret this (nevertheless interesting)
result.

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coldtea
> _found no sexism in STEM faculty positions as more women are now hired for
> STEM tenure-track jobs at a 2:1 ratio._

It's only sexism if it benefits men.

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tomp
I hope you're sarcastic.

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coldtea
/s

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clarkevans
I believe that PhD graduation in STEM is close to 50/50% now, yet, female
tenured faculty in STEM is closer to 20-30%. If an organization wishes to have
an equal gender representation in its faculty, wouldn't a short term hiring
preference be a reasonable thing to do? There is certainly no lack of
qualified candidates these days.

Even so, there's another aspect here -- service. Women are disproportionally
assigned service roles in academic departments (men eschew such assignments if
they can). Hence, existing male staff may prefer to tenure female colleagues
to reduce their own future service burden.

Sexism (in this conversation meaning male preferential treatment) is still
quite an issue in academia.

[1]
[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/new_study_fin...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/new_study_finds_unequal_distribution_by_gender_in_academic_service_work)

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duaneb
I disagree about the men eschewing service roles, I haven't seen any clear
gender line opinions about them.

This strikes me as delving dangerously far into assigning motives to a group
of people when looking at symptoms.

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clarkevans
You're correct, my statement is unnecessarily argumentative. Thank you.

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danharaj
Somewhat old article; one study not corroborated by other studies.
Interesting, but only as a single observation in a corpus of observations.

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throwaway13337
Are there other studies that deal with this specifically?

I don't doubt you're right - it seems reproducibility is tough these days -
but a link would be nice.

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danharaj
Here's one off the top of my head:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract#aff-1](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract#aff-1)

Abstract: Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender
disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated
gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally
investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students
that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a
randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-
intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was
randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager
position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more
competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These
participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career
mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did
not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to
exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the
female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less
competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias
against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle
bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against
women was associated with less support for the female student, but was
unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that
interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of
increasing the participation of women in science.

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zo1
Two things of question/curiosity regarding this that immediately spring to
mind. It wasn't immediately obvious from the abstract, and I don't have
journal access.

Did the faculty subjects know that they were being tested? Sure the testers +
subjects didn't know whether they had female/male students, but they might
still know they are part of an experiment.

Secondly. Could we not _perhaps_ attribute the rating of male candidates
higher (or females lower) due to perceived "corrective" bias in a field? One
common theme among individuals that are against affirmative-action-type
processes, is that the candidates are picked not on merit but rather by quota.
With that in mind, could the bias shown in the study not be personal-bias
being externalized to fix the unfair/unjust bias within the great affirmative-
action/quota environment?

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danharaj
I don't think intention matters. For two reasons: The material effect of the
bias is what is being evaluated and is more important than the intentions of
the person acting on the bias, and assigning intention is always fraught with
post-hoc rationalizations because human beings have limited access to their
own internal behavior, let alone the behavior of an ensemble of humans.

There have been numerous stories used to justify the systematic and
institutional biases and injustices against women throughout history: whether
it is appeals to the divine order set forth by God, or appeals to the
biological inferiority of women or the insistence that there is actually a
structural bias _against_ men and _for_ women throughout society because,
nominally, our institutions discarded explicit affirmations of male
superiority and took up explicit goals for gender equality.

Bias is bias and it is out of fashion to insist that women are inferior to
men. So I would not be surprised that the personal stories we tell ourselves
to justify our biased actions avoid that rhetoric and take a different tack.
Racists insist they are color blind and people who talk about structural
racism are the _real_ racists. A similar logic holds in gender politics.

