
Do women face a reputational bias when they co-author? - luu
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/do-women-face-a-reputational-bias-when-they-co-author.html
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cokernel
I notice that Sarsons's paper says on the very first page:

"NOTE: Very preliminary – please do not cite without permission. Comments
welcome."

I wonder if Cowen sought permission or just ignored that sentence? I am aware
that linking to something from a blog isn't exactly the same as citing it
(presumably Sarsons is trying to discourage citations in other papers), but
Cowen could have mentioned, but didn't mention, the preliminary nature of the
paper when quoting the abstract.

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nonbel
Lots of assuming going on here:

>"The majority of schools require faculty to apply for tenure after 7 years. I
consider one year before and after the 7th year to account for people who go
up for tenure early or late because of a leave of absence, for example. I put
universities into bins of 3 based on their ranking and assume that an
individual is denied tenure if that person moves to a lower-ranked university
group after 6-8 years. For example, a person who moves from Harvard to MIT
after 6 years is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves within
the same bin of schools. Someone who moves from Harvard to UCLA after 6 years
is assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves to a lower group of
schools. As another example, a person who moves 5 or fewer years after his
initial appointment is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moved
before the tenure window (years 6 through 8 at an institution) starts."

Arbitrary binning of universities, using a change in employer as a proxy for
getting tenure, using number of papers published as a measure of productivity,
fitting lines to a relationship that does not appear linear (and in fact
cannot be linear since fraction getting tenure must be in the range 0-1).

This issue may exist, but I don't think this analysis is capable of producing
anything convincing.

~~~
vilda
These types of arguments should be made by peer reviewers. Addressing these
makes the paper (and research) stronger.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of internal corruption in academia, which makes
this feedback ineffective. If you apply for a grant, you already have to
outline results of our research. Heather Sarsons, the author, is a doctoral
fellow in the "Inequality and Social Policy program". She is paid to find
inequality. If she won't find any, she would be unsuccessful. The same holds
for colleagues--who actually do peer review. They are on the same ship.

It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia. About
80% of papers in health science was found to be unreproducible. Guess why.

~~~
littletimmy
To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly
corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for
jobs/publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is
"Quarterly Journal of Economics" has 50% of it's articles only from Harvard
and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate
the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT
much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the
reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other
people.

The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools
produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution.

Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with
prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative
result, and what you get is shoddy research.

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bitmadness
I'm a (male) PhD student at Caltech, and didn't really believe gender bias was
prevalent in academia till I spoke with female friends and learned about the
kind of problems they faced. Believe me people, the problem is real.

~~~
zzleeper
In what field are you? From my experience in a business school, there is a lot
of pressure now to have more woman and minorities as faculty. For instance,
this is a task I recently got asked to do:

\--------------------------------

Hi _____,

_ __* __ __said that you can help me collect some data for the finance hiring
committee. Here is what I need.

Attached is an excel spreadsheet with a list of business schools. Please go to
each business school's website, and look up the finance department/area/group,
and count the # of assistant professors in that group. In addition, please
note the name of any assistant professor who is female or African-American,
and the year of PhD if available. I hope you can complete this task by _____.
Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

_ __*

\--------------------------------

Interestingly (in a sad way), I couldn't find any African American assistant
professor professor in the list of ~100 schools I got for that field (although
I did find "African Africans" and "African Europeans" or whatever you call
being black and not American).

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venomsnake
> Interestingly (in a sad way), I couldn't find any African American assistant
> professor professor in the list of ~100 schools I got for that field
> (although I did find "African Africans" and "African Europeans" or whatever
> you call being black and not American).

That leads to a question not often discussed. I have seen in other places too
that black people that are from outside US fare better in US than African-
Americans. Is there a point in which the years lived under systemic racism
have side effects of learned helplessness that amplify and perpetuate the
initial problem?

~~~
danieltillett
I think it is more likely to be the result of approaching things with an
outsiders perspective. This gives you the ability to avoid problems insiders
assume are unavoidable.

~~~
pgeorgi
> problems insiders assume are unavoidable

Isn't that one aspect of learned helplessness?

~~~
danieltillett
Not quite. There is a difference between assuming you can't do anything about
the situation and giving up.

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lsc
Now, I don't know, but my impression is that the appearance of confidence (by
which I mean the things _associated_ with confidence, like being tall,
speaking in a loud voice, being a guy, having a higher level of social
competence, etc...) have a lot to do with how much credit you get for doing a
thing when it is obvious that credit is being shared.

I mean, that's just my impression, not a study or anything... but it is
something I observe, and it's _weird_ because my own bias is to assume that
the less confident or less socially competent person did most of the work.

