

Discrimination starts even before grad school, study finds - nkrumm
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/04/discrimination-starts-even-before-grad-school-study-finds.html

======
nkrumm
For those interested in what the text of the email was, from the study [1]:

\-----

Subject Line: Prospective Doctoral Student (On Campus Today/[Next Monday])

Dear Professor [Surname of Professor Inserted Here],

I am writing you because I am a prospective doctoral student with considerable
interest in your research. My plan is to apply to doctoral programs this
coming fall, and I am eager to learn as much as I can about research
opportunities in the meantime.

I will be on campus today/[next Monday], and although I know it is short
notice, I was wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing
to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities
for me to get involved in your research. Any time that would be convenient for
you would be fine with me, as meeting with you is my first priority during
this campus visit.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely, [Student’s Full Name Inserted Here]

[1]
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742)

~~~
danieltillett
This email lacks any personalisation and looks exactly like spam to me. I am
wondering if the study should have been entitled "Generic emails containing
minority names are classified as spam at higher frequencies."

~~~
thaumasiotes
That problem is difficult to solve for a controlled experiment; as soon as you
personalize the messages then two outreaches to two professors become
incomparable to each other.

~~~
emiliobumachar
I disagree. You could write personalized letters to each of thousands of
professors, as long as each contained a slot for the student's name. If you
then randomly assign the different student names to the letters, you still
have a perfectly valid controlled experiment. No need to compare two
outreaches to each other.

Being said that, the study as it is is already very solid proof of
discrimination. So what that the email looks spammy? If it looks just as
spammy from each and every group, and not every group is equally rejected,
that's textbook discrimination.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Those personalized letters won't be comparable unless they are so generic that
they're still spam. After randomizing which name goes to which letter, you're
stuck with an infinite number of dimensions of variation, where one dimension
is the ethnicity of the name signed at the bottom of the letter, and the other
infinity represent the "quality" of the personalized letters. You won't be
able to conclude anything about the influence of the name.

~~~
emiliobumachar
I still disagree. If there are only two letters, than, sure, the relative
quality of them will dwarf the influence of the name.

But if there are thousands of letters, assigned randomly, the Law of Large
Numbers does its magic.

No name gets assigned significantly lower or significantly higher quality
letters than the average. (something like that could happen, but the odds are
small enough to be ignored).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers)

------
TTPrograms
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.

------
tzs
> Most would acknowledge that women and minorities already face more hurdles
> in academia than their white, male peers. A lack of mentors, occasionally
> overt discrimination and the academy’s poor work-life balance, are well-
> documented issues.

OK, I'm stumped. I can't figure out how poor work-life balance is more of a
hurdle for women and minorities than for white males. Anyone know?

~~~
scottfr
"poor work-life balance" is a greater issue for women than men due to
childbirth and general fact that childcare and elder care burdens generally
fall primarily on the woman in a couple.

"lack of mentors" and "occasionally over discrimination" affect both women and
minorities more than white males.

~~~
analog31
I suspect elder / disabled care may be an issue for minorities too, of both
sexes, if they come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

------
btoptical
When I was a physics undergrad all 12 physics majors in my graduating class
were given a "talk" by a senior white faculty member about the "realities" of
the physics pyramid. Basically we were told that our Chinese competitors made
much better grad students and we should basically not bother applying to grad
school because we couldn't compete against the "better" Chinese.

~~~
WWLink
In grade school at least one of my teachers made a comment along the lines of
this. For a little backstory, my town was roughly 30% white, 25% asian, 25%
black, the rest spanish or other races.

Shoot I'll go one further. When I was in 5th grade I offered to help get their
huge donation of 486s ready for use (installing windows on them and the like).
Most of the teachers didn't know how to use computers at the time, and they
were happy with my work so they tasked me to fix/maintain all of them after
class. That was pretty cool! I picked a filipino classmate to help out, and
one day at honor roll ceremony the principal accidentally introduced him as
the computer guy and me as the assistant -_-.

A physics teacher pulled that stunt once too at my community college. He told
us the only people that would get As in his class were "real Asians. Not white
guys that think they're Asian." He regularly made borderline racist and sexist
comments though.

The reality is (at least in my experience) that no one race or gender is
better at science subjects, engineering, or math. Most people in those
subjects work their butts off to get where they are. The part I dislike is
when someone stumbles, there's a lot of pressure on them to quit when there
should be encouragement to try again. Sometimes things can be like pounding
out a sword on an anvil, it doesn't happen instantly.

Instead it looks like there's always encouragement to kick people out and
discourage people from studying a subject.

------
midas007
I worked at a dept with ~2.5% acceptance rate.

There were two, subtle factors in play: soft ageism and PI's hiring their
clones (in thought, gender and race).

So the dept gravitated to predominantly two minorities, at least in terms of
staff, faculty, visiting researchers and grad students.

------
gojomo
EDIT: With regard to what I pointed out in my original comment (below for
reference), I believe the Nature article chart is in error. Reading the actual
paper (p.55), the gap in "engineering and computer sciences" (while smaller
than some other fields) is actually _more_ statistically significant than some
of the other results. I suppose that may be because they were able to trial
more professors.

I guess that means, be careful trusting charts, even from _Nature_ 's blog.
The smaller gap may still count for something compared to a few worse fields,
but it's not among the statistically-unclear results of the fields studied.

\--original below--

From the graph, "engineering and computer sciences" was one of the smallest
measured gaps, and further didn't feature the "*" which indicated a
statistically-significant result.

So in all the often-justified criticism, the fact that CS/engineering are
better than many other fields-of-practice should count for something.

(Interestingly also per the chart, in 'Fine Arts' the faculty discrimination
ran in favor of women/minorities, to a statistically-significant level.)

~~~
tomp
Why does it matter if one result is more or less statistically significant
than another, assuming that they are both _sufficiently_ significant?!

(Note: I don't think that 5% or 1% chance of error is sufficiently
statistically significant, but I'm a mathematician/programmer, and I know that
most social studies researchers disagree.)

------
pervycreeper
Peculiar why women were bunched together with minorities. I wonder how the
results would look if they were decoupled. I also wonder what their reasoning
was in attributing the small effect linking different names to differing
response rates to 'implicit bias' was.

~~~
pcurve
The study does break it down further, and the result actually made feel ill.

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code...](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2427725_code488996.pdf?abstractid=2063742&mirid=1)

Go to Page 55+

Things aren't so bad if you're white female. If you're hispanic female, you
even enjoy advantages in field of science.

But the numbers for Chinese and Indian (both genders) look absolutely
atrocious. I'm seeing on average 30 percentage point difference, but as much
as 60%+ in some fields.

This is just disturbing.

~~~
monochr
Have you had to deal with the number of Indian or Chinese students trying to
push into a program they have no place being in?

I get it's the poverty back home that makes them desperate and nothing to do
with race, but the one time my former department accepted a Chinese student
from mainland China it was a disaster, he was rude, hardly spoke English, his
credentials were most likely fake and made the whole thing incredibly
unpleasant to everyone with how pushy he was. Needless to say he was kicked
out after a year because he kept failing his classes.

This isn't racism, this is people not wanting to be scammed.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Isn't biased stereotyping exactly what racism is though? A few bad apples can
spoil it for everyone else? "Hey watch the black guy, I was mugged by
once...", if you find that sickening, this is quite similar to that.

~~~
monochr
Only if it's based on race. You must be American since you missed the part
where I said it's the _poor_ Indians and Chinese that are desperate and most
departments want nothing to do with them. That isn't racism, that is wealth
discrimination. By contrast the poor Australians aren't applying to post
graduate programs in mathematics, they are too busy being drunk at the footy,
so they are not a group anyone had to worry about at my university. But if one
of them showed up with fake credentials they would be as disruptive to the
department as that Chinese student was, and would fly out just as quickly.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I doubt this Chinese student was poor if he could get convincing enough fake
qualifications; he was probably middle class with city hukou and resourceful
parents, but just didn't apply himself because his parents were always able to
solve his problems for him (also, very likely an only child). This is actually
quite common in China; the poor Chinese students are the ones that have to
work their asses off because their parents can't give them any special
advantages.

I have my own biases, but having lived in China for so long, they aren't based
on ethnicity anymore (e.g. watch that guy in starbucks wearing farmer clothes,
he might try to steal my computer).

~~~
monochr
He might have been rich by Chinese standards but he was still poor by Western
ones. He seemed to be vastly more interested in finding a job outside the
university so he could stay in the country than actually trying to study for
the classes he was taking.

And again note, I didn't say he was lazy, as far as we could tell he was
taking a dozen interviews a week for work. He was however a complete academic
deadbeat and terrible investment for the university.

In short, we got scammed, someone came over on a student visa, only to try
their hardest to migrate permanently without adding anything of value to the
university and group he was meant to be working in.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> He might have been rich by Chinese standards but he was still poor by
> Western ones.

Ugh. It is possible that his parents were richer than yours; they could be
driving black Audi's, have multiple Ayi's (house keepers), and multiple
apartments; you really can't tell! It is true that having their kids get a job
in a western country is important even to middle class/rich Chinese; even they
realize how unbalanced the employment situation is even if it often works in
their favor.

> And again note, I didn't say he was lazy, as far as we could tell he was
> taking a dozen interviews a week for work.

This makes sense. They can lazy academically but, instilled by the habits of
their parents, realize that the key to success is networking and career
climbing rather than studying.

------
alexeisadeski3
How many American women receive selective service notification?

[https://www.sss.gov/](https://www.sss.gov/)

------
mjfl
some of the differences aren't statistically significant?

~~~
blahzay
Same thing I'm wondering. Would've been trivial to add error bars to this
figure.

------
glbrew
No shit?

------
alexeisadeski3
What's the relative proportion of men in prison to women?

~~~
Anechoic
If there are more men then women in prison, it can only be because men commit
more crime, right?

~~~
tsotha
Women get laughably light prison sentences compared to men.

~~~
Mangalor
Here we go...

