
When Teamwork Doesn't Work for Women - dsr12
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/upshot/when-teamwork-doesnt-work-for-women.html
======
shoo
From last year's epic "emotional labour" thread on metafilter [1], `barchan`
made this comment that seemed to resonate with a few people:

    
    
      > Another terrible thing about emotional labor at work is that
      > women "stepping up" to get things done is not just expected and
      > unappreciated, it's called "teamwork"; but when guys do it, it's
      > called "leadership".
    
    

[1] -- [http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-
Emo...](http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-
Labor)

------
tajen
This article is excellent, both in the way it's written and in the underlying
genius of using tenure as an indicator for credit for each paper.

One interesting point is that a women-only or woman-solo paper gets more
credit (9%) than a mixed-gender paper (8%).

I'm wondering why they rounded single-digit number, it's 15% imprecision (8.4%
and 8.5% aren't significantly different, whereas 7.5% and 9.4% would be a
great gap).

~~~
jkn
It's too bad indeed that the labels are rounded to one digit, but at least the
plot bars are from unrounded data (as the second figure with 6%, 7% and 8%
bars makes it clear), so I think readers still likely get the right impression
of the effect size.

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forrestthewoods
"The bias that Ms. Sarsons documents is so large that it may account on its
own for another statistic: Female economists are twice as likely to be denied
tenure as their male colleagues."

Aren't they using earned tenure as the metric to determine whether someone did
or did not get credit? Seems like that's really just one point then rather
than two. Unless I'm missing something.

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seunosewa
I'm curious about the data for women who published papers with other women.
That will tell us whether the issue is that men tend to get most of the credit
for collaborative work done with women, or something else.

~~~
prolways
The article seems to address that in the second chart. When a woman publishes
with only women they get the 9% bump they're supposed to. When they publish
with a mixed-gender group they get only 4%, and when they publish with only
men they get almost no benefit. Is this what you were asking?

~~~
in_cahoots
I wonder if they controlled for age in this study. Women in the sciences are
younger than men (on average), so a dual-female paper is more likely to be
from two contemporaries, while a dual-male paper could more easily be from an
old prof and a young one. From what I've seen, the more established author
tends to get more of the credit/prestige, even though the less-established one
tends to do more of the work.

~~~
barry-cotter
Age doesn't appear to be in the pdf. A surprising omission.

[http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/gender_groupw...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/gender_groupwork.pdf?m=1449178759)

~~~
digbyloftus
That does seem very flawed. If there's a strong correlation between gender and
age in the field then why would that be not accounted for? I can definitely
see people assuming the older person was the brains/leader of a project.

------
jkot
> _This leaves a sample of 552 economists ... between 1975 and 2014_

Soon there will be studies about a few dozens people and latter about
individuals. I just wish other issues would receive similar attention and
dedication.

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venomsnake
Lies, damn lies and statistics ... I have yet to find a person that does not
do its best to find a data presentation that suits the agenda.

~~~
drdeca
What about when someone does statistics to make a decision for themselves
which they do not reveal?

~~~
tomjen3
Then pretty much by definition we wouldn't hear about it, would we?

