
Sexism in the Academy: Women's narrowing path to tenure - rhaps0dy
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/sexism-in-the-academy
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ralusek
It says that women make up over 50% of undergrads, as well as graduate school
students. Then when it comes to professors, they decline in representation.
Why is the implication that this is due primarily to sexism? Populations
differ in their representations for vocations across the board, why is the
default assumption that sexism is the primary contributor?

~~~
gilbetron
As an anecdote, living in a college town, I know many academics at various
levels in their career. I happen to know 3 couples where both partners in the
marriage are in academia, and actually in the same general branch. In all
three cases, the women have been talked to about how they must be treated
tougher because their spouses are in academia as well and it the
administration needs to prove to the academic world that the women are not
riding on the coattails of their husbands.

The men have not had any such discussions with their superiors.

Additionally, why is assuming there is no sexism and proceeding with the
status quo better than the assumption there is sexism and trying to improve
the situation?

~~~
charliesharding
The same reason we don't assume the accused is guilty.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence)

~~~
BigFish12
We do assume the accused of rape or sexual harassment against a woman is
guilty though. In that case, it's guilty until proven innocent. Allegations
only are enough to ruin a man's whole career.

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gavanwoolery
I want to ask two (genuine) questions. Note that these are not statements or
attempting to imply something, they are just questions and I am looking for
answers, not critiques of my questions (it is silly that I even have to state
this, but I do).

1) What percentage of women in each stage of the pipeline want to become full
professors?

2) What is the expected level of sexism at the university? I have always seen
universities tending towards very liberal, progressive views (generally
speaking), both in the student body and the staff, but that is just my
observation.

~~~
qntty
It's almost impossible to give a meaningful answer to the first question.
Asking people doesn't really answer the question because the meaningful
version of the question is a nuanced counterfactual that would never really be
asked in surveys. Lots of people would want to be professors under the right
circumstances. If you make a career path that's needlessly precarious and and
the only people who "want" to risk trying to have that kind of career are
privileged people, then you _could_ just throw up your hands and say "well I
guess no one else wants to be a professor," or you could be honest about what
people's motivations are and try to create a more humane system.

~~~
gavanwoolery
I think you are correct, it is a nuanced question. But perhaps some insight
into statistics around factors that push females towards or away from
professorship might be useful.

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wtdata
From the article: "Given that women have been the majority of the
undergraduate student body in many countries for the last three decades, one
can no longer argue that equality can be achieved by simply waiting for young
female scholars to emerge at the end of the academic “pipeline."

Isn't having less men as undergrads and grads, sexism as well? This time
against men?

If the principle being proposed by the author of the article, is that "not
having equal outcomes is sexism", then one should expect the ones demanding
that principle, to extend it to every situation, not only to the situations
that suit their personal ideology.

It is a question of basic coherence, really.

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avsteele
I believe there are logical inference errors in the paper. I'll mention one
example:

"Given that women have been the majority of the undergraduate student body in
many countries for the last three decades, one can no longer argue that
equality can be achieved by simply waiting for young female scholars to emerge
at the end of the academic “pipeline.” "

The author should familiarize themselves with Simpson's paradox*. This maps
almost directly onto the classic UC Berkley case in the Wikipedia article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

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bduerst
Slightly tangential, but Planet Money did an interesting podcast on how an
econ student was shocked to find rampant misogyny in an econ job forum, and
she ended up using the data to quantify sexism in the field as part of a
study:

[https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/720139562/episode-910-economi...](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/720139562/episode-910-economics-
sexism-data)

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Excel_Wizard
The article doesn't attempt to control for any variance that would lead to
unequal outcomes even if there were no bias.

For example, men make up the majority of people with very high (and very low)
IQ's. If you randomly sampled the general population, binned to the IQ
distribution of tenured professors, what gender ratio would you get?

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cybersnowflake
Okay I gave this a chance and while it has a formidably long citation list
every argument essentially boils down to difference found between men/women
=MUST BE SEXISM.

The rest is generally the author like most 3rd wave feminists using these few
vague usually deeply flawed correlative data points as a jumping point for
wild theorycrafting and speculation. And they salt the article liberally with
words like 'patriarchy' and a generally hostile tone to the point that this
reads more like a forum post on resetera than an actual technical/scientific
article.

Which is fine as long as everybody realizes contribution quality to HN is
apparently now random blog musings the likes of which hundreds? of
thousands/millions are generated everyday by the vast swath of upper/middle
class privileged coeds of the western world and their male hangerons.

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higherkinded
Not sure if I'm going to express an unpopular opinion on that matter but I'm
pretty sure that ot was already said somewhere in the comments in some
different form. Not sure if my opinion even counts to people like ones who
authored this strange piece of text since I'm from the mischievous and
sinister kind of people collectively called "straight white male", and thus I
may not have the fitting amount of oppression points to be heard. But I'll try
anyway.

I think that the article itself revolves heavily about some prestige or
whatever. So here comes the first question: does the person who cares about
prestige more than science possess the amount of dedication and discipline to
get to the higher ranks? In my opinion, the answer is strong "no" at the very
least. To be proficient and productive, to be useful, you have to dedicate all
your hard work towards your chosen discipline. Apparently you must be
interested very much in it. It doesn't just fall down upon the "privileged
cast", it's a competitive field, and outcome of that, if any, depends on
dedication and the ability to act smart without relying on anyone or anything
else too much.

The second question will be: do you actually know better than the people who
make their own life choices? I mean, they do things or don't do them for a
reason. Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, but if we talk about
education and science, it's nothing close to sexism in the vast majority of
cases.

The third part is simpler. What will happen if we enforce/regulate/implement
quotas? The amount of useful output will decline. You can't force people into
being effective and they will not be effective by "getting there" just by
regulations and quotas.

And for the last one, some personal part. Last couple of years I study quite
complex math (abstract algebra mostly) on my own out of pure interest in it. I
don't have any mentorship, and I don't suffer from it. My dedication
compensates for it. It's a bit anecdotal but I believe that you can achieve a
lot just by being dedicated and interested. You will not get even close by
being placed there and babysat until you're "big enough".

Think about it. Cheers!

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xhkkffbf
Everyone's path is narrowing. They only want adjuncts now. Who wouldn't want
cheap labor?

