Nobody who is familiar with the literature on this will be surprised, but it’s good to accumulate new evidence and also to keep the issue in the public eye: academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.
That’s the conclusion of a new study in PNAS by Corinne Moss-Racusin and collaborators at Yale. (Hat tip Dan Vergano.) To test scientist’s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.
Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.
This lurking bias has clear real-world implications. When asked what kind of starting salaries they might be willing to offer the applicants, the ones offered to women were lower.
I have no reason to think that scientists are more sexist than people in other professions in the US, but this is my profession, and I’d like to see it do better. Admitting that the problem exists is a good start.
I think it’s a byproduct of the sheer number of men in science overall. I don’t know the actual data but judging by the physics department at Durham (UK) men clearly outnumber women by a large number (I’d estimate ~70% of the department are male). It has been seen in the past that people have a tendency to hire those “similar” to themselves, which, of course, means there is going to be discrimination against women. Hopefully this gender bias will pass as more women enter the field and legislation is brought in to try and prevent discrimination.
But on the inverse side of things; any time a man needs a damn break he doesn’t get it. You see a woman crying and everyone rushes to see what’s wrong. You see a man crying and everyone thinks “man up dude, jesus, get yourself together.”
That is a rather surprising and disturbing finding. What really strikes me is that Male and Female faculty both displayed this bias, and I wonder why this is the case.
Calling this dishonest would be a huge understatement. The figure two graph just puts the nail in the coffin. Not starting the Y at 0, and only going from 25 – 31 is blatantly and facially manipulative.
Pingback: What’s in a name | Butterflies and Wheels
The test should be made into something you can take online to self-assess your own bias. I am pretty sure most scientists aren’t even aware of their own biases. This could be an important eye-opener. Being the director of a physics department, I would require all staff to submit to the test. That’s how you could actively change things.
The whining about Figure 2 is fascinating, as is the resultant blanket dismissal of the entire study. Apparently the author erroneously assumed that readers would actually look at the words and numbers on the page. Usually, one can assume that a reader knows how to read. I’m curious to hear these brilliant voices of dissent produce actual critiques of the study itself, beyond complaining about how they were ‘facially [sic] manipulated.’
I’m literally laughing at loud at all these folks throwing out accusations that this research is fraudulent because it doesn’t fit their right-wing black-and-white world view. Yes, one of the graphs is misleading. No, that does not make the data behind the graph invalid. Please go back to school, conservatives.
@Brett:
Yes, that is also a problem of sexism. It hurts both genders.
@ Sean: “At least the trolls have moved on from ‘there is no discrimination’ to ‘discrimination is rationally justified.'”
The whole hiring process IS a process of discrimination or did you forget what the word means? Are you proposing indiscriminate hiring? Get a hat and some pieces of paper with names on it?
This is an excellent post and the discussion has been enlightening but the idea that hiring isn’t an activity of discrimination obscures the complexity of the problem we should all be trying to address. That legitimate problem is that sometimes qualified candidates are unfairly discriminated against based on physical attributes they cannot change.
This includes sexuality, gender, age, physical disability and the color of their skin.
Just look at this wonderful discussion that has been provoked. TW brings up excellent and fair point about stereotypes and how they are often justified — so this begs the question:
How do you effectively combat unfair discrimination?
Well, first you have to prove to us that it *is* unfair. TW points out that his physical disability my adversely effect his ability to do a job when compared to a make-believe completely equal person. If he were applying to a position that requires he regularly climb into volcanoes to take samples and he can’t do that then is it truly unfair to discriminate against him? Or is it common sense?
If a team needs scientists who are going to be available for the next 12 months no matter what and you have two EXACTLY identical candidates, one male, one female… who would you chose? If your grant, your project, your science, your tenure depended on the reliability of your team?
It *is* a problem but to gloss over the very real differences between individuals is equally as foolish.
So I appreciate the excellent post, I think your hypothesis that _all_ discrimination is bad is sorely lacking and I would request you refine it.
@Brett: You do it to yourself. You go through all this trouble to hide your emotions, so when you do finally let a tear loose, you shouldn’t be surprised that other people want you to stop. It makes them uncomfortable. They’re not used to seeing it and they don’t know what to do about it, whereas everyone knows how to comfort a crying woman. If you really feel you need a break or some emotional support, it helps to admit that you need it and to actually ask for it. If men all did that more, it wouldn’t be so weird.
But back to the article: the gender bias in science isn’t just a stereotype problem. It’s compounded with working conditions in the U.S. Both men and women who bend over backward to accommodate their employers make it hard for all of us to lead reasonably balanced lives inside and outside the workplace, and if we as a society don’t draw a line somewhere, we’ll all continue to be abused by work. No U.S. employer, especially in this job market, has any regulations or obvious economic incentive to make them support work-life balance at all. If you have a salaried job with benefits, it’s in your employer’s interest to make you work as many hours as possible. If you have an hourly job with no benefits, the employer will have you work as hours as possible to minimize the wages that need to be paid out.
If we simply leave employer incentives the way they are and have men ask for parental leave, flex time and consistent hours as much as women do, employers will probably start selecting against parents of both sexes. Part of the answer is changing our expectations of each other and of ourselves, and another part of the solution has to be workplace regulation.
@ TW and Drake Sullivan:
1. Studying hard is a big part of being a good scientist. You talk about studying hard and getting good grades as if these traits are negatively correlated with being a “good scientist”. Why can’t females be both smart and hardworking? Do you think we never explore our interests outside of getting good grades? I know many female scientists, including myself, who get good grades, work hard, and still manage to have non-academic hobbies.
2. We shouldn’t be arguing about which sex makes better scientists. There are plenty of bad or mediocre male scientists. The problem is that more mediocre male scientists get hired than mediocre female scientists, and when they do get hired, males earn more than females. In traditional “female” roles like cooking, men still historically dominate. Look at the restaurant industry at top chefs, look at artists throughout the ages. Sexism pervades through many professions, not just science. Given the same ability, there should be equal hiring when there still is not. So ability is not even in question here, that is a whole different discussion.
3. From a biological point of view, female and male brains are of course different in many ways. But being a “good scientist” requires MANY characteristics. You need to be intelligent, but do we know what will distinguish one person from the next? Drive, curiosity, hardwork, perseverance, resilience, and even luck, can all factor into being a “good scientist”. I think these characteristics have more inter-individual than inter-sex variation. There are many recent studies on corporate teamwork that point to diversity of thinking increases productivity and better outcomes. So, given these findings, I would think that science should also benefit people with diverse backgrounds, strengths, and ways of thinking. Females and males being “different” is a good thing, we need to harness the brain power of both sexes.
Hi all,
Thanks for the enlightening discussion of our paper. Just wanted to make 2 quick points.
1. I do hear your points on the scale of Figure 2. However, if at all possible, I’d like to suggest focusing on the results of the underlying statistical tests, rather than how they were formatted for presentation in this journal. We formatted it this way with ease of interpretation in mind–it was certainly not necessary to “manipulate” or “distort” results that were so clearly significant, and with such a large effect size. The bottom line is that (male and female) faculty elected to pay a female applicant significantly less than an identical male applicant. That difference will always be significant, no matter how the y-axis is scaled.
2. @ Michel: this is taps something slightly different, but I’d recommend taking a look at Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/), where people can take very well-validated tests measuring their implicit gender bias (among other things). This could serve as a good educational tool about subtle, pervasive biases.
@ TW, Drake Sullivan and everyone else
I just want to emphasize the enormous pressure for female scientists to feel like they must be the cream of the crop in order to identify themselves as a “competent scientist”. I think our culture right now is more tolerant of mediocre male scientists over female scientists, and lets face it, most scientists aren’t operating at the level of winning Nobel Prizes or discovering the cure to a disease. We are talking about the middle of the road scientists. If you are a mediocre female scientist, it must be because you are female. If you are a mediocre male scientist, well, there are many explanations.
Furthermore, there is the tendency for females to have “impostor syndrome”, where they don’t feel like they belong in their fields of expertise.
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200907/the-imposter-syndrome)
“Men are more likely to attribute their success to internal factors (their ability and effort) and their failure to external factors (task difficulty and luck), whereas women are more likely to attribute their success to external factors and their failure to internal factors.” Even though no one really knows why this is, maybe it’s due to self-incorporation of cultural biases, which doesn’t just work against women but against minorities as well. I can only hope that as our society progress to become more equal and tolerant, these biases will disappear.
Not that it makes the finding any less sad, but I noticed in the application from the online supplementary material an excerpt from the letter of recommendation:
“… although (Jennifer/John) admittedly took a bit longer than some students to get serious about (his/her) studies early in college, she has impressed me by improving over the last two years of her science coursework and has made every effort to make up for lost ground… (she/he) has been a strong research assistant in my lab, and I know (he/she) is capable of serving as a dedicated lab manager”
Although this may show my own stereotypes , to me this seems to fit with a typically male narrative. Smart male (1430 GRE), who after slacking off for a year or two got his act together. The rest of the application is quite generic (e.g. “I am a motivated student”), and this is the last part of the application and therefore might really play a large role in how the professors judge the application. It would be interesting to know how the inclusion of this may have impacted the results.
Corinne, thanks for chiming in!
1) I don’t really get the pregnancy argument, in the short term, maternity leave can affect productivity but some of these posters (TW I’m looking at you) act like women just walk around and pop babies out nonstop. The average amount of kids per house hold is ~2, I am 22 years old right now, probably won’t have my first child for at least another 5 years. Why should I be denied a job because I *might* have a child in another 5 years…when I might not even be at the company anymore OR have children at all. This logic is just infuriating.
2) Anecdotal stories are NOT evidence, but just for fun here is my own anecdote: I am a recent college grad (University of Maryland College Park) with a double in astronomy and physics. I slacked off as much as possible, focused on my social life and outside interests, and was still able to maintain a 3.6/4.0 GPA. Seems like in this case I would have a “higher growth potential” than TW here because he couldn’t even do well in college…NASA was happy to have me post-grad.
I can understand the “pregnancy objection”, though I’m not sure if it has any actual consequence in the real world; even if it were a real issue, anyway, the proposed cure is completely absurd. The right thing to do would be to somehow “force” a balance between man and woman in maternity/paternity leaves; not hiring an otherwise competent woman just because you’re scared she might decide to have a baby is counterproductive and simply unjust.
That said, it’s really offensive the message that has been passed around that basically women might be hard worker, but on the other side they have definitely less potential than men; I’m really surprised that things like these have been said by so-called scientists after an evaluation based on *anectodal* evidence. Even by not considering the fact that it’s simply absurd to be able to think something like that, I think it’s a serious flaw in reasoning to argue, even on the internet, on anectodes. For a scientist in particular it’s something that can’t be forgiven.
I would love to know if Moss-Racusin and colleagues considered the possibility that there are two separate explanations for the findings presented in figure 2. While discrimination may account for the difference in proposed salary limits between male and female candidates, it is also possible that the female faculty may have unconsciously selected lower salary levels for female applicants based on their own prior salaries, and would have offered a similar lower level if they had received that CV with a male name. As I understand this, each faculty member only saw one CV and so there was no control evaluation to predict if they are “tightwads” or generally “generous” with job offers.
My husband and I have been academic researchers at the same institutions for many years. All through our post-doc years, he was employed at a slightly higher salary than I was, even though our performance and CVs were highly comparable. Only when I was promoted into a faculty position did I see a significant increase in my salary relative to his…. only to subsequently learn the amount that I received was substantially lower than male faculty were paid!! If you’ve only ever earned on the lower end of the scale, why would it cross your mind to offer a higher salary?
It’s a testament to how powerful peoples’ preconceived biases are. In my experience, female scientists and scientists in training, as a group, outperform their male colleagues. While it is somewhat of a competitive advantage for me that my colleagues don’t see it this way, it is an unmitigated disaster for the field that this kind of bias, and other challenges, drive so many women away.
I don’t see why you can’t enforce equal parental leave between the 2 parents, or make it easier for fathers to contribute to child rearing. I think women can still be productive while pregnant/nursing, especially in fields like computational biology where you can easily work from home. Even if your research normally requires you to do bench work, everyone can make use of time away from the bench to read literature, write up results, write a review paper or a grant, etc. A system that does not help 1/2 of the population succeed while retaining their ability to raise a family is a rigged and failed system. Women shouldn’t have to give up having children in fear of loss of opportunities.
@Megan: Why should I be denied a job because I *might* have a child in another 5 years…
I don’t get your argument. That’s like saying, why should I pay for insurance just because I might have a car accident?
I never said that women should be denied employment per se. I am just saying that deciding on the best candidate: the risk of pregnancy is a real disadvantage. But so are many other things like your prospective boss doesn’t like your face, you remind her of her ex-husband’s new wife, you are 5 years to old for your boss to apply for a special grant, or whatever…
@BG I understand your exhaustion, I’m in my first year of my masters, after taking 10 years between undergrad and grad so that I could work part time and raise my children. Even with school age children, balancing both is exhausting.
@VV&Lydia, thank you. It’s frustrating enough to be reduced to a uterus by the republicans, I hate seeing it here, too.
@ JF, I have a long drive home from my 3 hour long seminar class each week. Each week the professor talks us under the table until late at night, and I spend the entire drive home convincing myself I really do belong in that room. And he’s a male, feminist scientist. Imposter syndrome is real and isn’t helped by some of the attitudes expressed here.
And I agree about the broken system, emphatically!
This reinforces that I have a long journey ahead of me, in order to prepare my daughter for the biases she will have to address. It is my hope that I can guide her so that she doesn’t internalize so many of these negative messages.
@TW Do you have any actual evidence to substantiate your claims that pregnancy is a real disadvantage and actually has a substantial impact on productivity, or is it just something else only based on anectodes? And even if this was actually the situation, do you think that the right thing to do would just be to accept it and discriminate women?
I don’t think TW has evidence to support his claim, especially when he admits to not being fully committed to “what he’s supposed to be doing”. At work, you are supposed to do what you are supposed to do (oops, here we all are commenting on this post). The great thing about science is that it’s not just a 9-5 job. Most of us putting way more hours at work and at home and the work-life boundary is blurred. This also means that a nursing mother can still put in intellectual contribution to her work, especially in fields where you don’t even need to be in lab to do research. I know computational neuroscientists who spend a lot of time working at coffee shops.
I’ve also heard many parents say they gain laser focus when they have children, that they become much better time-managers and multitaskers. I’m not claiming I have scientific evidence for this, but lets say it’s true, that the woman who just had a child is working 50% of the time but being 100% efficient and spending the rest at home with her child, and that TW spends 50% of the time doing what “he’s supposed to be doing” and the rest of the time being distracted by his other interests like commenting on this post, then they should be equally as productive. This is an extreme example, but I just don’t think we should pretend like we are performing at 100% efficiency all the time. There is no reason to assume women with children are much less productive, and if they can get equal help from their partners, they’ll be just as productive as everyone else.