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.
So discouraging.
As for as the pay gap, I’ve seen it quite a few times in my short experience. The latest is maybe the most egregious: My boyfriend and his classmate, who he is close with, were hired by the same firm after graduation. They graduated from the same program, same school, literally all the same extracurriculars. She was actually ranked slightly higher than him and had a few years experience working in the field whereas my boyfriend had never had a job outside waiting tables in high school. They got talking and found out he’d been offered $5,000 more starting salary than her. She took it up with management with much more grace than I think I would have been capable of in her situation. They claimed the difference was a “typo” on her paperwork. I haven’t been able to ask her yet in private her reaction to the whole thing, though my boyfriend apparently found it amusing. He kept teasing her about it. Again, such grace! I most surely would have punched him in his adorable face.
@TW and other commenters, why is pregnancy the only gender factor you cite? What about the fact that men have twice as high a prevalence of alcoholism? How about social skills? Retention rates? Performance after hire? Incidence of chronic disease? Surely, you’ve examined all of these factors from a gender perspective to come to your purely rational perspective on hiring. Or is this just cherry-picking? I believe recent research shows that people often come to their opinions on topics first by gut feel, then find logical reasons why those positions must be right. Are you sure that doesn’t describe you?
@ Odexios
Here is an excerpt from a study I found that shows an actual increase in worker productivity with the enactment of maternity/family leave policies. It’s a PDF but here’s the title & authors:
The Impact of “Family-Friendly Policies” on Women’s Employment Outcomes and on the Costs and Benefits of Doing Business
Janet C. Gornick Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Ariane Hegewisch Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)
On page 20, it reads:
Research Finds Overwhelmingly Positive Effects of Leave on Employers in High Income Countries
Research on the impact of leave on employers is more limited than on the impact on women, but finds little evidence of substantial costs or problems for employers in response to leave.
A 19- country OECD study of trends in multi factor productivity (MFP) in response to maternity/ parental leave from 1979 – 2003, comparing female to male dominated sectors, found no negative effects on productivity, and concludes: “If countries with no unpaid maternity leave (such as the US) introduced this measure at the average OECD level (15 weeks), they could increase MFP by 1.1 percent in the long run.” (Bassanini and Venn, 2008:11).
Doug #84 makes a good point, and Sandra #86 proves it; it is sexism that hurts both genders. Sandra #86 is of course the female side of sexism. When I need a break or need help, I take it and/or ask without any harm to my ego because I’m able to accurately analyze my performance or lack of it. I also have an ever so slightly receding hairline that I ask my barber to not cover up; because that’s just pathetic IMO. If you look at a profession dominated by women, then you’ll find the same thing taking place with men getting paid less.
It has been an uphill battle, especially in the sciences for pay equality. It would be good to think about why the gender bias exists. Is this why so many young girls leave the sciences?
I don’t agree with the idea that women should get less pay simply because they might become pregnant at some time. Think about what kind of society we would have if only uneducated, unemployable women had children.
Reading all the comments, the ones that want to deny these findings seem to proclaim “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts”. Kudos to Greg for his response!
I agree with the main premise and see it in my workplace all the time too (I’m in engineering grad school), but the second graph shows your bias. The fact that the y-axis begins at $26K rather than $0K gives a misleading picture about what the difference in salaries is: still significant, but much less so than the chart would have you believe.
Not ok to suppress the y-axis to make your point seem stronger. It makes a 15% effect look like a factor of 3.
You’d be wrong, Brett #104. For example, female RNs make 86.5% of what male RNs do. For social workers, it’s 90%. There are a few occupations where women earn more than men, but the highest one the Bureau of Labor Statistics could find was food preparation workers, where women earn 112% of what men do. Compare that to multiple professions where women earn 70% or less of what men do: http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2011/women/pdf/women_bls_spotlight.pdf
Re: “A rational agent should factor risk of pregnancy into it’s [sic] decision.”
I’m a married female physicist in my early 30s. If you didn’t know me well–and members of a hiring committee are unlikely to—you might make the erroneous assumption that I might get pregnant.
But you’d be wrong.
I have a less than 1% chance of getting pregnant, and 0% chance of keeping any child possibly conceived.
But thanks for discriminating against me anyway.
Not happy about these results, but they do seem to be pretty hard to deny. I am curious about the root of this bias, and what causes it.
I think the next focus of study could be demographics on the individuals who evaluate women lower than men. For instance, how strongly correlated are these results which favor men over equally qualified women to individual evaluators? Is the trend very broad, or are a few rotten apples spoiling the whole thing? Is there an age association with this sexism? What about regional or cultural association? And how about gender association. It is noteworthy that both men and women discriminate against women in this regard. I’d like to see more specifics on these numbers.
Also, I wonder what would happen if you matched a male applicant against a slightly more qualified female applicant? In other words, how much (if any) of the gender bias arises solely when the two applicants are otherwise equally qualified?
On a biological level, males are far more likely to have managerial traits like being assertive, being confident, being consistent, being an authoritative figure. This is why men are more likely to be seen as suitable for manager/admin -type role. Feminists – grow up, the workforce has historically been a man’s world for biological reasons – the same reasons why you don’t see men at home trying to nurse babies. Men are biologically made for work, especially in leadership roles and in positions of manual labor. Its strictly biological differences. I dont see men whining that they cant be stay at home dads and raise kids – because this is clearly still to this day a woman’s role – women are just made for it biologically. Bottom line.. BIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES AND GENDER ROLES EXIST FOR A REASON, STOP TRYING TO CHANGE THAT
Somehow I’ve escaped the biological urge to do all these womanly things suggested by Papovich at #112. What I have done over the last 10 years is a lot of hiring in academia, mostly students (undergrad and graduate) and postdocs. It has given me a fair sample from which to draw my own conclusions about what is desirable in a trainee, though who knows whether the outcome is affected by innate biases affecting my interactions with those trainees.
In addition to the sub-conscious biases uncovered in this study that seemingly lurk within each of us, I have developed acknowledged (to myself) prejudices based on my experiences with trainees. In particular, applicants from one particular country have shown themselves, when hired, to be nothing like their transcripts, awards, recommendation letters suggest, and have performed very poorly in comparison to other trainees with less stellar resumes. This means I have a prejudice against applicants from this country. I don’t reject them out-of-sorts, but I don’t believe the publicity. It would be unfair of me to dismiss the individual applicant from this country because of my prejudice. Instead, I have developed a set of exercises and questions which I pose to all candidates who make it past the first screening. It is more difficult for applicants from this country without a track record including refereed publications to make it past the first screening because I have less to go on than other applicants, and I regret that. It is probably also more difficult for a candidate from that country to impress me even if they get beyond that first screening.
I think it is important to acknowledge our prejudices and to treat each applicant as an individual, and it can be very difficult.
Let’s just hope TW and cronies are force-retired soon, and that the next generation can do better than theirs. I mean wow! Granted he is probably one dirty old dudes who make my poster look like such a hot spot at the conference, but I would gladly be rid of those d-bags for a lick of intellectual justice.
@Odexios: “@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… based on anectodes?”
Of course, it is. The woman is simply NOT at work. If that is not a disadvantage, I don’t know what. I have seen 4 of my colleagues being pregnant and work just stopped for months. 3 had not interest for work after the child was born. But I also have to say that the law makes it worse. Most women when in the late stages are still happy to contribute and work for several hours from home, but are NOT allowed by law to have tasks assigned, even though they wouldn’t mind and bore themselves to death at home.
@Greg: @TW and other commenters, why is pregnancy the only gender factor you cite?
Pregnancy risk is a risk affecting all woman and a very clear SEX (not gender) factor. I cannot think of any other, except men having to do military services or being exposed to claims of paedophilia when working with kids, or women not having the necessary physical strength.
>Kris, there’s a very famous example in the sciences of women being hired partly because the pay differential allowed for a larger workforce at the same price:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
It’s striking that the chosen example was from 100 years ago.
@McJibJab: Please stay on topic. No need for personal attacks. We are just presenting counter-arguments. Force-retiring is certainly discrimination: one ideology simply pushing out those that do not agree. And for the record, I still have at least 25 years to retirement. In fact, most young woman are not moaning. It is the women of my generation from 35 upwards that moan. And many blame their failure on discrimination rather than on any other factors.
@Sean: No need to use the word “troll”. I would like you to give counter-arguments instead and engage in the debate.
@ TW: on topic? okay… ahem- cause ‘physical strength’ is essential at the bench? ha! By your own standards this is totally on topic…
TW, I will take you in a pushup contest, foot race, bike, or swim. But I’d rather stay in the lab and find things you hadn’t thought to look for. Good luck catching up with the world, dude
What were the sexes of the scientists who were questionned!? I suspect if you were to only include the data from male scientists you would have a stronger male bias, whilst if you only took the responses from females scientists, you would have a female bias!?
Why doesnt the salary scale start at 0? Trying to overhype the bias are we?
To all who question the validity of Figure 2 on the basis of a non-zero axis: Wow… are any of you actually scientists? I am a researcher at Caltech and the majority of my published graphs do not have an axis that begins at zero. If differences between data points are statistically signifcant, there is no reason why you cannot adjust the range of a graph to more clearly visualize a trend. Go back to stats class. Oh wait… according to TW, classes don’t mean shit for men. I guess this is why there are so many male commenters who do not understand this extremely basic principle routinely taught in high school science classes.
Very interesting, esp because non-scientists like myself are taught that good scientists rely on data not unsupported hunches. This seems not to be the case, judging by this debate, and throws light on a lot of bad science.
I am confused by @TW’s logic that being lazy means you are a better hire because you are a) smarter (based on what evidence?) and b) might someday not be lazy. However his broader point deserves the benefit of the doubt.
I have noticed at work that women tend to take on a lot of procedural or supportive tasks that benefit the team but not them personally. Men save their energy for the big moment when they’ll get more glory. This is exacerbated by work assignments from male managers, and the tendency of male managers to hang around with their non-busy male subordinates. The not-so-busy employee also has more time to think creativity. Therefore women should simply stop doing anything that doesn’t benefit them personally, remain free to brainstorm with the boss or let your mind wander to that prize-winning idea, and get someone else to do the grunt work. In my profession this would go a long way towards women getting the same recognition as men.
I think it is true that child-rearing (not pregnancy) takes a lot more time than most people expect. I don’t think it would hurt feminists and equal-ists to acknowledge that. Most men get around this by having their wives take up the slack. If more women worked and stood their ground on sharing the burden, more husbands would be forced to be reasonable about balancing work-family commitments.
#112 Nathan Popovich has clearly not spent much time in less developed economies, where it is very common to see women working tough manual labor in the fields or keeping long hours in shops while men sit around and chat.
In the past few years in my company, one man has had a nervous breakdown and missed 4 months of work. Another had to be removed from a post due to alcoholism. Various men have quit for other jobs, two of them within 2 months of getting a promotion. Four senior men failed to be promoted and were kept on the payroll for several months to one year each while they did very little but look for other jobs. One man had a stroke in the office and missed months of work. Three men and one woman missed several weeks of work each due to broken bones. Two women had to take off time for severe anemia. Four women have gone on maternity leave (including myself) while at least two others quit once they were pregnant, thereby sparing the company from any pregnancy-related expense or absence. My point is simply that there are lots of reasons for long, expensive absences. Pregnancy at least you can plan around.
I have suffered under bosses who lack confidence or consistency – those bosses have all been male. I’ve had some good male bosses too, and some good female bosses. I’ve had underperforming male colleagues and underperforming female colleagues.
My “scientific” conclusion therefore that employers should select for intelligence, competence, assertiveness, confidence, consistency and authoritativeness, not select for male or female. If they are selecting for male instead, based on the logic in some of these posts, then it should be no surprise that there are so many mediocre hires.
@MarriedToaScientist: You did not read the second post. Men at university usually do other things than focus on coursework, and that does not mean that they don’t learn something for life. You equate grades with success in science. I disagree. it’s maybe true for an administrative job but not for a science job (except maybe tedious lab work).
I also did not say that laziness should be rewarded. I am just saying that if both men and women have the same grade. I expect the men to have more potential and the women to have worked harder for the grade on average. That is how I would decide. If you are the boss, then just decide how ever you want to decide. I don’t care. i just care about output.
@44 TW:I just gave you one example. I spent more than 10 years in this environment. I saw it over and over again. Grades and ability to do good science do not 100% correlate. Women just get better grades by studying more and more regularly but that doesn’t mean the men didn’t learn other stuff in the mean time.
I’ve seen it too. I had a friend who actually skipped a grade in high school. Each year I helped him study for his exams, which were a year ahead of me. I even helped him study for his first year university exams while I was still in high school. He consistently got marks that were 5-10 percentage points higher than mine, but I was consistently teaching him the same stuff for his finals that I had taught him for his mid-terms and other tests. He functioned by rote memorization, not by understanding.
My issue is that you are generalizing from your experience with one (as you mentioned in your the first post I responded to) or even several (as you mention in your post @44) to THE ENTIRE GENDER OF WOMEN. It ain’t so.
The CVs were not the same. Sex is an additional piece of information.
And it was the ONLY piece of information that was different on the CV. The name was either a masculine or feminine name.
And we are humans and are all biased as we take a lot of unconscious decisions based on our experience. So many might have unconsciously discounted for pregnancy risk and potential.
Perhaps. That’s irrelevant to the study. The study was not asking why people are biased, it was measuring whether they are biased.
I would be interested in whether just men had this bias or also female reviewers.
Obviously you’re not reading the article above. Trolling? Let me refresh your memory:
Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.
And the study is somewat unrealistic, because NO-ONE is hired by CV but by interview.
And again, you’re not reading the article. The article didn’t ask reviewers to hire the person from the CV. It asked them to rate the competency of the person represented on the CV. Period.
In the real world, the person on this CV might be called for an interview, if the name is male. And the person might NOT be called for an interview if the name is female.
Put it another way, Theresa (I’m going to guess that’s your first name). Since I’ve guessed that you’re female, I can make certain assumptions about you even though all I know about you is what you’ve posted here.
Those assumptions might be wrong, or they might be right…but without meeting you and getting to know you, that’s all I have to go on – what you’ve written and your name, Theresa.
On the other hand, Thomas (and now I’m switching your first name), when I look at your posts again, I come to a different set of assumptions about who you are and what type of person you are. Merely by changing the named attached to your posts.
@TW – Seriously? You really need to expand on the females you have encountered in your life. What if they don’t want a kid, ever? Ever met one of those? Do you think it’s fair to not let them have the job, even if they’re more qualified? Especially when, you “prove” that they study and focus better than men. Yes, you’ll find that quality more common in women because they have to work harder to even be given a chance in the first place, but you will also find that quality in men too. I’ve met many men (and women) who work hard and push their limits to the max… it’s varies from person to person. What you’re implying is that men are smarter than women even when they don’t try. That’s called sexism, so don’t be surprised if you’re pissing a lot of people off. Imagine comparing the hire-ability of white men against black men. If the white man was higher that wouldn’t be fair either and something would be said and done about it. But in this case nothing gets done about it because “men are the bosses”. Try putting yourself in our shoes.
Anyway, you’ve taught me that if I apply for a job now and get rejected, I’ll have to sink to asking “Is is because I’m a woman?” … I really thought we were beyond that …