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.
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@Erin: Judging from the fact that you responded just 3 minutes after I did, seems like you have plenty of time to check the comments! You’re right, you didn’t outright call me a name. I notice that you continue to have the time to post here, but manage to keep avoiding making any comment on the fact that men are more highly represented among the high-IQ end of our society. Is that idea really so unpalatable to you?
By the way, here’s a scientific article saying that men in fact are more intelligent on average (which is apparently a new upcoming trend) by about 3-5 IQ points, because they are… get this; taller!
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women
@Erin @Nir
Hilarious to see a domineering male shout down a woman, appealing to reason rather than emotion. You can come armed with all the facts in the world and be as loud, as confident and as right as you want, but at the end of the day, you’re still what you are. And with the indignation about her hiring practices… heaven forbid a better qualified white male ever get passed over for a job he deserves. In your ideal world of “fairness”, “equality of opportunity, not outcome” etc., women and minorities get the short end of the stick. Justify it however you want.
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I’m female and have years of experience in sciences, along with numerous publications and stellar references. I’ve been flat-out told during job interviews that my being female was a strike against me (my first name is gender neutral). With the exception of two labs, I’ve always been asked what my family planning plans are during job interviews. I’ve also been told that I was not considered for jobs because I was in my child-bearing years. Joke’s on them as I’m infertile and have never felt like discussing it with anyone who is asinine enough to base hiring criteria on it. I seriously doubt the scientific prowess of anyone with such a strong bias for something as silly as gender.
1 in 8 couples, worldwide, who are trying to have kids is infertile. There’s no way of knowing if that woman you’re interviewing is a member of one of those couples or not. It’s not like we have a giant I stamped on our foreheads. There’s no way of knowing if that woman wishes to remain childfree for any reason. Making an assumption about a person just because of gender or marital status is frankly idiotic.
And so what if a woman has a child? If she’s unable to adapt due to problems in the workplace, it means there’s a problem in the workplace. Allowing for flexible schedules benefits everyone, including non-parents. And this notion that more hours on the job leads to increased productivity is ridiculously outdated. More hours in the lab just lead to more mistakes and more expensive experiments that have to be repeated due to brain fog.
@Nir, you are not the first male scientist to point to the greater variance in male IQ as a convenient argument to excuse the gender bias in academia. I remember there was quite a raucous when MIT published an article with a similar argument. I just don’t find it satisfying, especially when IQ trends for men and women are not at all static.
For example, type in Men and Women IQ into Google, what are the first articles that you see? There titles follow something like this: “Women overtake men in IQ tests for the first time in 100 years…”
I went to the article that you sited:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women
And found the following quote:
“Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence: Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people. And men in every human population are taller than women. So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller. Our analysis of a large representative American sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health shows that this is indeed the case. In fact, once we control for height, women are slightly but significantly more intelligent than men. Further controlling for health, physical attractiveness, age, race, education, and earnings does not alter this conclusion. Height has exactly the same effect on intelligence for men and women: Each inch in height increases the IQ by about .4 point. The partial effect of height on intelligence is more than three times as strong as the partial effect of sex.”
Now, this is still talking about average and not variance, but I like the way it introduces a new factor to the equation and challenges previous findings of sex differences in IQ. Instead of discriminating against women, we should really be discriminating against short people (JOKE).
The results about higher variance in men’s IQ fit so snuggly in your preexisting bias that you immediately adopted it into your schema as the logical reason for why you’ve noticed better male mathematicians in your field. You yourself admitted that IQ might not be the best measurement of intelligence. Have you ever thought of how the biased society in which your women and men colleagues were raised might have caused their apparent differences in math ability in your observation?
I had a very interesting conversation with a UT Austin graduate student earlier this year about a study that showed the effect of self-bias in standardize testing. It went something like this: if asian students were able to check a “race” box at the beginning of the exam identifying themselves as asian, they were significantly more likely to perform better on math portions than other races. However, if asians were allowed to check their sex as well, the boost of being asian was negated by being a woman. I don’t know if this has published and a preliminary search has not turned out anything, but it has long been known that minorities self incorporate cultural biases to their own detriment. Could inner biases against women be present in your female colleagues, could these biases account for historically lower performance by women in STEM fields?
In this article: “Is the female of the species really more intelligent than the male?” I found some interesting quotes, please enjoy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9404856/Is-the-female-of-the-species-really-more-intelligent-than-the-male.html
“For years, the cause of the Flynn Effect (increasing IQ scores over the decades) was a mystery. One thing it could not be was genetic: the effect is happening too fast for any form of evolution to be occurring. In the end, it was Flynn himself who solved the mystery. The effect, he argued, is not due to innate changes in our brains, but to how they react to the sort of problems that define the modern world. In this sense IQ, or rather differences in IQ, may not be so much a measure of intelligence as of modernity…It is this that may give us a clue as to why women are not only catching up with men but, in some places, starting to overtake them. There may be something innate about the way women’s brains are put together (or the demands placed upon them) that allows them to cope with complexity and the need to systematise. As Prof Flynn said at the weekend: “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen, but women’s have risen faster. This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.””
Now, I’m not going to wield the results from these studies around like a piece of armor or safety net. I’m not going to cherry pick quotes or results from articles to support a claim that somehow women are more intelligent than men, or whether they are more likely to succeed in life. I’m not going to accept these results as never-changing facts. I’m not going to use these findings to excuse sexism. And I am not going to use these findings to influence my hiring practices or to deny anyone their fair chance at opportunity, when the day comes for me to be in the position to do so. Do I sometimes wish men like you will in your next life be subjected to the existence like that of the male angler fish, hyena, or jacana? Yes. But men like you are on the decline, and when you are gone, the world will be the better for it.
So to all men like Nir, please don’t be so smug with yourself. Don’t use one finding to justify your sexism. Women and men both have a lot to offer. When girls are raised in a society that encourages them to pursue science and math as much as it encourages boys, I can only imagine that you’ll find yourself among more capable, confident, and assertive colleagues.
PS. Gender bias in earnings is all across the board, not just for jobs in science that require people who have >120IQs. So, what’s your excuse for that? Sexism is more dangerous when it is subtle, so thank you, TW, and others for your candor, it exposes the mindset of people who might be in power to influence hiring decisions.
Babies, brains, and booty.
To be honest, it still seems to me that attacking unfair discrimination based on any criteria is a far better goal than just one factor.
In other words, I don’t get why scientists don’t do science on hiring. What hiring techniques lead to successful hires? Which suck? Too high a dose of reality?
If you don’t get along with your boss or your subordinate it doesn’t matter what background they have or what physical attributes, your chances of success are much lower. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy.
I really don’t get why science has found effective ways for identifying psychopaths but can’t test for compatible candidates? (Though, I suspect it’s because scientists look at individuals without considering their relationship to the group culture they would have to adapt to)
Thanks for the good reads.
Anonymous, until people make the legal complaints that they should, labs and others will get away with asking those personal questions. But please remember–EVEN ASKING YOU THOSE QUESTIONS is ILLEGAL. If no women answered those questions, but instead redirected the interviewer, that would help. Every one of us needs to defend our rights or they will be eroded. Do not reward their illegal acts by answering!
This is from employment.findlaw.com:
llegal Interview Questions to Avoid
It’s not that women have an unfair advantage over men during the interview process, yet some federal and state laws prohibit prospective employers from asking certain questions that primarily relate to women.
Examples of questions that may discriminate include:
Do you have any children? If so, how many and what are their ages?
Are you single, married, divorced, or engaged?
What kind of childcare arrangements do you have in place?
Are you currently taking any form of birth control or fertility treatment?
What are your plans if you get pregnant?
Does your spouse work? If so, what does your spouse do for a living?
Should we refer to you as Mr., Miss, or Mrs.?
and here is an appropriate response, from Dummies.com/how-to/answering-job-interview-questions-about-family:
When cornered, try this tactic to assure you won’t become a staffing problem down the line:
Whether or not I plan to have children in the future is not central to my career. Like so many other energetic women today, I intend to work and have a career no matter what happens in my personal life.
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“…people with the same ability should be treated equally.”
300 Million years ago,…
Oh, never mind. It’s pointless to converse with people of different abilities.
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Next level of analysis would be revealing. To what extent do the differences in competence, mentoring etc. account for the differences in salary recommendations? Or, do the differences in compensation exceed that which would be predicted by the differences in perceived competence etc.?
If you look at the paper’s supporting material you will find that the participants were informed about the purpose of the study as follows: “In the current phase of the study, we are interested in how undergraduate students’ [sic] are selected for competitive lab manager positions following their graduation and before they apply to doctoral programs.”
Thus the people who participated in the study knew what it was studying. So it’s not obvious to me that it’s possible to conclude that their responses were identical to what they’d give if they were hiring for their own program. Perhaps some would be more prejudiced against women in an actual hiring case. Perhaps some realized that it was a study of sex biases and adjusted their answers accordingly.
I’d rather see a situation where, for example, the same application was used to apply to grad school. These tests are frequently split into piles where one faculty member is assigned to each pile. It should be possible to run a test on that without the faculty knowing that they’re being tested.
Omg it’s hilarious to see all the men defending men on this by coming up with some dumb, petty excuse.
this is a study that proves it yet they’re still not willing to believe it exists. this is some sad, sad stuff.
I was disturbed to see that the “pregnancy argument” that TW makes was also made, many times over, by young future physicians in response to a similar study. (The study found a 17K gender gap in physician starting pay with all other factors controlled for.)
This link highlights some of them: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5255&blogid=140
As a supplement, they note that “of participants, 74% were male and 81% were White.”
And everyone seems unanimous to maintain the equilibrium!
@ Syd,
Men do it because women do it. Women do it because men do it. I guess the concept of conservation truly is a universal phenomena. What’s really some sad, sad stuff is watching all these people who can’t see how similar both sexes are in their social behavior. How would you react to someone saying:
” Omg it’s hilarious to see all the women defending women on this by coming up with some dumb, petty excuse.
this is a study that proves nothing, yet they’re still willing to believe it exists. this is some sad, sad stuff. “
@ TW,
If women are getting lower ratings for the exact same resume in a workplace, is it really that much of a jump to think that maybe they are also getting lower ratings for equally good school work? I have known plenty of girls in college who completed assignments/ take home exams with a male friend, and received a substantially lower grade on the assignment/ exam than male friend, despite having turned in identical work.
Before you decide that two candidates of the opposite sex have the same grades and therefore the man is the better choice, maybe you should think about the possibility that the woman was already having to perform better just to receive equal grades.
@ Meh
this isn’t about how men and women pick on each other.
im a dude and i realize that males are way more privileged then females. especially when it comes to getting a job.
this study shows that by just switching the gender on job applications men got the jobs just for being male. if you’re going to support that and the fact qualified men get beaten by overqualified women there is something wrong.
and of course it’s going to be mainly men who get agitated over the face that this is being brought to people’s attention. it makes sense because we like these odds and rather than equal the job playing field out, we make some dumb excuse as to why things like this are bogus.
im sorry i had to clarify this out for you
you didn’t “clarify it out” for anyone, you just assumed I was attacking you and made an ass of yourself by making a stereotypical trolling comment. I also don’t think your a man. I think you’re just claiming to be a man to try and make a point. I’m sorry you feel that every attempt at coexistence and equivalence of the sexes is an attack on you. My point IS that it’s about how people like you and men like those you specified, do pick on each other like whiny and pathetic brats instead of making logical points so that something can be accomplished in a discussion. Your previous comment, and this one, are simply spam due to their pointless and snarky nature. Like those men you spoke about, you are an inverse extreme on the spectrum of dumb and petty excuses.
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Has anyone out there ask an employer?
As an employer of a small business owner in my industry we’ve found that the cost of women in some positions are higher at least that what comes to our minds rightly or wrongly.
If you hire a female for the same position – suddenly a small business owner has to consider: 1. potentiality maternity costs
2. bathrooms (thinking in terms of tradesman)
3. balance to current teams ….. among many other elements.
The reality is we dont we’re too busy and just drop the price down. (if we can)
Basically I see this is an opportunity for women. From a small business point of view if i can hire a woman that can do the same as a man i would – generally speaking (abit more complex in my business). Therefore you’d expect that women would have more chance of getting the position initially. The rest is up to that individual.
As a professional, she would acquire “the right” for a pay rise – what i mean by that is showing her worth or value to the business or she moves on. Pretty soon all employers will be paying more – simple. You know economic rules.
regards
David
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@ David
If you are running a business and haven’t considered, before starting the business, what would happen if you actually employ both men and women–I hope the rest of your business plan was more carefully thought out. Because I think eliminating half of your potential employee pool at the start would be rather short sighted.
Maternity costs to you might occur. So might prostate cancer costs. So might granting leave to a male employee who chooses to stay home with a baby. So might granting leave to a male employee whose father has a stroke and needs 24 hour care.
I would hope that, for your customers’ sake, you have installed bathrooms for both sexes. Although I don’t see why men and women can’t each clean up after themselves and have a unisex restroom. I don’t know the legal requirements on that.
The truth is, rightly or wrongly, that if you are considering the person’s sex when you don’t hire a female employee…you are breaking the law. If you are considering the person’s sex when you do hire a female employee, but offer her less than her male counterpart…you are breaking the law. I surely hope that you are not describing your own business practices re: hiring women with your “just drop the price down” comment.
This is the 21st century. Women can own property and vote, too. I’m curious to know what “your” business is, that you think is so complicated women might not be able to handle. In my immediate family, women have been stage managers, union welders, rock climbing instructors, union carpenters, professional landscapers (both design and planting), heavy equipment operators, and plumbers. Oh yeah, and in several instances–the boss.
I find it really funny from the comments that the bias that’s usually referred as subconscious is actually a CONSCIOUS one. I also don’t see how telling people about this bias would help them not to be biased, if they already feel entitled to be such, even breaking the law is not being a problem… Scientist make judgements based on presented facts, not on their imagination, really??? (otherwise I would give no credit to their research). The experiment is pretty much taking the same person and randomly assigning them a female or a male name. I was conducting a real life experiment on this myself, attaching different names to my qualifications. The male ones were treated much more favorably. Another famous example is “James Chartrand” (google) and other female writers changing their names for male ones. I don’t know, what’s the “scientific” explanation to how is changing somebody’s name makes the same person more qualified?
As for maternity leaves… doesn’t absenteeism and employee attrition cost more? wouldn’t discrimination and harassment potentially cost much more? I found it really myopic with my past employer how scared he was of “maternity leaves”, yet, with me the only female working there (and not missing), men were allowed to be on all possible leaves – including taking care of children and even dating! No I didn’t quit because of any pregnancy.
Speaking of statistics, an average time people spent at one job in the US is 4 years. There are 2.01 children born per a woman (say, anytime during 25 years). With at will employment, it makes on average 3 times less likely for a woman to quit because of pregnancy, then for a men (or a woman) to be terminated or quit for any reason… When hiring somebody, go ahead and toss a coin, it would make more sense and science then any gender bias.