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.
See my comments on the same topic at http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/09/23/bias-against-women-persists-in-science/
Here’s a contrarian thought: with grant money as tight as it is, lower pay could be a distinct advantage to female applicants! Maybe that’s why it seems like the majority of new hires around here are phenotypically XX.
@Meh:
Wow, way to throw away any credibility you might have had.
@David:
“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. ”
This assumes that human beings are rational economic actors. Behavioral economists have demonstrated time and time again that this is simply not the case. Ever hear the phrase “No Irish need apply?” Why were employers intentionally forgoing the most inexpensive labor in favor of WASPS back in the 1800’s? Because human beings do not make economically optimal choices.
In what ways are humans irrational? Well, they discriminate on the basis of variables that are poor predictors of competence and productivity. Read the thread for examples — TW and Papovich are striking ones.
Pregnancy is also a factor for transgender men who haven’t had bottom surgery. It’s not a factor for infertile cisgender women or for transgender women. Last I checked, fertility status wasn’t a question on common job applications, nor was birth control status, or your opinion about abortion.
So all you talking about pregnancy: what’s your point? You can’t tell by someone having a feminine name that they’re going to get pregnant.
@ Meh
Wow, man. Just because I believe in an equal and non-biased job playing field it automatically makes me a woman? That’s not really how gender or sex works at all, and I am completely positive that I am in fact, male.
No, I support it because I’m tired of under-qualified coworkers who don’t know a thing about what they’re doing that could have been replace with a more profitable worker. Also, I didn’t think I would have to remind you that this is MY opinion. You calling me an asshole, a troll, and a “whiny brat” or whatever just for not agreeing with you is insanely childish. I wasn’t trying to attack you in my previous comment. I was only trying to clear things up and you took it the wrong way, I understand.
But to insult my beliefs is just being rude. I’m sorry if you don’t support equality through gender. You don’t have to.
I picked at men because I looked and saw that male names were the majority of the comments making excuses, it was the logical thing for me to observe at the time.
I am also not going to go back and forth with this either; there isn’t really a point to it. This is the last comment I’m making just for the sole purpose of standing up for myself and my values.
I’m surprised how many people dispute ‘maternity risk’ as being a real phenomenon. As a society we’ve come to the consensus that it is unethical to discriminate against individuals on the basis of statistical generalizations, which I completely support, but this doesn’t in any way invalidate the underlying statistic. I think Daniel Kahnman describes this situation very well in Thinking Fast and Slow.
I have no high quality evidence, but my intuition is that women who have just finished their undergraduate degrees and are about to take a temporary job before continuing their careers are more likely to take time off to start a family than a man at a similar point in his life. I’d increase my estimate of the odds if said woman was in her early thirties.
So I agree with TW’s appraisal in this regard, I just think that it would be unethical to act on it. I’m sure many a PI looking to hire for a postdoc position has agonized over this decision, and I’m sure many a PI has been burned for doing the right thing. So by all means bemoan the fact that granting agencies don’t include contingency funds to hire new staff in the event of a mat. leave, or that child care is so inaccessible, but I don’t think it’s helpful or honest to pretend that a young woman isn’t more likely to take a 9-12 mo leave of absence than a comparably aged male, even counting all the trouble young men are more likely to get into (WoW addiction anyone?)
p.s. My grad student is currenly on maternity leave. We are thrilled for her, but can’t wait to have her back at work 😉
In my experience in the US, women in science leaving on maternity leave are gone for a max of 2 months, more usually 4-6 weeks, so really not a big deal. So at least in the US, this is a non-issue, even for a limited term postdoctoral appointment.
Women got better marks because they worked harder? Then one might suspect they will also do the job more effectively because they work harder.
Taking time off to have children, which might happen once, twice, or never in a woman’s career, is a reason not to hire them? It is simply a double standard. I have observed a company avoiding women because they take time off to have babies, while they subsidize the company ski chalet where men break bones and take off just as much time to recover, without anyone penalizing their career chances. Or taking off several weeks for “mental fatigue” after a few years of drinking a case of been every weekend. It’s not only illegal and unfair, it’s a waste of talent.
One study a few years ago found that even in enlightened Sweden, female scientists had to publish five times as much to be considered equal.
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I suggest that women who decide not to return to work immediately and TW’s women over 35 who are “moaning” about workplace discrimination may both have recognized that they’re not getting anywhere because of sexist evaluation of their skill, their competence, their ambition, and their leadership. Speaking of leadership, this is for whoever said men were naturally seen as better leaders:
“Research shows that incongruities between perceptions of female gender roles and leadership roles cause evaluators to assume that women will be less competent leaders. When women leaders provide clear evidence of their competence, thus violating traditional gender norms, evaluators perceive them to be less likeable and are less likely to recommend them for hiring or promotion (Eagly and Karau; Ridgeway; Heilman et al.).”
This is from the brochure mentioned above about bias,
http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/BiasBrochure_2ndEd.pdf
A friend commented, “It’s just not a discussion of a study that proves sexism exists without a bunch of men denying it.”
@Erin:
“I think it’s atrocious that you think men are inherently better at math. ”
So what, precisely, is your evidence that men and women are exactly equal at math? Their achievements in this field are clearly dramatically different. It seems you want to claim that this vast difference is exactly accounted for by vast amounts of discrimination, social gender pressure, etc etc, that exactly balance things out. That seems rather like the Fine Tuning problem of feminist studies.
To make a credible claim of a precise underlying symmetry, you surely need some data to back it up. (Since you’re a logical scientist.) What are these data, please? Or is it actually just a hunch on your part? Thanks very much.
@Drake
If you want evidence about equality of math skills, look on my blog post (http://mickteaching.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/women-in-science/). That post has a link to a review about stereotype threat – this result is highly repeatable: women and men do equally well at mathematical tests, until the participants are told women do worse. Then the women do in fact do worse. Substitute any group that has a tradition of being unfairly discriminated against, and you get the same result.
As I understand, there might be some gender-based reason for the extreme tail of exceptionally high performance in mathematics. But it is hard to disentangle that very slim tail from questions of opportunity. Such studies are necessarily correlative, so they have limited explanatory power.
The study that on which the initial blog post was based is fully experimental, as are the studies on stereotype threat. They also produce repeatable results.
@Julia
I don’t think discussing the topic will reduce bias among those who consciously believe that women perform worse the men. However, there are plenty of people with unconscious gender bias. Making those people aware that unconscious gender bias exists should help (and the evidence suggests it does).
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Nice job suppressing the zero in the salary graph. Sure does make it dramatic and adds pizzazz. Stay classy, Discover.
Moss-Racusin, et al. (2012) erroneously interpret the failure of the subjects of their study to commit the base-rate fallacy (ignore background information) as sexism. That the applications were designed to reflect ‘slightly ambiguous competence’ makes the background information (the sex of the applicant) all the more important, and exacerbates the authors’ error. The sex of the applicant contains important information, there are significant sex differences, actually dichotomies, in terms of motivation. In order to attract a high value mate, men have to compete with other men for their rank in the male dominance hierarchy and this translates directly into men contesting each other for positions within organisations. There is no parallel for women. The article by Moss-Racusin, et al. is ill-motivated (in reality, there is no intersexual competition), wrong (the authors commit the base-rate fallacy) and sexist (the authors implicitly deny sex differences).
Since the job the fictitious student was being considered for was “lab manager,” could it be that the bias was against women as managers, rather than women as scientists?
@Drake
Michael answered your question, but
“It seems you want to claim that this vast difference is exactly accounted for by vast amounts of discrimination, social gender pressure, etc etc, that exactly balance things out.”
You don’t know what I want to claim, so you just go straight to the extreme opposite of your beliefs as a straw man argument. You are 1. completely wrong about the existence of a vast difference between men and women’s mathematical abilities, and 2. already confident in your beliefs about women. No data will convince you of anything different.
Also @Martin Sewell Is the idea that women should be paid less when they have the same qualifications for the same job, because they are less motivated, from an evolutionary perspective, because they don’t need to compete to find a mate ? That’s pretty funny. The world, and people, are more complicated than that. Modern hiring laws are definitely more complicated than that.
@Michael
Thank you very much for your answer – this sounds like exactly the sort of response that might change my mind completely on this topic. I’d like to look at the study in detail, but I’m not sure which one you’re referring to. When I click on the link “Why So Few”, it seems the link from your blog is broken. Please could you provide a direct link to the study you’re talking about. Thanks.
@Erin
“You are 1. completely wrong about the existence of a vast difference between men and women’s mathematical abilities,..”.
If you believe I am completely wrong, please could you provide a reference to back up your claims. As for my claims: I observe a huge disparity in the results achieved by women versus men in the mathematical sciences across a huge range of measures. For example, women account for approximately 1% of physics nobel prize winners (or zero percent since the rise of Women’s Lib, if you prefer that statistic). They account for exactly zero percent of Fields Medallists. They account for 4% of Turing Awards. They account for only around a couple of percent of Mathematical Olympiad participants, varying by country. I’d say that qualifies as a vast difference in performance. If you dispute this gap is due to ability and wish to explain it as something else, then please provide a link to your own favorite study that demonstrates there is really no vast underlying difference. If you wish to rely on Michael’s answer, then please tell me which of his referenced studies you’ve read and found most convincing. Thanks.
This seems a good place to bring up my old chestnut. Why are there so few famous female rock musicians who are not singers, not part of something marketed as a girl group and not romantically involved with someone else in the band? Can you even think of one (keep the “famous” criterion in mind)? Not that there is anything wrong with these, but most male rock musicians are not singers, not part of a boy group and not romantically involved with someone else in the band.
Consider that in other fields of music, there are often even more women than men.
There are gender inequalities in many fields: nursing, chess playing, three-Michelin-star chefs, garbage collectors, lorry drivers, models, highly paid porn participants. Is there an individual, field-specific explanation in each case, a common explanation, or some combination?
@Drake Here is the link.
http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/upload/whysofew.pdf
Thanks for letting me know about the broken link in my post.
Because of PC the idea that women are not as good at sciences is never tested or entertained. Some things women are better at than men and that’s accepted yet the opposite is shunned. Gender bias studies are biased.
not all women are women; not all men are men
@Drake I wonder why you point to those statistics and make unwarranted conclusions about women’s innate biology/cognitive ability vs environmental factors working against women in those fields? I’d love to know if you your believes could be wavered in the face of studies like the ones Michael posted. For example, look at Fig 9 and 11 showing increasing representation of women in STEM fields. Do you think these trends are due to women becoming innately smarter at math and physics?
An example of how environment and upbringing can affect outcomes, how do you think gender-biased teachers would unconsciously treat boy vs girl students, and how that might affect the career they choose later in life, if this study’s findings are true?:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform
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I am a tenured physics professor and had 6 weeks of maternity leave. I published 3 first author papers 3 months after the delivery and was teaching full time, the research papers were submitted 2 months before delivery. While recovering from c- section, I had my female Ph.D student visit me at home so I was able to give comments on her thesis. She graduated in time and my research career and family career are continuing to flourish. I have a great husband who participates at home and I have hired a house keeper and my toddler is at day care 6 hrs/ day. The pregnancy is a non-issue, but then again I am originally from Scandinavia where women rights were acknowledged way before here in the US. Most of my male colleagues have house wives at home taking care of their children, so it was fun to see some of them disappointed that I continue to professionally flourish ‘even after having’ children. I have definitely learned to manage my time better and close my office door to keep the ‘time stealers’ at bay.