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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I agree with Sean in the comments. Optimistically, I guess it’s a good thing that the deniers (yup, I am making a parallel to the climate change debate) have now moved onto the “it is happening, but it isn’t a problem” phase.
Jesus, I’ve just seen this! You mean those bar graph heights aren’t exactly equal across males/females??!!!
That’s crazy, considering the whole of the rest of society has reached a 50/50 equilibrium with respect to every other possible measure: males/females looking after kids exactly equally, males/females having exactly same living expenses, males/females having exactly equal health problems, males/females dying at exactly the sames ages, males/females running at exactly the same speed…
I mean, I could understand if some of the other factors in society weren’t EXACTLY 50/50 that these evil scientists might have some argument that 50/50 might not have to be REQUIRED RIGHT NOW WITHOUT ANY POSSIBLE SENSIBLE DELAY SO THAT THE EQUILIBRIUM MIGHT BE REACHED WITHOUT BULLYING AND FORCE OVER SOME REASONABLY NATURAL TIMELINE AND APPROPRIATE TO OTHER FACTORS IN SOCIETY AT LARGE.
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Someone mentioned this in the middle of the discussion; I also thought about the possibility that women were less likely to give higher pay because they themselves were paid less, but if you look at the study, table 1, you will see they would pay the male applicant about the same (a little bit less, not significantly different) as their male colleagues would. Apparently if I’m reading the table correctly, what they would pay the female applicant is not statistically significantly different from what the men would pay her, which is contrary to some of the reporting I read, but that’s a minor point.
And re pregnancy. I think paternity leave of the same length as maternity leave is a good idea. Yes, it might make employers discriminate against parents, but there are not really that many people who go their entire lives without starting families (although I’d hypothesize more in academia than elsewhere). While it’s illegal to let this affect hiring decisions in pretty much every western country I’m certain that it still does. It’s really the low-hanging fruit to solving this problem, since it’s so easy. The economic impact is nothing to worry about. Plenty of countries already do it and employment has been generally unaffected (productivity and gdp might be slightly lower, but they are just relative numbers really).
Men might still choose to take less paternity leave, but I think as a society we’re growing much less tolerant of absent fathers. It will just take a long while for something like this to really shake out.
BTW I hear in Finland they’ve managed to create a system where you can take up to one year of parental leave. Even CEO’s of large companies do it. Strangely, their economy hasn’t melted down yet. Just saying.
While I don’t deny that there is implicit gender bias, and that it does have an impact that should be addressed, I also think that it’s easy to over-simplify the results of studies like these, in such a way that men (in particular) feel that they are being *accused* of deliberate gender bias. That’s actually counter-productive: this is not about telling men that they are bigoted, and if it’s presented as such that makes some people react defensively (as many of the comments above suggest).
So take this for what it means, literally: we very often think we are being objective, when in fact we are not. Trying to evaluate objectivity through studies like this helps us be aware of that, and behave more rationally as a consequence. It doesn’t matter what you believe about the relative scientific talents of men and women as a group: the fact is, in a random pool of students there are going to be some women who are more gifted than some men — so if you are the person doing the hiring, don’t you want to do everything you can to pick the most talented employee? Including being aware of factors that might bias you towards a less talented employee on the basis of race or gender?
I also wanted to say, from personal experience, that there *are* a lot of scientists out there who do make the effort to reach out to female students, and offer them the encouragement and mentorship that is so key to becoming successful. And we should give them credit for this: changing behavior is not just about identifying things that could be improved, but also about recognizing the positive steps that have been made, and the people (male and female) who made them.
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” academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. ” Can nobody see that this article is a hoax? That’s like saying “All white people are racist.” It’s a tip off that this should NOT be taken seriously. If anybody reads something about people like them “being held down,” their natural instinct is going to be outrage and playing the victim. This article is just playing on that, with terms like “heir-ability.” There is more to that then grades, there are things like work experience, schedules, and adeptness for the particular position. Saying all the applicants were identical you KNOW is non-sense. Do you know what the odds are of having two people with the same intelligence, physical capability, experiences, and scheduling are? This article was meant to put panties in a bunch and nothing more. Also look how close the numbers ACTUALLY are, they used a bar graph simply to make the difference look more drastic, the test group they got simply had more qualified males than females, so they exaggerate it but putting a big space on the graph and crying sexism. It’s like rolling the dice 3 times and saying odd numbers are less common because two of the times it was even.
Women use “you” twice as often as men, arrange (like Latins) topics & tables horizontally vs. (like Nordics) topics & tables vertically
what you mean people do not produce results which are calculated in the same way a computer might!? shock horror!! the writer of this article seems to be unaware that the human brain uses heuristics to produce outcomes – ie to simplify what is a reasonably complex task of decision-making into a less complex task using some rough past experience. is it perfect? hell no! should we expect it to be? hell no! would we be better off letting a completely fair computer decide? well i’d like to see a study done on that 😉
but to illustrate my point, consider an example: a person (male or female) has been burned in a relationship with a blonde who had a playful yet occasionally savage personality in the past. this person makes a new acquaintance – a blonde with a playful personality. they hit it off and the blonde asks the person out on a date. despite the fact that the person has no reason to suspect that the blonde might be occasionally savage, the person is fearful of this and decides not to accept the offer.
now, supposing the blonde did not infact have any traces of savageness in their personality, was this decision fair? of course not. however, the person made the best decision they knew how, given the available information.
it is not possible to get an honest answer if you ask somebody. “are you a vengeful person?”, just as its not possible to get an honest answer if you ask a future employee “are you a hard worker?”, or “are you smart?”, or “are you planning on getting pregnant in the next couple of years?”
i would say that the differences in pay reflect the employer’s past experience which has been projected onto their future expectations. this may not be fair, but no human is completely fair.
thanks this
Evolution has Created Gender Bias in Modern Society
Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago. The transition to behavioral modernity with the development of symbolic culture, language, and specialized lithic technology happened around 50,000 years ago according to many although some suggest a gradual change in behavior over a longer time span.
It has been assumed that the human race is thousands of years old and probably tens of thousands by some scientist. DNA says about 50,000 years, with humans not related to anything else─ no macro-evolution. The Bible would say about 50,000 years also when the gaps in the genealogies are filled in.
For thousands of years primitive man possessed little knowledge except that which was necessary for bare existence. He killed whatever animals he was able to, and ate the fruits, nuts, and berries that grew wild. Humans have existed for thousands of years but were just very primitive. They had simple tools, and perhaps a very primitive sort of communication… like pointing and grunting.
Gender bias in survival mode or bare existence with primitive communications either did not exist… or if it did exist, it wasn’t communicated or even recognized.
Technologically, we have evolved in the last 100 years the most. In that time we have seen jet passenger planes, automobiles, indoor plumbing for the masses, electricity as a common utility, and color TV, computers, and on and on.
As the modern life evolved and women joined the work force to supplement family income or to support the single parent family unit… the competition for jobs and business became more profound and so did the incidence and awareness about gender inequalities. What were feminist groups and women doing for all of the thousands of years up until then? Why did it take so long? Were women just unaware or unconscious or what?
The social advocacy on gender equality from the feminist movements and GAD programs remained far from reality to reduce gender bias. It holds that there is now the liberation of women as their human rights and freedom is now equal to all men. In the contemporary time, the gender equality is at the pinnacle of success in the human liberation of women. I believe they have done so much to change the gender culture awareness in the western societies. These have been the result of the gender success in developed countries:
• The high incidence of divorce and single mother because of the “fucking shit” father whose main interest is on masculinity, dominance and most of all the sexual drive for beautiful women.
• The women kept on dating compassionate and good men as future partner. These are the genuine partners you can find for family now in developed countries.
• The rise of feminist movement to sustain the fight against the gender discrimination including the responsibility of UN in the advocacy of “Gender and Development”
However, the sexual drive of men in developed countries remains active based on this “age of commercialism” as the object of demand in economics:
• The commercial products on whisky, scotch, beer, and red wine with theme of highly desirable for the physiologic response may find advertiser to use the sexy and beautiful women.
• The commercial bar provides women in action as GRO and prostitutes. It also includes the use of magazines and pornographic materials where in the women are exposed in degrading sexual object just to meet the sexual drive of men.
• Women rights are fighting on all the social fronts of gender bias; gay rights, lesbian rights, rights of abortion, and all other rights just to break the gender bias.
• The breakdown of family is culturally imminent once the women’s rights movement gathers momentum to disrupt the highly societal structure.
The bottom line is…
Gender bias against women has existed, in one form or the other, for thousands of years. Evolution and technology advancements, including global communications, have created gender bias to become more visible and thus debated in our modern society.
However, gender bias is not going away soon; as long as procreation is at the core of survival and continuous evolution of the human species… whatever miserable consequences might happen to the female gender.
Anant B. Goel
Producer CEO RKNet Studios
Based on and excerpts from media articles, blog articles, and sponsored research articles.
People might also be interested in this Physics World article by Amy Bug from Swarthmore College, where she shows how small, unconscious biases can add to up to have a sizeable impact on female scientists’ careers. Her conclusion was based on a fascinating set of “experiments” in which four non-scientific actors — two men and two women — were trained to give identical physics lectures that were then rated by the students in the audience.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2010/aug/02/swimming-against-the-unseen-tide
Matin Durrani
Editor, Physics World
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Modern qualifications don’t discriminate for ability, you can get a 1st class degree with 70% or 99%. Females have achieved equal scientific qualifications with males mostly because the higher ability class has been so dumbed down that the average attainment between males/females looks the same.
Can the females please discover some great things, like the males do, in proportion to their numbers in the science establishments?
No.
It’s like arguing that the World Chess Championship entry qualification should be 50/50 male/female because some socially engineered system has shown females are just as good at chess (on average) as males.
Women aren’t as good as men at some things.
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I’ll give you one of the (mostly unconscious) reasons a successful woman scientist/engineer/any-women-underrepresented-professional might rate an unproven entry-level type woman lower than an entry-level man or offer them a lower salary. In general, the successful woman doing the evaluating has always had to fight the initial impression that she might not be qualified. She’s always had to prove herself. She’s always had to be better then the men at the table. Everyone is just starting to truly accept that women CAN be good at $profession, and not be surprised about it. It does no harm to her position – to the “image” of women in her profession – if the male candidate turns out to be lousy or just mediocre. But if the woman candidate is hired and turns out to be mediocre? Geez, we’ve spent years trying to prove women can be darn good in $profession! All we need is some mediocre or lousy woman dragging down the stats, hurting the overall image of women in $profession. Successful women in $profession will only want new entry-level women in $profession if they are confident they are not going to lower the average perceived performance of women in that profession. I think one reason the evaluating women only partly consciously rate women lower is this “risk” to themselves and women in their profession. They also offer lower salaries to “hedge their bets”, giving the women a chance, but not saying they are in their class of “successful in that profession” women.
I have not gotten a chance to look at the “application materials” the study used, if they are available. It sounded like the materials portrayed the applicant as good/mediocre. Here’s a study I would like to see: try the same double-blind thing with changing only the name to appear male or female. But repeat it with 3 levels of resumes/materials – one mediocre at best, one a bit above average, and one documented superstar. I would be very interested to see if the “risk factor” I talk about above – the risk to themselves of lowering the image of women in the profession bears out. Would the rating women rate a female applicant with a rock-star proven track record lower, the same way that happened in the original study? My gut feeling is they would not, but I might be proven wrong. 🙂 I think they would rate a “sure thing” woman higher than an equally qualified male, but a “so-so” applicant as lower than an equally qualified male.
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