Sexism In Science

An anonymous reader writes with news of a recent paper about the bias among science faculty against female students. The study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, asked professors to evaluate applications for a lab manager position. The faculty were given information about fictional applicants with randomly-assigned genders. They tended to rate male applicants as more hire-able than female applicants, and male names also generated higher starting salary and more mentoring offers. This bias was found in both male and female faculty. "The average salary suggested by male scientists for the male student was $30,520; for the female student, it was $27,111. Female scientists recommended, on average, a salary of $29,333 for the male student and $25,000 for the female student."

Comments

This is particulary bad in Statistics and Genetics

[WillAffleckUW]

I remember when one of my colleagues in Statistics brought in her son, who was amazed that there were actually male scientists in US statistics, biostatistics, and medical genetics.

Up to running into a few male post-grads in the lab, he had only seen women in these fields. ... oh, wait, you mean male sexism. Yeah, might be a problem back east. Even the UW Engineering school is starting to see an uptick in women engineering Doctoral and Undergraduate students. Less so in Computer Science, sadly.

Adapt. Or Adapt.

There is no other choice.

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Re:Only in science?

[jhoegl]

Nope it is everywhere.
I have worked at many places to know women are generally discriminated against based on wage.
In the USA, there was an argument that passing a law making it against the rule for employees to talk about pay wage and women getting raises to the same level as their male counterparts would actually bankrupt the system and other stupid excuses.

Conversely, I have a Brother-In-Law who wanted to become a nurse and experienced sexism in Nursing school from a teacher and sexism at his job.
So it isnt just one sided, but it probably depends on the field. Male dominated/Female sexism, Female Dominated/Male Sexism.

Re:That's funny right there

[ZeroSumHappiness]

There's a number of reasons I can imagine this evolving. I would imagine a thought process like this could cause it: "I worked so hard to get where I am, proved beyond all my male peers how skillful I am. If she's not going to prove herself she's not going to get anywhere in this field."

Hmmm

[TheSpoom]

I wonder if the females were basing the salary figures off of a relative number based on their own salary? That would explain the bias from them, if they were subject to it in their own hiring.

Great Summary. But where does this go from here.

[Egdiroh]

I have to say the write up of the summary for this post did a really good job of not over stating what the study did and showed. Some that I have seen for this have been really bad.

So for me the question is that here the study was on name bias based on gender of names. So there are some obvious followup questions here, like were there gender ambiguous names in the study Like Terry, and if so how did they did do. For the participants what sort of pre-esxisitng person to name associations did they have with those names. (i.e. Rather then being a direct gender bias could this have been that people are more likely to have name biases for female names then male names [and by name bias I mean things like not trusting people named Jennifer].) Further going beyond the direct follow up I wonder if there are biases in styles of names. Does Jim go over better or worse the James, If there is a skew towards formal or informal names how do people who's names don't have a clear nickname (like Derek) end up in the whole situation. To me this just opens the doors to more questions, and since the study did not find that the bias was particular to either gender of reviewer, I think the obvious thing to ask is, so what's really going on here.

I think that this is a really important area, because science is best served by diversity, and am a little disappointed that they published their results at this stage because it potentially taints further study into this issue. I think that if we are going to tackle the problem we really need to understand it rather then trying fixes that are ignorant of the root causes.

Woman make better lab managers - IMHO.

[LothDaddy]

During my time in academia; Ph.D. student -> post doc -> professor, I always felt that women made better lab managers than men - so I think the people sampled in this study are completely wrong. At the risk of sounding like I'm stereotyping, the female managers tended to balance multiple concurrent projects better and kept the environment more harmonious and inclusive. The only times I saw issues with this type of situation was when it was a women-only environment. The most productive labs I witnessed, irregardless of the gender of the PI, had a female lab manager and a balance of female and male employees/students. I had lab mangers of both genders and paid them based on their level of experience as dictated by the university HR.

Re:Only in science?

[clarkkent09]

I have worked at many places to know women are generally discriminated against based on wage.
 
Are you sure of that or is it just your impression? I can believe that there is a bias among certain people, but I also know that studies were made that disputed the claim that women make less then men on average. The key is comparing apples to apples i.e. not just comparing people doing the same job, but comparing people with the same number of years of full time experience of comparable quality. Comparing workers of the same age in the same job fail because women take more time off in their careers to raise children and therefore have on average less work experience than men. Comparing overall years of experience also fails because women work part time much more often than men. Sounds obvious but a lot of studies that "show" that women are discriminated against actually suffer from one or both of the above problems.

Re:Only in science?

[cayenne8]

I just recently watched that documentary, Freakanomics....it had some interesting things in it, one was how a name effects you through life.

Having a more common name in general..helps. Having a very bizzare and strange sounding name...will often keep you from being hired over someone else.

The show mentioned, that black and white names...until only a couple or so decades ago, were similar, but in the late 60's and 70's you started seeing black parents coming up with very unusual and stand out naming habits (Shaquillabonno, etc)....

It may sound sad to you that a name can do this to you, but you need to face facts that it does. Your are likely to get called in for that CPA interview if your name is Jack.....and not so much if your name is Rain, Ja'Quaelah , Sting or Cher.....

If you're a parent....have a heart and try to give you kids a name that will help them out later in life....right or wrong, that's just the way things are and sometimes you have to accept that.

Re:Only in science?

[_bug_]

There is actually a massive need for male teachers at the elementary level right now. Why? Because boys need male role models and often don't have one because either dad is off working all day or they don't have a dad at all. And if boys don't have the real thing in front of them they're going to learn by what they find elsewhere (television, movies, older boys) which tends to have negative consequences.

Re:That's funny right there

[Velex]

Well, hey, that also means that STEM careers are less sexist, too! I just heard on NPR the other day that women only make 70% of what men do. But if you're a woman and you go into STEM, run those numbers, and hey! If you're being hired by another women, you'll make 85%, a whole 15% more than other careers. For top score, get hired by a man, and you're up to 89% of what your male colleagues are making!

So good job, STEM!

i never understood this thinking

[circletimessquare]

racist policies kept blacks out of career and education opportunities, with longstanding consequences. so: affirmative action

sexism is real and keeps women under a glass ceiling: so corrective hiring policies

classism is real and simple economics tells us money naturally gravitates to a few players. so: progressive tax rates to correct what otherwise would result in all wealth in society flowing to a few ultrawealthy

why are these simple prudent policies such a giant brainfuck for some people? why are they so hostile to these ideas?

Re:i never understood this thinking

[Ltap]

There are a number of underpinnings to what's broadly called anti-egalitarianism (which is a facet of the philosophies or schools of Fascism, the New Right, etc.). On one hand, there are the people who benefit from anti-egalitarianism and sponsor propaganda to that effect, similar to the anti-republican (in the "form of government" sense, not the "American political party" sense) and anti-democratic propaganda produced by aristocrats to discourage people from supporting democracy because of the "ignorant masses". The general basis for it is a nifty piece of circular reasoning where undereducated and ignorant people are derided for being undereducated and ignorant by the very people who have historically tried to ensure that they stayed undereducated and ignorant.

One way to think of it is a bit like a murder investigation -- look for motive. The very people who benefit most from anti-egalitarianism are people who occupy privileged positions which would vanish in a more egalitarian society -- the wealthy CEOs, princes, and oligarchs of all forms. Thus, they have the greatest incentive (and are in fact pretty much the only ones who have an incentive at all) to promote anti-egalitarian sentiment. It is, however, easy to promote simply because people, especially in the middle of the economic spectrum (petit-bourgeoisie, or the "small business owner" in many cases), occupy a precarious class position which they are constantly having to fight to maintain. Part of the result of this is a general social separation from the people directly below them (the working class), which is a natural result of fighting hard to stay above working-class people and to live out, in the USA, the myths of the American Dream and social advancement. Thus, while they might not instigate anti-egalitarian classism, they are more susceptible to aiding those who do instigate it and becoming the lackeys of the very group above them which utilizes them as a shield.

One way to consider this is to imagine three people, A, B, and C. Person A is a slave, Person B is a servant, and Person C is a master. In this situation, Person C might use Person B to keep Person A in bondage by threatening to eliminate Person B's (relatively more) privileged position. Even if it would be more advantageous for A and B to unite against C, this seldom happens, for a variety of reasons, often related to the machinations of Person C.

Even more insidious, especially in the cases of sexism and racism, is when people who occupy roughly the same class position are pitted against each other. It is advantageous to rulers for a permanent underclass to exist (as black people and women have been throughout the history of the United States, often the lowest of the low) because they can be exploited most readily. The easiest way to maintain this is to sponsor bigotry that will keep this group separated from other groups -- black from white, for instance. Then, this underclass will have to fight almost entirely alone to gain even a modicum of freedom, rather than being helped by their brothers and sisters to gain it. Why? Because our society today forces people to be competitive or be destroyed, rather than to unite in a non-competitive way. Thus, black workers gaining more rights could be seen as a threat to the privileged position of some white workers, and so forth. The easiest way to sustain a system is to throw a few scraps to a few select groups, and in doing that to turn them into defenders of the system for fear of losing their privileges.