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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."
I'd be astounded if this were limited to just the science field.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Males, less sexist against females than other females.
Let's talk about the complete lack of busaries/scholarships/grants for men in Science. At the university I studied at in British Columbia, there were literally a dozen monetary awards for female science undergrads, but absolutely nothing for men. In fact, the *only* award in Science that was open to both sexes was a $500 bursary for people of Scandinavian descent who also owned a woodlot in British Columbia. Seriously.
Female students get into university and grad schools with a higher acceptance rate. There are many brilliant females, yes. But if you put them rank and rank against males, and did not discriminate using sex, then perhaps the number of females in programs would be even fewer.
But hey, I'm not complaining. The lack of females in engineering school and career is a huge problem, and it needs to be resolved. But please, they get many benefits too. Not to mention, they get to say about the engineering guys: "the odds are good but the goods are odd".
So both male and female scientists that male scientists are likely to work harder, deserving a higher salary.
Not so much bias or sexism, but experience - the vast majority of people going the extra mile are male.
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Women need less money because they tend to marry men who earn more than they do on average.
For men it's the reverse -- they need more because they tend to marry women who earn less than they do on average.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
True, it refutes that male malice is to blame, but it also affirms that women do have a problem with bias.
So, perhaps we should put the blame and counter-blame aside and talk about solutions.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
There's a gap of $3409 between the male's suggestions for pay and a $4333 gap between the female's suggestions for pay. That's curious. I can understand that women might offer a lower wage across sexes based on being paid a lower starting wage, but I don't understand why there would be a bigger gender difference.
The more important issue is that we're trying to "combat STEM crisis" when both men and women have more financial incentive to manage a GAP than manage a laboratory.
To go cook dinner barefoot, and wait for my husband to get home and knock me up again.
This is a very important finding, and something people need to be aware of, but I also want to add another variable to the equation: part of the reason women don't command higher salaries is because they don't demand higher salaries. I don't want to take the sexist position that women need to act more like men to achieve salary equality, but I do get extremely frustrated by the fact that my female peers seem to lack the will to fight for equal pay. My father had to coach my mother into demanding a higher salary when she got a job as a professor. I've had to coach my sister to ask for higher pay, and I've done the same for female coworkers, where I have even taken them aside and told them my salary to see their eyes bug-out and then get angry at the injustice of our different pay-scales.
Yes, women and men discriminate against women concerning salaries and capabilities. It's scientifically proven, and it's something we all need to be cognizant of so we can work for a just society; however, women also need to stop allowing themselves to be discriminated against. I have seen many women go from unequal pay to getting what they deserve simply by having some self-confidence in their value to the company and demanding their worth when the opportunity arises to ask for it. If the boss still refuses, sue the discriminatory #$%@.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
What happened with the ones with gender left ambiguous?
(the paper itself will not open for me, for some reason.)
Really, this was no surprise years ago, but is disappointing to see it still going on.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This is about testosterone vs estrogen, and strident sexist attitudes based on fear and delusion. You're talking common sense and egalitarianism, which has no place here. Soon you'll be trying to let women control their own bodies.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
A real-life experiment occurred in the 80s and 90s in music - most top orchestras started doing blind auditions, and the number of women hired skyrocketed. (see e.g. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Blind-Auditions-Putting-Discrimination-on-2855410.php) In many cases, members of the orchestras were no doubt trying to choose candidates based on ability, not gender, before blind auditions began; the huge change in hiring indicates that they weren't successful. (I believe the New York Philharmonic hired it's first 4 women the year they started blind auditions)
Interestingly, this study implies that many of the biases which may add up to gender discrimination are societal, based on attitudes and experience shared by both men and women.
You assume managers are totally rational. I wish managers were totally rational.
Except you can't really start talking about solutions to anything until you identify the actual cause of your problem. Recognizing that gender bias is caused by men and women alike is the first step in the problem solving process.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Not to disagree with anything in the paper and certainly not with the message, but personally, I would definitely have wanted to see at least one more condition: same resumes with no names at all. That should give nice baseline against which to compare both conditions (e.g. are female salaries marked down or are male salaries marked up).
Also, I wonder what would happen if one were to replace the names with simply an indication of gender (male/female). Unlike the neutral condition, I don't think this would improve the study... I'm just curious if the gender is enough or if there's something specific about reading male vs female names.
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.
It is the fault of a Society. We stress that the "norm" for women is to have babies and stay at home. Christianity stresses this as a woman's role in the home as well. Many women do this, many do not. Employers know this. They know that at any time, that hot chick in accounting with the double D is going to ask for 6 weeks of maturnaty leave, and then 3 weeks after coming back she will decide she wants to be home with her baby. Call it instincts, call it pressure from society, call it faith, call it whatever.
So any business runs the risk of losing an individual due to this "begat" phenomenon any time they hire a female between the ages of 16 and 45.
That said, because of this risk, they are less willing to hire women. Economically speaking, it is supply and demand. The demand for women labor is less than it is for men, because of this probability that they will not stay employed long term. Granted, not all women fall into this model, however, businesses factor it in. Therefore, the price the businesses are willing to pay women is less as well, assuming all other factors are equal... qualifications, aptitude, etc.
Businesses with high turnover (fast food, entry level factory jobs, etc.) tend to not care about this factor as much, and therefore the pay rate tends to be more even.
So, this tends to impact higher wage earning jobs that have little turnover, where the employer is forced to look at the long term.
Enter technology/science. Businesses pay a great deal of money for "expert" help. People with degrees aren't cheap for them. They tend to want to keep their technical folks for the long haul. Not all businesses mind you, but many. Therefore, tech jobs fall into this category of "begat" supply and demand.
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.
I'm a woman working in the tech field and I'm glad to be paid what I am (due to where I live, my qualifications, age, and the industry that I am working in). What I find strange is that I know that if they'd hired a man to do what I am doing, he wouldn't be expected to also answer the phone/greet clients when they come in, and he'd probably be paid more than I am. I'm not complaining, necessarily, and living in the South means that sexism is something that people "just do." I think it's quite clear to my employer that I'd be more productive if I could focus on the tech aspects of my job and forgo the phone-answering, I'd be much more productive, but we - oops, there's the phone.
I have the hiccups.
It means you've built up enough karma and Slashdot Brownie Points to see articles "in the future", ie before most other readers. Congratulations!
Good point though, this kind of thing could be flame-bait or it could be a real effect. If the numbers match up and females consistently score lower on exams and problem solving then it may not be a sexist bias so much as a failing in the educational method or testing techniques - or it could (shock!) simply be that statistically women aren't as good at science (as currently practised and measured) as men - you'd probably find a similar statistical bias in tall/short people. (See also breast feeding - a small proportion of men can do it, but statistically women are better at it - sexist or simply biology?)
On the other hand, women tend to be better at managing groups of people, negotiation and communication (as currently practised and measured), skills which are not only valuable but a consistent problem in science. Swings and roundabouts, it should all even out in the end.
Which is why the pay disparity is the major cause for concern here. Pick any two scientists - one will be better than another at X, and vice versa for Y, but if they're doing much the same job they should be on much the same pay.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
The fact that female faculty had similar salary valuation disparity as male faculty would suggest there's no misogynistic bias going on here. Rather, that all faculty are weighing in other factors which on their own may be legitimate, but the factors themselves have a built-in gender bias.
e.g. What are the statistics on male researchers who start off in a field, get married, have kids, then retire to stay at home to take care of the kids; versus women who do the same? Maybe the faculty are automatically factoring in the likelihood that the hired lab manager will quit the job at some point in the future, forcing them to expend additional resources hiring and training a new manager. And this is deemed more likely to happen with female hirees than with male.
That's not to say it has to be this way. For the disabled, we've already decided as a society that the additional cost of giving the disabled equal access to job opportunities (handicap access, assistance equipment, etc) is worth paying. Yes treating them equally will cost us more, but it's a cost we're willing to pay for the results it generates. I don't see a problem with that. But it's something society should knowingly choose to implement, not something snuck in under the pretense of preventing "unjustified" discrimination.
But what if the females are poor negotiators and easier to take advantage of?
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"It's important to encourage girls to take up a professional career. So that in the future we have a strong motivated work force that costs only 60% of what it costs to pay a man."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jEmwtA_Ys4
Previewing comments are for sissies!
In many societies and cultures, the actual status quo tends to be enforced by women themselves, particularly on other women. That is not to say men are not involved, but some women can definitely form a supporting structure for their culture. That tends to be ignored because all women are always considered to be the oppressed group. However, some women obtain roles and benefits in those power structures and a threat to the existing order is a threat to their position as well, even if they are in an overall subordinate position.
How do you know I'm not your Daughter??
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If you're a subscriber it means the story hasn't yet been posted, but you can read it and TFA. If you're not, then slashdot goofed and served you the advance page by accident.
Free Martian Whores!
Plus feeling ovulatorily threatened by younger fertiles, no doubt. [sarcasm]
There is a biological factor at play as well: Women do get pregnant from time to time, and men don't.
It may seem unfair or unjust, but what I stated is just a fact and nothing more.
Now what does that mean for an employer? Sometimes - more often for women than for men - it means your employee will be out of the office on pregnancy leave. And sometimes, after said leave the employee will not return for a few month to a few years. Sometimes never.
Of course, not all women are in this situation, and they all pay the price of the bias, because, for being women, they CAN do it, and from experience they will tend to do it much much more often than men.
Is discriminating against that fact unfair? Of course it is. But is asking anyone to disregard that fact when choosing between a male and a female hire any different? Well... it is also unfair.
Life's a bitch.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
...he doesn't want to spend his entire career having everyone wonder why he's in a room filled with first grade girls.
paintball
Or, if you actually, read some of what these feminists write, you'd know that it's exactly what they say: women adapt to and adopt patriarchy. They, so to speak, out-Herod Herod. You could also argue that these scientists' perspectives on salaries are based on their own salaries. So women, paid less, offer less.
It's not surprising at all. If you are hiring someone to work under you, the amount you would offer to pay them will be influenced by how much you make yourself (anchoring). If women are paid less than men, it's perfectly natural for them to offer lower salaries to the people that will work under them.
Good point though, this kind of thing could be flame-bait or it could be a real effect. If the numbers match up and females consistently score lower on exams and problem solving then it may not be a sexist bias so much as a failing in the educational method or testing techniques
If men have better exam scores and men get paid more, that isn't necessarily sexist.
But that wasn't what this study did. This study offered the same set of applications and randomized the gender of the applicants. The resulting disparity is thus entirely attributable to gender bias, i.e. the individual accomplishments of each applicant was overridden by their gender.
paintball
I can say that about *one* of the female scientists that I work with*. It's actually more likely that a male scientist will go on paternity leave than a female on maternity.
My theory is that because of the gender bias, the females are either selected who aren't going to start a family, or they actively choose not to do so for fear of supporting the myth you claim. I can't say which one, as I'm involved in the hiring of scientists. Or, it's like in Idiocracy, where the smart ones are just less likely to have kids.
* And I can only say that she's in her 20s or 30s and went on maternity leave; I can't make any claims as to the timing vs. the minimum time elapsed, as I believe she's been here for at least 2.5 years.
(disclaimer: I work with scientists at a US government agency; it's possible it may be different in other countries or in the commercial / academic area, or even in different scientific fields)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Isn't it interesting that women seem to have more prejudice against equal salary for women, than women do?
Makes perfect sense - while male scientists may suspect female scientists are less qualified, the female scientists know it for sure!
(Note: This post is +1 Funny, not -1 Flamebait.)
paintball
Male employees, on the other hand, are more likely to be alcoholic, more likely to have antisocial personality disorder, and more likely to either commit crimes or be victims of crime. All of these things can easily have negative effects on work performance.
As for maternity leave -- all of the people surveyed were in the US, which does not require women to be paid while on maternity leave. The Family Medical Leave Act, which creates that requirement, applies equally to male and female employees -- men are allowed the exact same rights to take off for the birth of their child as women in the US.
And who knew the world wasn't fair? Go figure. Sometimes you just have to work harder.
Nobody gets rich by working harder. Sure, you can pick up double hours, but at best that just doubles your income.
You get rich by working EVILER, or in a smaller number of cases, smarter.
paintball
Well, women CAN get pregnant from time to time, if a woman so chooses.
But a woman is perfectly capable of NOT getting pregnant. Unfortunately, since we've made it illegal to ask about marital status or birth control use or child bearing plans, all women suffer a lower employment value instead of just the ones who want to choose to have children.
paintball
Yes but STATISTICALLY speaking, which gender is more likely to stop working at around the age of 30 and never return to work?
Risk bears cost. This is business we're talking about here. Not some utopian society.
Politically incorrect and proud of it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
women do keep each other down, perhaps more so than men keeping women down and definitely more so than men keeping other men down
the worst enemy of women is other women it seems
i'm not marginalizing sexism against women by men, i am just saying the negativity, hatred, and social violence by women towards other women is a real issue
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have run into plenty of men who are paid far less than another man with similar experience in a similar position simply because one guy is always looking for ways to get a raise (find competitive offers, threaten to jump ship, etc) while the other isn't.
paintball
It's not particularly clear from the story, nor is it clear from the abstract on how they actually differentiated for natural bias in the random selection. Did each professor receive the same candidate twice, once as a male and once as a female (hopefully far apart)?
It sounds like the data set was randomly generated once, and then used to push through the study. It's quite possible that the data set simply had a lopsided pool of better qualified "males" versus "females." Considering that they do not state the number of students in the pool in either the story or the abstract, it also seems plausible that the results are from a very small pool of students, which makes the bad random data bias much more likely regardless of a large pool of graders (the 127 professors).
Of course, it could also be that the mandating of gender equality, where they are otherwise not equal, has led to a worse perception of actually qualified female candidates due to bad past experiences. Anyone in a decent engineering program has seen women coast through when they otherwise should have failed like many of their male peers, and I suspect that happens in science as well, where the number of women in the programs is simply far lower than the number of males. This, in effect, results in an immense quality bias given the same academic record, so when women have a certain academic record, it will be called into question due to past experiences.
Now, with that said, I would like to believe that people would rate people as equals from paper until the actual interview process differentiates them. Without seeing the random applicant data (specifically the quantity, and the randomization of it), then it's impossible to say. Just as we've seen women coasting where they shouldn't, literally this week, I heard of a professor in academia that still hold the age-old idea that women are only good for dictation and secretarial duties.
Of course they do - men can't take maternity leave; they take paternity leave. ;-)
But leaving semantics aside -- if women were paid as much as men, then their leave would have a greater financial impact to the couple, so it would be more likely that (a) the man might take off some time, so the woman doesn't have to take off as much, and (b) the couple might choose to take less total leave time, since their total income is affected proportionally more by it.
Scientists are interested in making more scientists. That's why mentoring exists. Generally, females do not progress as far along the scientific career track as males do. They are just as smart and devoted -- up until the point when they have kids. Then science becomes less important to them, and they stop pushing so hard to become professors / researchers / Nobel winners / whatever.
So, if you're going to spend countless hours teaching a student, which one would you pick? The male student, who's more likely to push his career like crazy and become a great collaborator and publish lots of papers with you? Or the female student, who has a 50/50 shot that she'll suddenly stop caring at age 25~30, right when her career would be taking off?
Sexist? Absolutely - and this kind of thinking contributes to undervaluing females in science everywhere. Even brilliant ones who aren't going to have kids still face this bias. It's a disaster. But it has a logical cause. Until it's possible to have family-friendly science careers, this is unlikely to change. Right now, there are too many scientists competing for too few spots. The males are going to win, because they'll (generally speaking) put their careers before their families.
The summary paper says that two names were used: John and Jennifer. These were chosen after testing a multitude of names for bias for and against them with a study group; the researchers chose a pair of names that rated as equally as they could find in the tests, to minimize any effects from the names themselves.
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?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... when females act like men.
Crumbs - I can't find the link to the studies but here's the summary: When american women adopt the same value systems as american men they tend to outperform men. More specifically, when they make money, work, and recognition their top motivations, they excel in pretty much every supposedly man-dominated field; education, engineering, business, etc. Especially when it comes to small business owners.
So why aren't they running the world? Apparently most women have a different priority order, and things like family, time flexibility, vacation scheduling, personal happiness (one area where women absolutely CRUSH men), and one of the biggest factors: having children. There was an examination of women in business, especially CEO's and VP's, and what they showed was that when qualifications were identical, women made more and generally had better success growing the company/raising stock prices/whatever it was they were tasked with. However, they made up only a very small percent of the CEOs. Why? Because many of them chose to have kids, and didn't have the same qualifications, like an unbroken 40 year long track record of management, as they took time off, or made their career second to being a mother.
In some ways, the gender bias is in the eye of the beholder; the real issue is your priorities and how you work to achieve them. Granted, due to widespread generalization (which may be accurate), women have been sterotyped as less dedicated to a career, and end up earning less, starting for less, achieving less, making the men-stereotype priorities higher hurdles.
It would be interesting to rank people based on how well they've achieved their priorities. Not that it excuses deliberate or accidental sexism, but it may result in questioning equal opportunity regulations. If you achieve all your goals in life, and having gainful employment is not one of those goals, artificially privileging you to get it over vs. someone who prioritizes it but doesn't achieve it - or other goals - on the basis of gender or race seems a bit .. unfairly discriminatory.
Women have a significantly higher chance of taking maternity leave than men. This does on average make them less valuable to an employer. My childfree girlfriend hates this.
It may be sexist and not politically correct to mention, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
The statement is undoubtedly true, whether or not it is consciously applied.
However, following that trail of logic a little further -- why wouldn't salaries start to equalize once women are past typical child-bearing age? If companies are afraid of lost-productivity in younger women, by age 40 or 45, you'd expect to see women's salaries evening up with mens. But studies show that doesn't happen.
load "windows7"
Men, obviously. A lot of househusbands here in Seattle.
Your results may differ.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Like it or not everybody even you makes judgements based upon demographics all the time otherwise we'd be sitting on our butts frozen with inaction. Like for example we probably both assume each other to be males with below average social skills. We need to realize that while it is fashionable to pretend otherwise, this is natural and is not an evil thing. Although not always right it sometimes is a valid strategy. The trick is to keep it where its appropriate. Thats why we have actual interviews and references and on job evaluations instead of flamebait articles with contrived circumstances and leading conclusions.
No, you're spending the resources on qualified people who have vaginas, some of whom are the most qualified.
...if she takes it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
With only a paper likely filled with lies and exaggeration to go on [...]
So, I take it you didn't actually read the article? Because what was sent to the scientists wasn't presented as a resume that the candidates themselves had written -- it was presented as evaluations of the candidates written by an impartial third party.
Yes, but women didn't offer (significantly) lower salaries. They offered women lower salaries.
Names should simply be GUID's.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
From comments here, a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the subjects of the study were looking at a resume or something similar. From the actual paper, they were given an evaluation of the applicant written by a third party, not something that was supposed to have been written by the applicant. The summary is misleading when it says they were asked to evaluate "applications for a lab manager position" -- it should say "applicants for a lab manager position".
mod parent up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I could see the pregnancy excuse meaning something when it was typical for people to stay in jobs for decades. With more job hopping now, I find it hard to believe that you can realistically expect any interview candidate to still be at your company in 2-5 years, regardless of gender. There are a lot of reasons employees leave and while pregnancy may be the reason for some women, it's not like men don't ever leave.
As I understand it, men are allowed the same rights to take off UNPAID leave as women for the birth of their child. There can be differences in how many sick days can be taken by a father or mother upon the birth of a child. I know there are situations where, for example, a new mother can take six weeks of sick leave if she has them, while a new father cannot.
My comment was intended to address the issue raised in the post I was replying to, nothing else.
... except that it doesn't, really. Women moving into the workforce led to a greater need for childcare, which increased the number of available jobs. Women and blacks getting good-paying jobs, when previously they couldn't, bought more goods and services, which increased the number of available jobs. Same with gays.
Employment is not a zero-sum game; there's not a fixed number of possible job positions.
Based on the evidence presented in the study, the conclusion that faculty have a lower regard for female job applicants than for male job applicants is at best an unsupported assumption and at worst a misinterpretation of the evidence. Furthermore, the study results are consistent with faculty holding beliefs favorably biased toward women and against men.
To rate job applicants on the basis of jobs applications one must hypothesize a relationship between the application and the applicant. One must explicitly, or implicitly through action, supply a general answer to the question: Given an application, how well will the applicant perform on the job?.
The only definite conclusion which can be reached from this study is that faculty hypothesize different relationships between application and applicant for male than for female applicants. But here is the kicker: The "bias" exhibited in this study is consistent with a belief among hirers that women job applicatns tend to look better on paper, not worse, than male applicants. Faculty offering lower salaries to women could be operating in the belief that women are better than men at presenting themselves.
If Professor Jane Doe believes the following to be true:
"Women are usually awesomely fantastic at presenting themselves, so if this female applicant looks looks like a 10/10 on paper, she is really probably an 8/10"
"Men are terrible ignoramuses at presenting themselves, so if he looks like an 8/10 on paper, he's probably a 10/10".
Those statements 1) Evidently display belief favorably biased toward female and against male applicants 2) Are consistent with the study results.
So, the traditional interpretation is flawed, because it is not a conclusion, but an assumption; there is no reason whatsoever to favor it over a handicapping explanation.
Someone should study what are the assumption of the faculty about the relationship between jobs applicants and job applications. And separately, if there is a difference in those assumptions between male and female job applicants, how accurate are they?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A study that took into account education, hours worked, and skill into account found that:
Keep in mind that skill is not entirely an independent variable. People who are promoted to more resonsible positions have the opportunity to learn from the experience, whereas those who are not promoted don't. In other words, the effects of bias are likely to compound.
So the statistics above may understate the problem. The unadjusted numbers are truly horrendous. For law, men get paid more than twice as much ($138k vs $66k), which seems dramatically out of proportion to slightly more schooling (17.5 years vs 15.6 years) and a significant but not huge gap in hours worked (46.6 vs 40.9 hours - I don't know about you, but I personally find a dramatic drop-off in marginal productivity as hours increase).
Notice also the gap in education. Some comments here are suggesting that education is a domain of reverse descrimination, but that's not the story told by the wage gap.
I must echo the request of others here: if you have evidence to the contrary, plese provide it.
i mean murder is obviously wrong, but it still happens. do you think making murder socially unacceptable will stop it? we're dealing with a kind of criminality, a transgression against someone else
what does this even mean? this is a load of crap. something like affirmative action or progressive taxation or corrective hiring practices are actual real world concrete solutions. what you have written as a solution is a political paean, a nice vague soundbite that doesn't really say anything useful at all
this is a discussion board full of engineers. solve the problem concretely or fuck off, we don't take kindly to puff words that mean nothing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What makes you assume the solution will be regulatory?
For the record, I believe people want to be fair and that treating people equally and with respect has become an entrenched cultural value in the US and many other countries. To the extent we are not living those values, I think the majority of citizens would see that as a problem.
To bring up market economics is a worthwhile point. Here's a cold fact: females account for 50% of the population. The tech industry keeps clamoring they can't find enough good people. This in my opinion is a strong argument for why to seek more women in science, where they are currently under-represented. If women believe they have better prospects in other fields like law or finance, don't you think the opportunity cost of that talent drain could potentially offset the efficiency gains you're talking about?
I also think that if efficiency differences are the driver of wage differences as you suggest, then they would become more apparent for women with children as opposed to those without. That should be easy to check.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If women are as productive as men than there is an extreme business opportunity for hiring women. Women-heavy employers would have great advantage over men-heavy employers in the same field: the same work done with lower salary. In free market, it would increase demand for women labor and would equalize salaries.
What is also possible is that women are in fact less productive in aggregate. Even with equal potential capabilities to men, the employers are not sure if a hired women is going to concentrate on the career or on taking care of the children and this potential risk makes them offer smaller salaries. This theory is supported by the fact that the men/women salary gap is the smallest in Scandinavian countries where there are programs forcing men to take parental leave to take care of children.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
> There is a biological factor at play as well: Women do get pregnant from time to time, and men don't.
> It may seem unfair or unjust, but what I stated is just a fact and nothing more.
It is more than unfair. It is illegal in most civilized countries.
It is illegal for women to get pregnant in most civilized countries ????
Dude, what planet are you from?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
By age 40 or 45, many women have already taken the maternity leave and therefore have less experience than the men.
It's also worth noting that employers tend to like employees with families. They tend to be more responsible. However, the brunt of the childcare duties (at least the pregnancies) tend to fall on the women. This makes it hard to make apples to apples comparisons across genders. You need to compare childless women to childless men. And there may be other confounding variables that are more difficult to recognize.
I believe you can also see it if your karma is high enough. I frequently see red articles, and I'm not a subscriber.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
No, my friend, you believe in "blind" tests no matter how fishy they are if they are consistent with what you want to believe.
The employment market is one of the few markets that still is as much a free market as possible.
But you're still not spending the money on the most qualified scientists.
There is money to be spent. It can be spent on helping the most qualified potential scientists get an education, or it can be spent on the most qualified potential scientists WITH VAGINAS getting an education.
If your goal is to get the most qualified scientists, then you need to go with the former. If your goal is to create category parity in an attribute unrelated to being a good scientist, then go ahead and spend the money only on scientists with vaginas.
But you have to accept that determining resource allocation by sex is, by definition, sexist.
paintball
Exactly. If they are irrational they will be paying more than the competition for similar results, and you can't stay in business for long if your competition is more efficient.
which is why telecommuting should be used more often (or flipping this Office Provided Day Care should be done more often).
Fix the Why and then this is not a problem.
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http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031:10-31&version=KJV
im hoping you were trying to be funny but just in case read and get back to us (its even in KJV for you)
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But that makes things even worse. If you hire an employee for a couple years and this employee is unable to perform its role for a few months you are being considerable more affected than if you hire such an employee for a 10 years period. That obviously assuming that most people won't have anything like 5 consecutive pregnancies nowadays.
What I was really referring to was not the study's being flame baiting, but, rather /.'s sexism label.
/. title "Sexism and Science" is straight up flame baiting. Where the hell do they come off? It's that old inability to say things which, though true, are not politically correct. I did not see any effort to determine whether the study subjects were assessed for (unfair) bias. Without unfair bias, there can be no finding of sexism, only discrimination, and discrimination without unfair bias isn't wrong, it is laudable.
From your valid point of this possibly being valid science, the
And that is exactly why the study means nothing. Offers only reflect what employers expectations, which may very well be accurate and based on their experience. The difference in offers does not in any way proves that there is irrational bias. Actually if you consider the market as I said, it points to a well founded rational bias.
Sexism is a very overused and consequently meaningless term these days. Apparently anything that puts women in an unfavorable position is "sexist" by the definition of people like you no matter how truthful it may be. You want so badly for things to be like you think they should that you willingly choose to blatantly ignore reality around you whenever it brings you unfavorable data.
Thanks for the info. Looks like they recently went down, though! :)
I assume results are rational, that there is a strong relation between employee performance/cost ratio and a company's success. Managers irrationality is irrelevant here.
You know you might want to try actually reading the Bible sometime. Then you might discover passages such as this: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Now that we know that there is a problem, and that the problem is not helped by changing the sex of the hirers, we have to minimize the bias by hiding the sex of the applicants during the application process for as long as possible.
There was a similar problem in hiring for orchestras. They started doing blind auditions (players behind a screen) and a lot of the hiring bias went away.
The biggest problem will be getting scientists to admit that this is a serious issue that won't go away without effort. This study needs to be replicated, a lot, and to survive serious peer review.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Here's my dissenting view.
Comparing salaries alone is meaningless. That's only looking at one factor in a highly complex system that may not even be knowable and claiming you understand it all.
Males and females are not the same. There are biological and socio-cultural differences that are undeniable and to deny them is to deny reality. Let's explore some potential differences that do not rely on sexism:
Maybe males are just less prone to accepting the first offer thrown their way and more likely to push for an increase.This may or may not result in males being employed less often, for example they lose more jobs because they pushed too hard in the negotiation, but work for higher wages when they do have employment. There is some basis in science here, many experiments have shown that males tend to take more risks. If this is the case and females could immediately begin earning the same mean wage by just rejecting the first offer and attempting to negotiate more often, would you call this sexism if it is something under their own control? I would not.
While each hour of female labor and male labor are as productive as each other, maybe employers understand that there is a non-zero chance of a female becoming pregnant and taking a longer maternity leave than the male. There's nothing wrong with factoring this into wage negotiations. It's not sexism if it is true.
It cuts both ways. Have you ever been to an auto show? How many male 'booth babes' have you seen at such an event? There is a special cause variation for this job, females obviously perform much better at certain jobs by virtue of being female. Is this sexism, or is it just reflective of the reality we live in? Would you hire a little person to play for a basketball team or would you consider the fact that they just may not be suited for it?
You also don't see ANY male strippers at a strip club for men. Is that because of sexism too?
Comparing wages, does not control for any one of many other causes for wage difference. You can't just say it must be sexism without ruling all other plausible factors out first.
Now can I say it isn't because of sexism? No. But then again I'm not making that claim either.
Liberty.
How about we just make things more fair by giving men a paternity leave when they have children? That way both parents can be home with the newborn and form those ever important bonds with their offspring... You know like certain more evolved countries already do...
Oh wait... what am I saying... we obviously could never do that...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I'm confused. If men think women deserve less, and women think women deserve less, then who's arguing? Maybe, just maybe, oh, I don't know, women deserve less?
You know, I called eight painters this week to get quotes for painting my house. Not a single independent painter of the eight was female. Since there's absolutely nothing making women worse painters than men, I can only guess that women choose to not start painting businesses. Maybe it's a "man's world" because women choose to avoid perfectly fine industries. I can't say why.
So perhaps, instead of focussing on why men don't allow women into the clubhouse, perhaps women should take it upon themselves to teach women to accept women. Perhaps then men will respect women enough to allow them into the clubhouse.
But until then -- until women help women -- they'll always be treated as lesser by men. And rightfully so. If women always need help from men -- in this case because they don't help eachother -- then they can't possibly expect respect from men.
Maybe the gardeners that I call next week will be female -- not that I've ever seen a female gardener in the neighbourhood. Come to think of it, I've never seen a female valet parking cars either. Of course I've never seen a female papergirl either. And female pizza delivery, only in movies. Haven't seen a female taxi driver either.
I live in a growing neighbourhood with dozens of houses being built every month. I haven't seen a female builder either. Not a female handychick. Not a female duct cleaner.
So how can I possibly have equal respect for a female worker when I typically don't see them running their own businesses in the community? I started my own business. Why don't they?
My dad told me and told my sister that we need to stand up for ourselves. My brother was told during an unpaid "undergraduate research opportunity" at a big hospital where he was working on some engineering (EE) stuff to help file some papers. He said "my job here isn't to file papers, it's to do electrical system analysis" or some such thing. Of course, you could say he wasn't going to lose a paid position, but he would have / could have lost a position important for letters of recommendation. His speaking up was held against him, but he drew a line in the sand and stuck with it. I'd say you need to draw a line in the sand. Best of luck, and best wishes. Let someone else answer the phone. What do you do in tech, btw?
It's laster for over half a century now. Seems the free market is all out of magic pixie dust.
Your economic argument could be applied throughout history. Why then has the pay gap reduced over time? Are women randomly smarter this generation?
The high-school-level idealized free market does not exist and cannot exist because homo economicus does not exit, nor does perfect information.
And this is the point where feminists shoot themselves in the foot. On the one hand they say women are smart and independent, but they can't show that because they are oppressed by men. Then they say that women adapt partiarchy without thinking about the consequences, thus portraying themselves as willingly mindless robots controlled by men. Well, which one is it? Feminism is in this regard extremely sexist against women.
Yes, there are parts that kind of make sense. Then there is the rest of the Bible spouting nonsense, sexist and hatred based stories.
Of course, either you've read it all and you know what I'm talking about (in which case you were just trying to deceive in your comment) or you didn't (and you were just trying to show off your little quote you learned last week).
Which is it?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I know that many people consider the Bible to contain those things. I even know some of the things that people claim are that way, but I do not agree that that is true. The writers of the Bible consistently show a greater regard for women and outsiders than their contemporaries.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The pay gap has been reduced over time exactly because of my economic argument. If it keeps being reduced and eventually becomes zero it is a sign that both sexes are equally productive and therefore equally desired. It remains to be seen. Either way it is not a problem. The market will always stabilize in a fair point where professionals are rewarded accordingly with their relative values. If it does stabilize in a point where women earn less than men it is because they do deserve to earn less. If it stabilizes in a point where they earn more it is because they do deserve to earn more. Simple as that.
And although the idealized free market does not exist and have never truly existed, the employment market is as near to it as we have ever got.
Ah, I see, you're assuming that market forces are totally rational instead. I wish market forces were totally rational.
Let me spell it out for you -- you think that a 5-25% price difference in salary will make or break a business instead of such things as being first to market, getting lucky on a government contract, or buying the right or wrong start-up. Companies don't win solely because they have the right talent, there are a number of things that have to go right for a company to make it big beyond just talent.
Then again, you're also assuming that women are given the same opportunities to get up to the same skill level as male counterparts whereas this study found that the women were less likely to be considered for mentoring possibilities. Students don't cost mentors anything and there are far more students than mentors, so if there's a systematic bias against equivalent female students receiving equivalent mentoring opportunities then it would make sense that until that bias removed women may never receive the same opportunities in the paid workforce.
They did this in a University setting, that is a leftist type setting. They discriminate more than anyone else I've found. You know, free speech - for them, and so on. I've worked for a number of companies and I could see the pay and experience, up until the late 1980s. Then I was simply to high up to see that information anymore. I found that women were actually paid more than men for the same education and experience with respect to a given - non subjective job. I didn't see much of a performance difference.
Salary is often very interesting. Take Oprah and her hair dresser. Why should Oprah make hundreds of millions more? That hair dresser is probably just as talented as Oprah is.
Another way around it would be mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave. So if you hire someone of child-bearing age, regardless of gender, they are equally apt to disappear to have children.
And since this is the 21st century, it is actually possible for a father to cook, clean, change diapers, etc. Childbirth isn't exactly a minor event - having someone else around to help after the birth wouldn't be a bad idea. Perhaps, if the father had the time and opportunity to bond with his child, instead of being forced into the traditional breadwinner role, families would be stronger.
The two names they used in the study were John and Jennifer, which are apparently equally likeable, where they cite this study here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/3/268.short
Men take less of it, even in ball-less nations.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
'Sentimental partner'?
Is that someone you hang around with and talk about old times? WTF?
If you mean some sort of dating service type add then I'd explain it that men are better a lying, but that doesn't match my experience.
Alternatively the men wrote 'get a date' type adds. 'Attractive Double jointed 25 year old nymphomaniac seeks man with functional penis' will get lots of responses, but no relationship prospects. Kind of like 'Generous older gentleman seeks companion for tour of Europe' will get lots of responses, but no relationship prospects.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A different attitude would definitely be better on an internship or volunteer position being taken on to learn about a job or to receive a letter of recommendation for a career in a particular field or for college applications or educational opportunities: in this case, do all of the work asked, regardless of the silliness of the request or the merit of the task. Learn all that's possible and get a glowing recommendation "blah-blah would do anything to get ahead in this field and is a wonderful so-and-so". I did just that this summer in order to get letters of recommendation for college and to see if medicine is of interest to me. Your mileage and results may vary. :)
Interesting aside, random search regarding the word uppity shows it is used to put down "blacks/African Americans" who are perceived to be stepping out of their place of subservience. That wasn't your intent at all, I am certain, but it is strange how some words come with loaded context.