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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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 depends on what you mean by "sexism."
Back in 1999, MIT ran thorough study on gender differences among the faculty. It's an interesting read. One of the striking findings was the consensus that "this is not what we expected gender bias to look like."
Put another way, women's concerns in 2012 are not the same as what they were in 1970 or 1920. It could be your working definition of sexism doesn't describe the problems of women in science.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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
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
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.
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
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.