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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."
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
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.
The same reason a 30 year old woman wants to spend all day in a room filled with first grade boys: some people actually enjoy teaching.
Can we stop parroting the media's current trend of "all adult males want to molest children"?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Sorry, but the study suggests that the *suggested starting salary* was significantly lower for women than it was for men - for the exact same information packet about the candidate, with the only difference being whether you were hiring "Mike Smith" or "Michelle Smith."
If you are lowering your opening number by $5000 just because the applicant is a woman, that's not the fault of the woman. Even if the female candidate is a negotiator to shame Henry Kissinger, she has to somehow negotiate back that $5000 you took off the table on account of her having a vagina before she even reaches parity with what you were willing to offer a man as an opening figure. It's very facile to suggest "if you want more, just ask!" But when the expected opening number is $5k lower for a female, she has to be $5k worth of negotiations better than the male candidate just to be his equal in pay.
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.
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Sexism and racism are making decisions based on someone's sex. Affirmative action IS racism. Female only scholarships and discriminatory hiring practices ARE sexism.
You're right, all those can be effective at doing things like evening out the demographics in a particular job. The people for whom they're "a giant brainfuck" are not convinced that correcting metrics, treating the symptoms, at the expense of more, overt, blatant, sanctioned racism/sexism is the way to go. In fact, it seems like they may have a point - discriminatory practices tend to have the effect of encouraging more discrimination. "She only got the job because she's a woman and they had to hire her" and the like.
A better approach is to actually address the problem. Identify sexism and racism, of any type, when they happen, and stop them. Make such things socially unacceptable. THAT's how you eliminate discrimination.
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.