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Cornell Study: For STEM Tenure Track, Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men

Posted by timothy on from the whose-bias-is-called-bias dept.

_Sharp'r_ writes In the first "empirical study of sexism in faculty hiring using actual faculty members", Cornell University researchers found that when using identical qualifications, but changing the sex of the applicant, "women candidates are favored 2 to 1 over men for tenure-track positions in the science, technology, engineering and math fields." An anonymous reader links to the study itself.

2 of 517 comments (clear)

  1. Not Actual Hirings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Before the comments explode into an orgy of heated and tedious argument (well ok, they already have), it's worth noting that the study didn't use statistics for actual hiring decisions. By the phrase "using actual faculty members," they just mean that they got a bunch of professors to participate in an experiment where they evaluate the suitability of various made-up candidates on paper. Meh. If they had real-world stats for this, I might actually be interested. How many men and how many women applied to different STEM faculty jobs in a given year, and who got hired? Simple - yet we don't have that information.

  2. Misleading headline and story by ardmhacha · · Score: 1, Informative

    The study did not look at real hiring decisions made by colleges but rather had STEM faculty members rank made up resumes. So to say that "Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men" is not supported by the study.