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Cornell Study: For STEM Tenure Track, Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men
_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.
I've been pushing my daughter in STEM and she's about to transition from HS to college.
If this keeps up, I can look forward to her not having to move home after college graduation!
You now have a basis to sue. Have at it.
So we'll see the opposite in nursing schools?
No? You must be full of shit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How is excluding someone from a job based solely on gender not sexism?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Affirmative action in the United States counteracts institutional and systemic discrimination against specific groups (often visible) minorities.
Affirmative action for women is not the same as sexism; it is a corrective for sexism.
You'll need to define those terms carefully before you have any hope of persuading us.
Nope.. because penis. Welcome to affirmative action, the newspeak term for discrimination against those who are not in a protected caste.
Sex based discrimination is sex based discrimination, whatever the motives behind it are. yes, affirmative action is a corrective for sexism, but it isn't a counter for it, and isn't that what we really want? If one institution discriminates against women, and another applies affirmative action as a corrective measure, we may end up with cosily balanced statistics (men & women being equally likely to be hired), but we actually end up with 2 institutions who discriminate based on sex, and where actual ability plays second fiddle.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I have not.
I HAVE heard of men being run out of the nursing profession by women who don't want them there.
There's also education, where men elementary school teachers are frequently forced out by institutional sexism, but again, no one particularly cares about the lack of men teaching first grade.
I'm going to find it really hard to take any of this sexism bullshit seriously until I see a strong push to get half of all garbage collectors be women. Right now from my point of view it's all bullshit done by people who see nerds as a "soft target."
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.
Is it still sexism if it's correcting an existing sexist imbalance?
Yes. If gender is a consideration that influences the decision then it is by definition sexism. We can argue about whether it is justified or not (I think not) but it unquestionably IS sexism.
until then the choices are (A) preferentially hire women, or (B) hire an equal mix and wait until all the existing faculty retires (probably at least a generation or two) for the gender mix to equalize.
Incomplete set of choices. There are other options. The best option is to hire the most qualified individuals without regard to gender. Generally speaking unless there is a supply imbalance (which does happen sometimes) hiring the best people tends to take care of the diversity problems. Talent in STEM generally has little to do with gender or ethnicity or country of origin or age or even sexual orientation. Hire the best people and you'll get a diverse workforce in most cases rather naturally.
The problem is that people tend to hire who they are comfortable with rather than hire the best available candidates. This is how you end up with executive teams with nothing but old white men. Look at how much of a monoculture an organization is if you want to know whether they truly value identifying and promoting the best available people.
I should say that I'd be more strongly opposed to the practice if it were occurring in industry, but we're talking about a college
Makes no difference. College is just another type of industry. Hire the best people. Period.
Neutralizing sexual discrimination is a multi-generation endeavor, and one of the most important steps is to eliminate the gender bias in positions of power - which unfortunately requires either a period of systematic discrimination in the opposite direction, or a willingness to wait several more generations until everyone currently in the queue retires.
I really fucking hate social engineering. So until we reach this fantasy utopia of yours those of us that you are discriminating against just have to roll over? Because previous generations discriminated in the opposite direction? I'm to be disadvantaged because of my gender based on the actions of my parents and grandparents?
There's a reason why corruption of blood is proscribed in our political system. I fail to see why corruption of gender or race is justifiable. You're punishing me for the actions of third parties, many of whom died years before I was born, and you really think this is sound public policy?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
^^^^ THIS ++
There are dozens and dozens of programs for my daughter to participate in STEM. ZERO for my son. There are programs sponsored by local colleges, and high schools and software companies. Robotics competitions focused on girls.
ZERO for boys.
It is ridiculous at the opportunities cascading down upon my daughter (I am taking full advantage of it). Free, Awesome, comprehensive, ubiquitous.
ZERO for my son.
So anyone saying that girls are being discouraged from doing STEM is ignorant of the current situation in the world
blah
Well, presuming that women and men are equally qualified (which was one of the explicitly stated premises of the study), then that would make for a 50-50 mix, would it not?
No it would not because there are more men in the workplace than women overall, largely due to traditional gender roles. Furthermore there is an imbalance in some professions regarding the number of people that enter the profession. More men in engineering and construction. More women in nursing and clerical. Those issues occur FAR earlier than any hiring decision so it is not a 50-50 mix and probably never will be.
It will be rare that a workforce exactly matches the overall population ratio and doing so should never be the explicit goal. The goal is to create an environment where the only meaningful consideration is merit. If you do that well then you'll almost certainly have as diverse a workforce as is currently possible.
Yes, in a magical world populated by unicorns, rational humans, and the ability to accurately evaluate people's qualifications before hiring them, there are potentially better options. But we're stuck in this one.
Nice strawman. We don't even measure the qualifications we know about accurately or uniformly. Give the same resume with gender being the only thing changed and you get a different result? That means we aren't hiring based on merit. We're hiring based on societal pressure or comfort or some other principle.