14 ms·

Research finds no gender bias in academic science

133 points by jwond 3y ago

bannedbybros 3y ago
[dead]
quaz4r 3y ago
When I was an undergraduate, about 10% of my cohort were women. I worked for a professor in his lab who called me a cheerleader and would tell me how much he wished he was younger so he could date me and my friends. I presented at a conference when I was 19 and after my talk, a prof came up to me in the hallway and asked if I wanted to go up to his room. One time after sitting a graduate course, I got to overhear some of the senior faculty at my department talk about how they love summer because the freshman women sun bathe in tiny bikinis outside of their office. I worked my ass off to publish a first author paper as an undergrad and get great GRE scores. I collected my letters of rec. One focused on my personality as a young woman (that I wasn't going to be a 'fuss') and my appearance ("fit and modest with natural hair"). I was able to get into a top 5 gradschool in my field with the help of a major grant backing my studies. When I was a graduate student about 5% of my class were women. I was able to find an advisor my first year. He added an entire section to his NSF proposal patting himself on the back for supporting women in the field and how he is increasing diversity by mentoring me, and sent it to me to read. Later that year, I was sexually assaulted multiple times by graduates in the program. The uni did nothing and I fell behind on course work. My advisor stopped meeting with me. I wasn't invited to study sessions with the other grads. I went to conferences and summer schools to try to make research connections but the conferences were always 99% male dominated and it was really hard to make a connection with anyone, especially with all of my fear. The ones who did want to talk about my work always wanted to do it over dinner. After dinner, one of them told me "I'd really like to fuck you". Another one stalked me near my house for the week he was in town. I found a new advisor. He basically ignored me the rest of graduate school and I did my best to work alone. I was not able to publish first author papers in total isolation. I managed to get second and third author contributions while retooling and applying for grants in a totally unrelated field of science in an attempt to self-rescue. I was the only woman in my year to graduate from the program with a PhD. Most other PhD holding women in my field have similar experiences, especially if they were single through most of graduate school. I did not go on to do a postdoc. All of this is context so I can say: No shit if you look at metrics like hiring after obtaining the PhD it looks biased towards women. At least in my field there are about 2 women per year on the market, who made it through all of the above. This is called the "leaky pipeline" and is unaddressed in the paper. These women will be given extra consideration because they are only 5% represented in department faculty, and maybe 2% in the subdiscipline. And yes, they will likey have fewer papers and less support and less mentorship along the way, making their applications look weaker based on (arbitrary -- and I mean that!) metrics. Those metrics don't relatively measure tenacity and the ability to hunker down and push through adversity; the skills to seek out and find the right mentors; the ability to remain laser focused on a goal. I am just depressed by some of the comments in this section. Lots of people crying bias about hiring in academic departments ...that are still only 5% women.
jl2718 3y ago
Massive paper, but a quick scroll to several random statistical tables shows a very clear and indisputable gender preference in hiring.
- revelio 3y ago
  Yup. Headline: "Research Finds No Gender Bias in Academic Science" Subheading: "women have an edge over men in hiring." Paper abstract: "[women] are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring), For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning." Paper contents: - "Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments" - "in the authors’ main experiment (N = 363), faculty expressed a significant preference for hiring women. This pro-female preference was similar across fields, types of institution, and gender and rank of faculty" - "The authors found that all else being equal, faculty were between 5% and 10% more likely to favor a female candidate or a gender nonbinary candidate, respectively, over an identically accomplished male" - "The authors found a significant pro-female advantage, with faculty rating female applicants’ competence and hirability significantly higher than identically accomplished male applicants"
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    That doesn't count as gender bias. Gender bias is when the system discriminates against women. When it does the same against men, it's equity.
    - joemazerino 3y ago
      Doesn't seem equitable to me.
    - revelio 3y ago
      Assumed /s but yes that seems to be the (re)definition they're using.
    - 3y ago
onos 3y ago
“It’s important to get a grip on what’s going on today and not what was going on in 1985,” Amen. Some don’t agree though. They say we should favor historically mistreated groups because it’s important context. Yet, in higher ed this often entails favoring the child of doctors who will help diversity numbers over the poor white male. I believe the culture wars would decrease dramatically if we’d drop the identity politics and simply say: let’s help the poor.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  But then how do you define poor? I ask because you do enter a new identity politics discussion. Blacks tend to have much lower wealth, even when you control for income. So it’s in the interest of whites to push income and blacks to push wealth. I also think there’s an optics issue. As you note the poor white males may be getting passed over now. So many would say that it’s really convenient that NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?
  - letrowekwel 3y ago
    "So many would say that it’s really convenient NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?" Does historical injustice make it right to behave unjust in the present, almost as if it were a revenge? I don't think so. I agree about importance of defining poverty though. Both income and wealth should be taken into account and taxed appropriately. It's not only a class issue, but also generational issue with lots of old people sitting on super-expensive property, while young families can't afford a home.
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      The issue is if the intent to act just now is just a way to institute selective justice to further injustice. For example, the same people who tend to support helping all poor people for certain things (like college admissions) tend to oppose it for other things (like welfare or basic income). The defining line across all of these things tends to be race and which group benefits the most. So when I hear let’s help everyone when it helps their in-group, but they don’t have that same energy elsewhere (or the same energy a decade ago when maybe it wouldn’t have helped their in-group) — I get cynical.
revelio 3y ago
Paywalled but the paper is this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/15291006231163179 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/152910062311631...
rajin444 3y ago
The focus on group outcomes as opposed to efficacy of the discipline is a sign of a sick culture. Groups are fighting over spoils instead of working to solve hard problems and push humanity forward. Ironically, it’s a complacency enabled by those who came before and didn’t have as much concern over the racial / gender / etc makeup of an industry. They succeeded to such a degree our society can afford to waste entire careers in the name of equity. Who cares if the NBA has horrible diversity? They’re trying to find the best basketball players.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  The NBA cares. In terms of bottom line, they are helped by having diverse players. Yao Ming opened the game up to a billion audience market. Top jersey sales often go to rising white stars in the game. Ones of the pushes in the league is to make foreign European players appeal more to white Americans. We’re not trying to have the league match US demographics, but make no mistake that diversity is a big deal to the NBA.
  - rajin444 3y ago
    Diversity should only matter in that it furthers the level of basketball being played. Diversity because it opens up additional markets is an awful incentive. That they only care about diversity because it makes them richer is very telling. On top of that, the NBA is always going to have a problem with height diversity. I don’t think this is a problem, but viewed with an equity lens it is.
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      I think you underestimate how single minded business is. In fairness they probably also have some other reasons to care about diversity, but money is the biggest issue.
    - giaour 3y ago
      > On top of that, the NBA is always going to have a problem with height diversity When I was a kid, I recall people loving Muggsy Bogues because he was a short guy thriving in a tall man's game. It was really dramatic to watch him start when everybody else on the court was 2+ feet taller. Professional sports are a performance, and it's ludicrous to say managers and league execs shouldn't take things like viewership and ticket sales into account when planning a season or expanding a team's roster. The "home team" dynamic deliberately encourages spectators to identify with players with whom they share an affinity (even if it's just that they live in the same city), so it's unsurprising that the dynamic extends to nationality, gender, religion, race, etc, too.
m-watson 3y ago
Man that is not a great headline from Inside Higher Ed. In the discussion section the authors explicitly layout that this is a specific slice they are looking at not all of Academic Science. "Before we summarize our findings below, we reiterate a caveat noted throughout this article: The failure to support specific claims of bias does not deny the possibility that broader, systemic barriers against women in the academy exist and/or that significant bias existed before 2000. We did not examine systemic claims of bias, such as the tenure schedule that imposes inflexible time-career paths or structural societal norms that burden women with greater responsibilities outside of their academic jobs or that penalize women for negotiating forcefully for wage increases or seeking outside offers. Other scholars have identified a myriad of such systemic barriers. But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."
- ttpphd 3y ago
  Thanks for spotlighting this. It is encouraging to see people seriously engage with the writing and surface the nuanced words of the researchers themselves.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  That reads largely like a standard academic paper disclaimer. It’s standard to include a statement about things the authors didn’t explore as a way to set the context and also head off trivial objections. It’s unreasonable to expect them to have surveyed everything everywhere, so highlighting the boundaries of where they stopped is reasonable. The part at the end hints that they did find bias, but in the opposite direction of what was assumed: > But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."
photochemsyn 3y ago
This is a much better study than this recent one on HN that only looked at publication count, because it has six metric rather than one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699889 There's been a lot of discussion about diversity and equity in the sciences, but fundamentally, efforts to predict what young individuals are best suited to academic work based on their identitarian profile are foolish and doomed to failure. The best approach is to take the largest possible pool of candidates, i.e. eliminate all restrictions on who gets to enter the pool, and then proceed to put them through the same series of challenges and see who makes it through each successive stage, while also offering the same level of support to each individual. This 'salmon swimming upstream' approach doesn't attempt to predict outcomes based on race/gender/class/etc., it instead selects neutrally based on ability and effort. Given that only a small fraction of the overall population is going to have the necessary combination of mental ability and dedicated interest that it takes to do painstaking scientific research, you want to start with the largest pool of candidates possible, and this is why limiting that pool to members of one group is a very bad idea if you value scientific progress. This makes clear the point at which anti-discrimination policies should be applied: everyone who wants to should get to enter the competition and have equal initial support. Of course, there are issues here with academic development in the K-12 pre-college years, related to parental involvement and cultural expectations, economic disadvantages and quality of local schools, etc. but some of the responses - cutting back on algebra for 8th graders in California etc. - are just idiotic. Incidentally, nepotism is probably more of a problem today, i.e. tenured professors may use political maneuvering and social networking to get their grad students and postdocs jobs as academic professors even though they aren't necessarily the best candidates for those positions.
derbOac 3y ago
I'm not sure what to make of studies like this sometimes, as the problem is sometimes more in the heterogeneity than in the typical case. Two wrongs don't make a right. I've seen gender bias of both forms in academic settings, over and over again. Cases where women were treated grossly unacceptably because of their gender, even if it was mostly implicit and cast in terms of proxy issues; I've also seen cases where things happened in such a way as to benefit women, solely because of their gender, that would cause a firestorm if they were discussed openly in the public discourse. My guess is on average things might look ok across the broader institution(s), but that average would be burying a lot of problems of both forms. I don't see a paper like this really helping in this regard. Swinging from one form of sexism to another is not the same as being as gender-blind as is possible.
tristor 3y ago
Looks like what the study and source material actually show is a bias against men. I'm guessing they don't consider this a bias though, and think it's just desserts, as seems to be the current model in academia. Both in hiring and in graduation rates, there is a bias against men shown in the data in this paper.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  That will need some support. Citation please?
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    [dead]
  - fuzzybiscuit 3y ago
    its in the linked paper.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
The headline seems inaccurate. It first says that there's no bias. Then it says that it is biased toward women. Which is it?
tpoacher 3y ago
So, the conclusion is that in terms of the typical metrics used to get a job in academia (i.e. grant funding and publications) there is no difference between men and women. But there is a difference in terms of getting a job per se (with women hired more than men). But that's ok because the metrics that one tries to tick to get hired are equal. Therefore there is no evidence of sex discrimination. It's a bit like saying, we found that the CEO works the same hours as their workers (productivity metric), but the pay (i.e. the intended reward for achieving said productivity measured by said metric) was not the same because of the CEO's massive bonus. BUT, since the hours worked are the same, we conclude that there's no pay discrimination. Wat? There may genuinely be no sex discrimination involved, and I'm inclined to believe that this is indeed the case; but to me the argument above is not as much in support of this statement as the authors seem to think it is.
rhelz 3y ago
Not trying to be flip here, but isn't this kinda like the Bible verifying that indeed, the Bible is true?
- blep_ 3y ago
  If this was one group studying itself, maybe. Academia is big and has frequent disagreements about itself. Treat it as one group studying another. (Though one can still make mistakes and misrepresent data when not studying oneself, obviously.)

133 points by jwond 3y ago

[dead]

When I was an undergraduate, about 10% of my cohort were women. I worked for a professor in his lab who called me a cheerleader and would tell me how much he wished he was younger so he could date me and my friends. I presented at a conference when I was 19 and after my talk, a prof came up to me in the hallway and asked if I wanted to go up to his room. One time after sitting a graduate course, I got to overhear some of the senior faculty at my department talk about how they love summer because the freshman women sun bathe in tiny bikinis outside of their office. I worked my ass off to publish a first author paper as an undergrad and get great GRE scores. I collected my letters of rec. One focused on my personality as a young woman (that I wasn't going to be a 'fuss') and my appearance ("fit and modest with natural hair"). I was able to get into a top 5 gradschool in my field with the help of a major grant backing my studies. When I was a graduate student about 5% of my class were women. I was able to find an advisor my first year. He added an entire section to his NSF proposal patting himself on the back for supporting women in the field and how he is increasing diversity by mentoring me, and sent it to me to read. Later that year, I was sexually assaulted multiple times by graduates in the program. The uni did nothing and I fell behind on course work. My advisor stopped meeting with me. I wasn't invited to study sessions with the other grads. I went to conferences and summer schools to try to make research connections but the conferences were always 99% male dominated and it was really hard to make a connection with anyone, especially with all of my fear. The ones who did want to talk about my work always wanted to do it over dinner. After dinner, one of them told me "I'd really like to fuck you". Another one stalked me near my house for the week he was in town. I found a new advisor. He basically ignored me the rest of graduate school and I did my best to work alone. I was not able to publish first author papers in total isolation. I managed to get second and third author contributions while retooling and applying for grants in a totally unrelated field of science in an attempt to self-rescue. I was the only woman in my year to graduate from the program with a PhD. Most other PhD holding women in my field have similar experiences, especially if they were single through most of graduate school. I did not go on to do a postdoc. All of this is context so I can say: No shit if you look at metrics like hiring after obtaining the PhD it looks biased towards women. At least in my field there are about 2 women per year on the market, who made it through all of the above. This is called the "leaky pipeline" and is unaddressed in the paper. These women will be given extra consideration because they are only 5% represented in department faculty, and maybe 2% in the subdiscipline. And yes, they will likey have fewer papers and less support and less mentorship along the way, making their applications look weaker based on (arbitrary -- and I mean that!) metrics. Those metrics don't relatively measure tenacity and the ability to hunker down and push through adversity; the skills to seek out and find the right mentors; the ability to remain laser focused on a goal. I am just depressed by some of the comments in this section. Lots of people crying bias about hiring in academic departments ...that are still only 5% women.

jl2718 3y ago

Massive paper, but a quick scroll to several random statistical tables shows a very clear and indisputable gender preference in hiring.

revelio 3y ago
Yup. Headline: "Research Finds No Gender Bias in Academic Science" Subheading: "women have an edge over men in hiring." Paper abstract: "[women] are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring), For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning." Paper contents: - "Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments" - "in the authors’ main experiment (N = 363), faculty expressed a significant preference for hiring women. This pro-female preference was similar across fields, types of institution, and gender and rank of faculty" - "The authors found that all else being equal, faculty were between 5% and 10% more likely to favor a female candidate or a gender nonbinary candidate, respectively, over an identically accomplished male" - "The authors found a significant pro-female advantage, with faculty rating female applicants’ competence and hirability significantly higher than identically accomplished male applicants"
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  That doesn't count as gender bias. Gender bias is when the system discriminates against women. When it does the same against men, it's equity.
  - joemazerino 3y ago
    Doesn't seem equitable to me.
  - revelio 3y ago
    Assumed /s but yes that seems to be the (re)definition they're using.
  - 3y ago

onos 3y ago

“It’s important to get a grip on what’s going on today and not what was going on in 1985,” Amen. Some don’t agree though. They say we should favor historically mistreated groups because it’s important context. Yet, in higher ed this often entails favoring the child of doctors who will help diversity numbers over the poor white male. I believe the culture wars would decrease dramatically if we’d drop the identity politics and simply say: let’s help the poor.

kenjackson 3y ago
But then how do you define poor? I ask because you do enter a new identity politics discussion. Blacks tend to have much lower wealth, even when you control for income. So it’s in the interest of whites to push income and blacks to push wealth. I also think there’s an optics issue. As you note the poor white males may be getting passed over now. So many would say that it’s really convenient that NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?
- letrowekwel 3y ago
  "So many would say that it’s really convenient NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?" Does historical injustice make it right to behave unjust in the present, almost as if it were a revenge? I don't think so. I agree about importance of defining poverty though. Both income and wealth should be taken into account and taxed appropriately. It's not only a class issue, but also generational issue with lots of old people sitting on super-expensive property, while young families can't afford a home.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    The issue is if the intent to act just now is just a way to institute selective justice to further injustice. For example, the same people who tend to support helping all poor people for certain things (like college admissions) tend to oppose it for other things (like welfare or basic income). The defining line across all of these things tends to be race and which group benefits the most. So when I hear let’s help everyone when it helps their in-group, but they don’t have that same energy elsewhere (or the same energy a decade ago when maybe it wouldn’t have helped their in-group) — I get cynical.

revelio 3y ago

Paywalled but the paper is this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/15291006231163179 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/152910062311631...

rajin444 3y ago

The focus on group outcomes as opposed to efficacy of the discipline is a sign of a sick culture. Groups are fighting over spoils instead of working to solve hard problems and push humanity forward. Ironically, it’s a complacency enabled by those who came before and didn’t have as much concern over the racial / gender / etc makeup of an industry. They succeeded to such a degree our society can afford to waste entire careers in the name of equity. Who cares if the NBA has horrible diversity? They’re trying to find the best basketball players.

kenjackson 3y ago
The NBA cares. In terms of bottom line, they are helped by having diverse players. Yao Ming opened the game up to a billion audience market. Top jersey sales often go to rising white stars in the game. Ones of the pushes in the league is to make foreign European players appeal more to white Americans. We’re not trying to have the league match US demographics, but make no mistake that diversity is a big deal to the NBA.
- rajin444 3y ago
  Diversity should only matter in that it furthers the level of basketball being played. Diversity because it opens up additional markets is an awful incentive. That they only care about diversity because it makes them richer is very telling. On top of that, the NBA is always going to have a problem with height diversity. I don’t think this is a problem, but viewed with an equity lens it is.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    I think you underestimate how single minded business is. In fairness they probably also have some other reasons to care about diversity, but money is the biggest issue.
  - giaour 3y ago
    > On top of that, the NBA is always going to have a problem with height diversity When I was a kid, I recall people loving Muggsy Bogues because he was a short guy thriving in a tall man's game. It was really dramatic to watch him start when everybody else on the court was 2+ feet taller. Professional sports are a performance, and it's ludicrous to say managers and league execs shouldn't take things like viewership and ticket sales into account when planning a season or expanding a team's roster. The "home team" dynamic deliberately encourages spectators to identify with players with whom they share an affinity (even if it's just that they live in the same city), so it's unsurprising that the dynamic extends to nationality, gender, religion, race, etc, too.

m-watson 3y ago

Man that is not a great headline from Inside Higher Ed. In the discussion section the authors explicitly layout that this is a specific slice they are looking at not all of Academic Science. "Before we summarize our findings below, we reiterate a caveat noted throughout this article: The failure to support specific claims of bias does not deny the possibility that broader, systemic barriers against women in the academy exist and/or that significant bias existed before 2000. We did not examine systemic claims of bias, such as the tenure schedule that imposes inflexible time-career paths or structural societal norms that burden women with greater responsibilities outside of their academic jobs or that penalize women for negotiating forcefully for wage increases or seeking outside offers. Other scholars have identified a myriad of such systemic barriers. But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."

ttpphd 3y ago
Thanks for spotlighting this. It is encouraging to see people seriously engage with the writing and surface the nuanced words of the researchers themselves.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
That reads largely like a standard academic paper disclaimer. It’s standard to include a statement about things the authors didn’t explore as a way to set the context and also head off trivial objections. It’s unreasonable to expect them to have surveyed everything everywhere, so highlighting the boundaries of where they stopped is reasonable. The part at the end hints that they did find bias, but in the opposite direction of what was assumed: > But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."

photochemsyn 3y ago

This is a much better study than this recent one on HN that only looked at publication count, because it has six metric rather than one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699889 There's been a lot of discussion about diversity and equity in the sciences, but fundamentally, efforts to predict what young individuals are best suited to academic work based on their identitarian profile are foolish and doomed to failure. The best approach is to take the largest possible pool of candidates, i.e. eliminate all restrictions on who gets to enter the pool, and then proceed to put them through the same series of challenges and see who makes it through each successive stage, while also offering the same level of support to each individual. This 'salmon swimming upstream' approach doesn't attempt to predict outcomes based on race/gender/class/etc., it instead selects neutrally based on ability and effort. Given that only a small fraction of the overall population is going to have the necessary combination of mental ability and dedicated interest that it takes to do painstaking scientific research, you want to start with the largest pool of candidates possible, and this is why limiting that pool to members of one group is a very bad idea if you value scientific progress. This makes clear the point at which anti-discrimination policies should be applied: everyone who wants to should get to enter the competition and have equal initial support. Of course, there are issues here with academic development in the K-12 pre-college years, related to parental involvement and cultural expectations, economic disadvantages and quality of local schools, etc. but some of the responses - cutting back on algebra for 8th graders in California etc. - are just idiotic. Incidentally, nepotism is probably more of a problem today, i.e. tenured professors may use political maneuvering and social networking to get their grad students and postdocs jobs as academic professors even though they aren't necessarily the best candidates for those positions.

derbOac 3y ago

I'm not sure what to make of studies like this sometimes, as the problem is sometimes more in the heterogeneity than in the typical case. Two wrongs don't make a right. I've seen gender bias of both forms in academic settings, over and over again. Cases where women were treated grossly unacceptably because of their gender, even if it was mostly implicit and cast in terms of proxy issues; I've also seen cases where things happened in such a way as to benefit women, solely because of their gender, that would cause a firestorm if they were discussed openly in the public discourse. My guess is on average things might look ok across the broader institution(s), but that average would be burying a lot of problems of both forms. I don't see a paper like this really helping in this regard. Swinging from one form of sexism to another is not the same as being as gender-blind as is possible.

tristor 3y ago

Looks like what the study and source material actually show is a bias against men. I'm guessing they don't consider this a bias though, and think it's just desserts, as seems to be the current model in academia. Both in hiring and in graduation rates, there is a bias against men shown in the data in this paper.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
That will need some support. Citation please?
- bannedbybros 3y ago
  [dead]
- fuzzybiscuit 3y ago
  its in the linked paper.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

The headline seems inaccurate. It first says that there's no bias. Then it says that it is biased toward women. Which is it?

tpoacher 3y ago

So, the conclusion is that in terms of the typical metrics used to get a job in academia (i.e. grant funding and publications) there is no difference between men and women. But there is a difference in terms of getting a job per se (with women hired more than men). But that's ok because the metrics that one tries to tick to get hired are equal. Therefore there is no evidence of sex discrimination. It's a bit like saying, we found that the CEO works the same hours as their workers (productivity metric), but the pay (i.e. the intended reward for achieving said productivity measured by said metric) was not the same because of the CEO's massive bonus. BUT, since the hours worked are the same, we conclude that there's no pay discrimination. Wat? There may genuinely be no sex discrimination involved, and I'm inclined to believe that this is indeed the case; but to me the argument above is not as much in support of this statement as the authors seem to think it is.

rhelz 3y ago

Not trying to be flip here, but isn't this kinda like the Bible verifying that indeed, the Bible is true?

blep_ 3y ago
If this was one group studying itself, maybe. Academia is big and has frequent disagreements about itself. Treat it as one group studying another. (Though one can still make mistakes and misrepresent data when not studying oneself, obviously.)