Don't let your daughters grow up to be scientists

More and more research suggests gender bias in the sciences. But do men and women similarly trust evidence demonstrating such bias? A new paper argues that men and women interpret this kind of evidence -- however scientific -- differently, and that that has implications for the field as a whole. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, not everyone agrees with the findings.

The paper, in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on several experiments involving both laymen and -women and male and female faculty members. All participants were asked to evaluate scientific research showing a bias against women in science, technology, engineering and math. Men in both groups judged the research less favorably than did women, and male faculty members in STEM were especially likely to view it poorly. But men evaluated the same research more favorably than did women when findings of that research were altered to show no gender bias.

“Critically, across three experiments, we uncovered a gender difference in the way people from the general public and STEM faculty evaluate the quality of research that demonstrates women’s documented disadvantage in STEM fields: men think the research is of lower quality, whereas women think the research is of higher quality,” the authors said. “Why does this gender difference matter? For one, there are significant implications for the dissemination and impact of meritorious previous, current and future research on gender bias in STEM fields.”

Most importantly, they argue, “our research suggests that men will relatively disfavor -- and women will relatively favor -- research demonstrating this bias.” That means that scholars focusing on this area of research might have trouble advancing professionally, given that men still dominate the STEM fields, they say, and that lingering doubts about bias in STEM will unnecessarily prolong the process of making the sciences more inclusive.

That study was based on Internet comments on various kinds of websites regarding a third, widely cited study by Moss-Racusin suggesting that both male and female scientists were more likely to want to hire as a lab manager and award higher pay to a hypothetical student candidate named John than one named Jennifer, even though the rest of their applications were identical.

Maybe papers should be submitted or publication using a non gender identifier?

There is no guarantee that this [gender-neutral labels for scientific manuscripts] solves the problem. What if you do this, and the unequal numbers still favor men? The incorrect assumption is that a gender-blind system will always lead to equality (in terms of raw numbers).

The problem on the academic progression side is that at a lot of universities (definitely at the public universities we have in Canada) your progression requires you to publish and for your 'name' to become known.

A.C. Smith isn't going to get the credit Alan C. Smith is, without Alison C. Smith doing a lot of work to prove she is A.C. Smith.

It's unfortunate.

Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development at Cornell University, and Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cornell, are no strangers to complicating research on gender bias in STEM. In a 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, they argued that women’s life choices, whether voluntary or constrained, better explain women’s underrepresentation in STEM than the usual suspects of discrimination in journal and grant reviewing and hiring. (They argued such biases were things of the past, and that efforts to address them missed the real source of the problem.)

...

“We hope that the discovery of an overall 2 to 1 preference for hiring women over otherwise identical men will help counter self-handicapping and opting out by talented women at the point of entry to the STEM professoriate, and suggest that female underrepresentation can be addressed in part by increasing the number of women applying for tenure-track positions.”

Why doesn't funding and approval go to anonymous people, if they can prove via their grades/backgrounds they are viable candidates to do the work?

What you've answered though doesn't make sense for the picking of someone for their first paper, having them do the work, giving their critique, then finding out their name and gender.

But in what's been called the 'leaky STEM pipeline,' women haven't advanced as far toward equity in academic careers. However female underrepresentation is even more extreme in high-profile journal publications.

Women Men
PhD students
55% 45%
Postdocs
43.5% 56.5%
NIH large grant recipient
30% 70%
Tenure-track faculty
29% 71%
First author of research article in Nature/Science
25% 75%
Full professors
24% 76%
Last author of research article in Nature/Science
15% 85%

Why doesn't funding and approval go to anonymous people, if they can prove via their grades/backgrounds they are viable candidates to do the work?

II am working to give my daughter the skills that she will need to excel should she choose to be in engineering.

I want my daughter (as my sons) to equal opportunity. I am teaching her to confident, to be aggressive. I teach her to negotiate for salary and position and to promote herself. She seems to have no trouble doing this (and I am not worried). I also want my daughter to have equal opportunity...

Sure, if a gender-blind system significantly raises the number of published papers by women, it would strongly suggest a gender bias (and I would likely support it). But what if the gender-blind system had the opposite effect?