Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM (2015)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
More specifically, it covered these academic jobs in these departments: biology, engineering, economics and psychology.
The lower representation of women in STEM, has to do with fewer women wanting to join STEM or Tech programs in the first place. These preferences are especially visible among domestic candidates.
Given the lower supply of minority candidates and proportionally higher demand to appear diverse, major institutions will naturally end up with a bias favoring minorities in hiring on an individual basis.
Now, I will admit that the bias may not always manifest in a lower bar. Often, it involves simply interviewing more minorities or making it easier for them access grants, top projects or awards that accelerate their careers. Some of these benefits are implicitly reaped by the rich and connected, irrespective of their minority status. Others might argue, that the explicit affirmative action is merely balancing a culture that innately discourages women from entering the field. That's a whole another discussion.
But, to think that the observations of this study were surprising, shows priors born out of drinking political koolaid.
Is this really possible? If some company with resources over-interviews and over-hires some minority, then necessarily won't there be other companies that would be forced to under-hire from that minority because those resources will have been removed from the (fixed size) hiring pool, where the minority is now even more underrepresented.
This only works if the hiring pool is unbounded or there's a hidden pool of that minority somewhere that wasn't taken into account when figuring out the original percentages. It can't be done by all companies, only by a few that can take more than "their minority fair share".
Basically for both groups there is the top quality which will always be hired and the bottom quality which will never be hired. However the difference appears in the middle group that will eventually be hired given enough interviews. For minorities with more interviews a higher portion of this group will be hired. The more over-interviewing and over-hiring you do this group will get more and more drained. But there are still members on the lower end that will eventually be hired given enough opportunity.
And when it does...what should society be doing about that?
AKA rewarding mediocrity.
Some biased hiring policies exist to this day, notable in Google and other big names. Certain demographics are given a 2nd chance interview if the first is bombed, among the more implicit biases. You won't find this written anywhere, of course. The big names don't want their illegal behavior to come out during discovery.
This research is also backed up by blind hiring experiments. Studies have shown that stripping name and gender from resumes results in less women and less minorities from being selected for interview (suggesting positive bias). Such blind hiring trials are quickly shuttered and swept under the rug to avoid rattling the PC orthodoxy.
France tried it and it backfired spectacularly.
It's kinda sad because it creates two categories of devs when looking at internal hiring: people you know are there on merit and people who maybe got a little bit of help from "the quota".
I've heard it (in engineering only meetings) "you know this guy is solid, he went to X and he's asian so you know he's there for the right reasons".
Something I have to wonder is are women and minorities... ok with this?
I'm a woman, and I work in tech though not on tech (content marketing). Affirmative action infuriates me. Every time I get offered an institution-based opportunity, I have to wonder, is it actually me, or do they just want to juice the diversity numbers? I know that other people are wondering too, so it becomes important to demonstrate that I could have earned my way into the room. Luckily I'm pretty good at that, so I don't get questioned after opening my mouth.
This was one of the reasons why I stopped applying to speak at conferences — I realized that acceptance meant less about me than about the general applicant pool.
Somehow, promoting folks who are culturally just like you (in spite of mediocre ability) is considered a meritocracy, while hiring folks who DON'T look like you is considered a lower-quality diversity hire?
And, speaking of hiring just by resumes, I attended Harvard and we had something even lower status than the waitlist -- the "z list." That was the just-squeaking-in applicants who came from wealthy / connected families, but who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise. I knew one of them; he was not the brightest. But later on, he'd have Harvard on his resume and might outperform another applicant on a blind application. When you dig into it, the so-called meritocracy is often just a machine for consolidating privilege among the already privileged.
As a minority, coming from the largely blind-meritocracy of the military: NO. Same for the vast majority of minority service members and veterans that I know.
Not about "certain demographics" but since you mentioned Google, they do publicly say "Voting produces one of three possible outcomes: Hire, No Hire, Hold/More Information Needed. In the last case, the recruiter will take the committee's feedback and gather more information (potentially scheduling additional interviews)" https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/hiring-hire-by-committe...
One sees similar portrayals of e.g. the gender education gap, which massively favours girls, as a triumph, rather than a problem. Sometimes the massively higher rate of male homelessness is even made out to be about how our statistics must be biased against registering women who are slumming it by e.g. couch surfing... There seems a massive bias in the social sciences against men.
I'm sure you can slice and dice it into subcategories and then pick and choose those that have a higher number of men, but I can do the exact same thing with those subcategories you arbitrarily exclude to create a mirror image showing how STEM is biased against men. But it's a silly game.
Is it, though? I'm sure it's not, and the ratio of women to men is much much lower. I know of a FANG which rejects male candidates with PhDs but goes to the extents of admitting female candidates with a single boot camp on their resume, and even then most teams barely have more than a couple of women in their ranks.
It's true that in CS in particular, there are more men graduating than women. But people should say that instead of just "STEM."
And they should probably express concern about not enough men studying e.g. biology, especially since many of the career paths that biology is a prerequisite for are relatively stable and well-paying.
Oh no, it must continue until historical wrongs are righted!
Can I make a joke?
A more news worthy article would be: "Washington Post surprised that women are favored for jobs in stem"
Is anyone else tired of this obsession with the genders of people?
I don't care that women are underrepresented in garbage collection, construction, pilots or ceos. Or that they are now overrepresented in college. The only alarming thing is how much resources are spent on trying to socially engineer the ratios.
Although not impossible to do in the tech world it would involve a big change in current interview practices (e.g. no face to face interviews anymore). But in any case, this is not the direction society is going.
[1] https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
As for tech interviews: at some point it will have to be a face to face meeting or a video call. You literally cannot disguise male/female here unless you enforce the use of masks, voice changers, and make it difficult to see the remainder of the body (hair, posture, physical size, shape, gait).