Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science | Hacker News Reader

Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science

journals.sagepub.com

68 pointsjimmybox32 comments

Please replace the editorialized headline with the actual one (Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration)

From the abstract:

> our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and 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.

i.e. out of six domains, three were neutral, one favored women, and two favored men. Guess which one was cherrypicked for the HN submission?

> The two female authors of this article share personal histories rife with egregious examples of gender bias in academic science and beyond. Born in 1950 and 1960, respectively, they endured substantial sexism and were victims of cruelty during the earliest decades of their careers. Despite these experiences, today they share the belief—rooted in empirical data—that although the situation in academia was often deeply unfair to women in the past, it has dramatically improved over recent decades. The key question today is, in which domains of academic life has explicit sexism been addressed? And in which domains is it important to acknowledge continuing bias that demands attention and rectification lest we maintain academic systems that deter the full participation of women?

> Just as there are negative consequences of not acknowledging bias, there are also costs of believing that sexism in academic science is pervasive when it is not—key among them that women will be discouraged from choosing academic careers in science, and resources will be wasted in combatting nonexistent bias claims. For this and many additional reasons, the two female authors of this article request that readers approach the topic with an open mind.

A university I went to left a hiring document out marked "confidential". It specifically stated that preferences in hiring go to women and minorities when at all possible. It was not stated as "tie breaker" but stated that they would look at men once women and minorities had been exhausted. For a discrimination lawsuit it would have been a smoking gun. This was in the 90's. I imagine things are similar today, but nobody would have it written down.

The one that runs counter to the pending narrative.

If a study finds broccoli and cigarettes could cause pancreatic cancer the headlines sure as heck isn't going to read "cigarettes might cause cancer"

Hmm. I'm not convinced that teaching ratings can be considered a separate domain, given that hiring is a domain and finds a bias in favor of women.

If hiring decisions factor in both an applicant's demonstrated ability to teach a subject and whether the applicant is a woman, each institution (except the absolute top most competitive institution) will see a negative correlation between the two factors. https://brilliant.org/wiki/berksons-paradox/

Agreed, this is naked culture warfare and doesn't belong on HN.

More women than men attend college as well.

Women are not however overrepresented in the top 10 most dangerous jobs or the military or the homeless population.

A lot of talk about the glass ceiling but none about the glass floor.

Most talk about women and gender equality is region/culture specific. In most of the world, women have a long way to go to achieve equality but in some highly developed countries, i'd say they have it a little bit better overall than men. The problem is men are always judged by what the minority of men do / have, most of the top ten richest people on earth are men? Well lets not forget that most likely the top ten percent of the poorest people are also probably also men, men have higher rates of suicide completion, lower rates of college completion, higher pressure to be a provider, less social support etc... It is great to be a man, provided you are born with high degree of "ability", otherwise you are just one of the "dregs of society".

Most suicides are also men and yet no extra benefits to mental healthcare are provided. On the contrary.

Men have always been a disposable commodity. Useful for labor, paying taxes and dying in wars.

Not only that, but poorly performing students are more likely to be male, whilst excellent students are more likely to be female. This is true across almsot all disaplines.

One of the best suggestions on dealing with this academic discrepancy is having boys take one more year in kindergarten, so that they are one year older than the girls in their grade / year.

I'd take this one step further, and claim - from anecdata - that kids should be in quarters, and defer middle school until 6*4 or 7*4 quarters have been reached for girls and boys respectively.

My class in highschool, mostly people who ended up mathematicians, doctors, etc, most of us were born in the first quarter of the year. Do take with a large grain of salt as a) it's been 10 years, and b) this is likely biased bc of the book "outliers".

> having boys take one more year in kindergarten

Functionally doing this with both of my children (though not repeating curriculum) after lots of debating and stress. Adding the expectation into the child's head of being "One of the Smart Ones" seems incredibly powerful moving forward.

I know that this is unsolicited advice, but be careful when putting such expectations to children. I know that it has caused me a lot of trouble and many regrets, mostly those of inadequacy even though in retrospect, my environment didn't enable me to flourish.

re: unsolicited advice - PLEASE

  man parenting
  No manual entry for parenting

We've read a number of books; but our plan has pretty much broken down to

* try and not do what our parents did to annoy us as children

* give them every support and opportunity we can

* Don't let them be assholes

The range of attributes and outcomes are more varied for men.

Highest IQ in the world - probably a man.

Lowest - probably also a man.

Boardrooms - full of men.

Prisons - full of men.

In general, men are over represented at the extreme ends of performance, good and bad. If women excel in school that is an indicator of a bias against men.

This field is like a minefield for critical thinkers given the sensitivity around the issue and the difficulty in finding rigorous answers.

In stuff like that I don't trust the mainstream, nor I do trust any publication that is not very thorough. Since just establishing if a publication is thorough takes too much time for me I am content with a lot of question marks.

I accept that I do not know anything about general trends - only some personal stuff about myself and some people around me which may be or may not be representative.

Surprisingly you can still live well after you accept you are not required to have an informed opinion of this issue. You can still spend your time having fun and writing code

> tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women

So easier to hire but lower salary?

Can we call it a draw?

With how poorly academics are paid these days, and the grueling hours they have to work - is "women more readily hired into slave-labor jobs" an advantage for the women, or for the men?

Unfortunately I think academics fall into the category (trap really) of "passion jobs" that are exploited due to the large amount of people willing to take slave wages to "do what they love". It is why video game developers, aerospace engineers, artists, and the like are all paid significantly less than their peers at more "boring" companies/jobs. They'll do the same day to day work, yet work for longer hours and lower pay fueled by the idea that they'll eventually break through some invisible barrier and reach a point where they're just doing the "fun" stuff all day every day.

> With how poorly academics are paid these days

VS top private institutions I'd believe it; but that would surprise me overall.

https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-tenured-pro... ~156k/year being my first search hit across all fields; but that also includes Arts and the like where private industry (and professor salary) is much lower Finance as an example will bring it up drastically.

It's been their stated goal in academic hiring, so I don't think this is anything new.

Yes, my first thought on reading the headlines was ,"Great---it's actually working!"

It's worth noting that as of 2020, only 32.5% of full professors were women (https://www.aaup.org/news/data-snapshot-full-time-women-facu...). So still a sizable gap.

Why should the ratio be 50/50? Women continue to prefer to stay home with kids more than men, which reduces the number that will stay on the tenure track and beyond to the end.

Since most of the older ones are men, I think the career prospects for non-minority men considering academia are grim (if academic careers aren't already).

> women received 0.55 job offers per application, whereas men received only 0.19

I wonder what the stats are outside of academia

I don't understand why this is flagged. It's an academic paper. Surely we can handle the content.

Why was this flagged?

Ah, well that settles that. /s

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/business-negotiations/wome...

I guess computer science isn’t science /s

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