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Comment by drc500free | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

> 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.

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