Hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track
pnas.org
pnas.org
As I sat next to her, watching her draw on her free Surface Pro and text on her free Lumia, I was thinking about the projects I was working on, the weekends upon weekends I had spent in highschool tinkering around in a shell, and yeah, it pissed me off. I'm not by any means claiming that women can't code, that's ridiculous. I've coded with with women that are incredible thinkers. I just think this is a problem, is all. Meritocracy over everything.
A relevant blog post by weev (and i'll note, here's a trigger warning if you can't deal with his white victim complex and some name calling): http://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html
Feminism shouldn't be about "We had to go through this, so now you have to."
It should be about "Nobody should have to go through this."
No.
> have you considered the possibility that you aren't as good as you think you are.
Every day, more than you can imagine.
A non-sexist world would have 1:1, or no preference based on gender, declared or perceived.
The whole point is weeding out sexism. A non-sexist world is 1:1 in terms of preference.
I mean, if this practice is not beneficial to anyone (except the girls, [EDIT:and also perhaps the utterly smart guys in the world as the valuation of this asset for them increases due to this hiring preference]), they probably would just drop it in the end...
Aside from the obvious, the bias, and people's knowledge of the bias, creates a perception that women are only there due to an unfair bias in their favor. This is toxic, and it damages the cause of reducing such biases, because it brings conversations back to gender equality when they should be about individual merit.
And that's what this is about: Individuals. Individuals with their own merits and qualities, not "individuals" as proxies for whatever group they've been assigned to. Fighting bias is all about making everyone see everyone else as just an individual, just someone just like them in most respects, not as some instance of a class to be treated identically to all other instances of that class.
Going for numerical equality is metric-based thinking, and it relegates individuals to being instances of a class. It's like saying "Oh, you'll have so much in common! You're both women, after all!"
(Metric-based thinking: Optimize for what's easy to measure.)
> I mean, if this practice is not beneficial to anyone (except the girls, [EDIT:and also perhaps the utterly smart guys in the world as the valuation of this asset for them increases due to this hiring preference]), they probably would just drop it in the end...
Not if it becomes ingrained, or if it has benefits to the organization which the leadership thinks outweigh the detriments to the workforce.
>Aside from the obvious, the bias, and people's knowledge of the bias,
>creates a perception that women are only there due to an unfair bias
>in their favor. This is toxic, and it damages the cause of reducing
>such biases, because it brings conversations back to gender equality
>when they should be about individual merit.
And the process of un-biasing, is also the process of finding new properties or attributes to bias to (such as the "merits" you mentioned), with more accurate prediction power...
But back to the question of gender bias, I feel one of the reasons the industry hiring process starts to favor women than men, is to add more feminine elements in the product/service they sell, through increasing the women ratio in their team, and hence to attract more women consumers and also perhaps the feminine side of straight and gay men.
EDIT: I don't know why the gender bias in the recent tenure-tracked professorship awarding process in STEM...Is it because the academia would receive more government or corporate funding if they get more woman professors? Or perhaps they want to attract more women students to the department? Or simply they just want to show their political correctness?
It's a long road from here to there, but this is encouraging.
No, it's sexism.
But it's not clear how you distinguish between what's an appropriate correction to historical discrimination and what's overcompensation. If the bias were in favor of an over-represented group, it would be more clear -- but that's not what we're seeing. Women are grossly underrepresented in STEM faculty, and the only way to correct that is to hire a greater share of them and to use their gender as a positive discriminating factor in hiring.
I don't believe either of us are in a position to judge whether that should best manifest as a 2:1 ratio during resume reviews, a 1.1:1 ratio in finalized hires, or a 5:1 ratio in outreach, or some other arbitrary number during some other arbitrary phase.
This is affirmative action, which has the following problem: How do it eventually end? This is especially true when the desired quota is impossible (It may or may not be in the case of gender rep in STEM). In the real world, affirmative action policies never end due to social/political pressure, and eventually just inflict the converse problem.
Affirmative action is not the only way to correct imbalances (it may not even do that). The better way, at least in my view, is to correct the cause(s) of the imbalance, then wait. Of course if there's no discernible correctable cause, then the imbalance is clearly natural, and should not be disturbed. This may be slower, but its stable and infallible.
How about this: Should we mandate a numerical balance between men and women in grade school teachers? Should we not hire qualified women until there's a 1:1 ratio between men to women in K-6 education? Why or why not?