Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Gender Bias in Academics Continued: An Experimental Test in the Hard Sciences

Why are women underrepresented in the STEM fields?
A recent advisory council to the President concluded that at the current rate of training scientists and engineers, we will have a deficit of 1,000,000 workers over the next decade. The council suggests that one way to close this gap is to increase training and retention of women. Women are drastically underrepresented in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). Some people have suggested that this underrepresentation is due to women opting out of these jobs in order to stay home with their families. However, a new study provides compelling evidence that these differences could be due to the pervasive cultural stereotype that women are less competent in these fields than men.

At the end of my last post on gender bias in letters of recommendation, I wondered what other incidences of gender bias I had been missing throughout the years. Well, not long after, I came across this new study highlighting another incident of gender bias in academics. In this study, women were rated as less worthy of hiring for a lab manager position in the hard sciences than men. Unlike the study on letters of recommendation, this study actually uses an experimental manipulation. Participants saw the exact same job application; the only difference was whether the applicant was named “John” or “Jennifer.”

In short, this group of professors asked faculty members at six research-intense universities to help undergraduates by providing feedback on their applications. The 127 faculty members who participated in the study were from the fields of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. The researchers concentrated on these fields for two main reasons. First, because women are underrepresented in these fields, and decades of research have shown that people hold stereotypes that women are not as good at the hard sciences as men. Second, faculty members in these fields are trained to be objective, suggesting that they may be less likely to rely on stereotypes when making these decisions.

The Method: Faculty members were shown an application for a lab manager position and rated the student’s hireability, competence, starting salary, and how willing they would be to offer career mentoring to the student. The only difference in the application was the name of the applicant.


The Results: As shown in the graph above, the faculty members who believed the application was for a student named “John” rated the applicant as more hireable than faculty members who believed the applicant was for a student named “Jennifer.” And this was due to the fact that they saw “Jennifer” as less competent than John. They also were less willing to mentor “Jennifer” and suggested an average starting salary for her that was nearly $4,000 less than the suggested starting salary for “John” ($26,507.94 versus $30,238.10). That’s right, since the applications were otherwise identical, we know that just by virtue of having a female name, Jennifer was worth nearly $4,000 less than John. And this is all despite the fact that the faculty members actually reported liking Jennifer more than they reported liking John (perhaps another gender bias for another day?).

Both male and female faculty members exhibited this gender bias.

This research illustrates that differences in the numbers of men and women in the STEM fields are not just due to women choosing to opt out of these jobs. Of course, women may be opting out of these jobs at higher rates than men, and many other factors may also play a role in perpetuating gender differences. But it seems that there is another more subtle influence here as well, and if this is the case, simply encouraging more women to be interested in the field might not be enough. Instead, this research, as well as the previous research I described on gender bias in letters of recommendation, suggests that we need to focus on intervening at the level of hiring decisions, making people more aware of the gender biases they may bring with them to the hiring table.

What do you make of these findings? Are you surprised that the faculty members liked the female applicant more but found her less competent? 

The article:
Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ, & Handelsman J (2012). Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 22988126

5 comments:

  1. It's weird the National Academies, surveying a much larger sample, found that these "subtle biases" don't seem to have an effect in the real world: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12062

    It might even be that including a so-called "modern sexism scale" unblinded the test. Or the cover story made participants think they should prepare females for what they could expect.

    Overall, the study's been getting too much breathless coverage. N=127! This post is a welcome exception.

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    1. I agree that we should be cautious when interpreting the results from a single study. However, I do really appreciate the design of their study and would like to see more work that uses experimental paradigms. I think this work will be important if we want to understand the causal mechanisms influencing gender differences in hiring practices.

      Also, I would think that if the modern sexism scale unblinded the study, it would have caused the participants to be less sexist, not more.

      Thanks for reading!
      Amie

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  2. In Europe, especially northern europe, things are different. A few months ago I applied for a junior professorship position (same as assistant prof) in Germany and they explicitly wrote in the job announcement that they'd rather hire a woman. I was one of four candidates selected for an interview, and all four were women. (I placed second...)

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    1. I have also seen job ads here in the US that explicitly encourage women and minorities to apply for the job. I wonder what kind of effect this actually has on hiring outcomes - does it influence the percentage of women and minorities who apply? Does it influence the likelihood that they will get an interview or be offered a position?

      According the the National Academies surveys that Dennis linked to, the percentage of women interviewed for tenure track jobs is higher than the percentage who apply, suggesting that these conscious attempts to recruit more women may be working. However, there are still many fewer women than men in the application pool, and less than would be expected given the percentage of women who recently received PhDs.

      Thanks for reading!
      Amie

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  3. I wonder if the appropriate next step is to remove all name / religion / race info from the application and resumé.

    The famous story of Julie Landsman's audition (told by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink) shows the effectiveness of a truly 'blinded' selection process.

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