Do women face a reputational bias when they co-author?

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/do-women-face-a-reputational-bias-when-they-co-author.html

by luu • 11 years ago

34 45 11 years ago

bitmadness• 11 years ago

I'm a (male) PhD student at Caltech, and didn't really believe gender bias was prevalent in academia till I spoke with female friends and learned about the kind of problems they faced. Believe me people, the problem is real.

circlecrimson• 11 years ago

Are you kidding me, if I was female colleges would fall over backwards if I was inclined to take up STEM subjects.

throwaway2048• 11 years ago

maybe the fact you arn't should tell you something about your perspective on the issue.

zzleeper• 11 years ago

In what field are you? From my experience in a business school, there is a lot of pressure now to have more woman and minorities as faculty. For instance, this is a task I recently got asked to do:

--------------------------------

Hi ,

* said that you can help me collect some data for the finance hiring committee. Here is what I need.

Attached is an excel spreadsheet with a list of business schools. Please go to each business school's website, and look up the finance department/area/group, and count the # of assistant professors in that group. In addition, please note the name of any assistant professor who is female or African-American, and the year of PhD if available. I hope you can complete this task by . Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

--------------------------------

Interestingly (in a sad way), I couldn't find any African American assistant professor professor in the list of ~100 schools I got for that field (although I did find "African Africans" and "African Europeans" or whatever you call being black and not American).

cubancigar11• 11 years ago

Africans who are not from America generally realize that their society has a lot of problems, which really isn't there in America or the 'developed' countries. So they try to learn what they can to improve.

African Americans have internalized their class status so much, copying 'white people' has become equivalent to not being black.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

Interestingly (in a sad way), I couldn't find any African American assistant professor professor in the list of ~100 schools I got for that field (although I did find "African Africans" and "African Europeans" or whatever you call being black and not American).

That leads to a question not often discussed. I have seen in other places too that black people that are from outside US fare better in US than African-Americans. Is there a point in which the years lived under systemic racism have side effects of learned helplessness that amplify and perpetuate the initial problem?

omginternets7• 11 years ago

Believe me people, the problem is real.

It would be nice if you provided concrete examples, because I've had very much the opposite experience as you. From my perspective the problems are grossly exaggerated.

michaelbuddy2• 11 years ago

Believe me the problem is real

I guess we should all go ahead and believe him. I mean he did write a comment on the internet which consisted of some form of empty hearsay. That's all the proof any of us should need.

richmarr5• 11 years ago

It would be nice if you provided concrete examples, because I've had very much the opposite experience as you

He said, while providing no concrete examples :)

michaelbuddy2• 11 years ago

sure we'll just go ahead and believe you, being that you were so specific and straight forward with the proof. I mean you weren't vague at all with your friends alleged experiences.

mafribe5• 11 years ago

In what metholodically sound way are you taking into account the financial (and other) incentives (if any) at play that may have played a role in narrating tales of distress?

richmarr5• 11 years ago

So, if I understand correctly, you're suggesting bitmadness should have listened to his friends telling him their problems, then designed and executed a rigorous study into whether they were lying for profit (and/or other motives).

If so, that would be an extremely unusual thing for a human being to do, and I would wonder what would motivate someone to ask that kind of question.

da1• 11 years ago

Believe me people, the problem is real.

Just like that? Without any examples or data?

Do you really expect people to just listen and believe?!

Edit: typos.

martiuk• 11 years ago

It's the same tactics the social protestors at universities are using.

nonbel• 11 years ago

Lots of assuming going on here:

"The majority of schools require faculty to apply for tenure after 7 years. I consider one year before and after the 7th year to account for people who go up for tenure early or late because of a leave of absence, for example. I put universities into bins of 3 based on their ranking and assume that an individual is denied tenure if that person moves to a lower-ranked university group after 6-8 years. For example, a person who moves from Harvard to MIT after 6 years is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves within the same bin of schools. Someone who moves from Harvard to UCLA after 6 years is assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves to a lower group of schools. As another example, a person who moves 5 or fewer years after his initial appointment is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moved before the tenure window (years 6 through 8 at an institution) starts."

Arbitrary binning of universities, using a change in employer as a proxy for getting tenure, using number of papers published as a measure of productivity, fitting lines to a relationship that does not appear linear (and in fact cannot be linear since fraction getting tenure must be in the range 0-1).

This issue may exist, but I don't think this analysis is capable of producing anything convincing.

vilda• 11 years ago

These types of arguments should be made by peer reviewers. Addressing these makes the paper (and research) stronger.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of internal corruption in academia, which makes this feedback ineffective. If you apply for a grant, you already have to outline results of our research. Heather Sarsons, the author, is a doctoral fellow in the "Inequality and Social Policy program". She is paid to find inequality. If she won't find any, she would be unsuccessful. The same holds for colleagues--who actually do peer review. They are on the same ship.

It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia. About 80% of papers in health science was found to be unreproducible. Guess why.

omginternets7• 11 years ago

It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia.

I think it's both. Contentious though this may be, I think that the reproductibility problems in academia invite us to consider the idea that we may be hiring political activists to do research.

littletimmy• 11 years ago

To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for jobs/publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is "Quarterly Journal of Economics" has 50% of it's articles only from Harvard and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other people.

The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution.

Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative result, and what you get is shoddy research.

cokernel• 11 years ago

I notice that Sarsons's paper says on the very first page:

"NOTE: Very preliminary – please do not cite without permission. Comments welcome."

I wonder if Cowen sought permission or just ignored that sentence? I am aware that linking to something from a blog isn't exactly the same as citing it (presumably Sarsons is trying to discourage citations in other papers), but Cowen could have mentioned, but didn't mention, the preliminary nature of the paper when quoting the abstract.

lsc• 11 years ago

Now, I don't know, but my impression is that the appearance of confidence (by which I mean the things associated with confidence, like being tall, speaking in a loud voice, being a guy, having a higher level of social competence, etc...) have a lot to do with how much credit you get for doing a thing when it is obvious that credit is being shared.

I mean, that's just my impression, not a study or anything... but it is something I observe, and it's weird because my own bias is to assume that the less confident or less socially competent person did most of the work.

Do women face a reputational bias when they co-author?

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