Research finds no gender bias in academic science

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/04/27/research-finds-no-gender-bias-academic-science

by jwond • 3 years ago

133 128 3 years ago

insidehighered.com

jl2718• 3 years ago

Massive paper, but a quick scroll to several random statistical tables shows a very clear and indisputable gender preference in hiring.

revelio3• 3 years ago

Yup.

Headline: "Research Finds No Gender Bias in Academic Science"

Subheading: "women have an edge over men in hiring."

Paper abstract: "[women] 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."

Paper contents:

- "Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments"

- "in the authors’ main experiment (N = 363), faculty expressed a significant preference for hiring women. This pro-female preference was similar across fields, types of institution, and gender and rank of faculty"

- "The authors found that all else being equal, faculty were between 5% and 10% more likely to favor a female candidate or a gender nonbinary candidate, respectively, over an identically accomplished male"

- "The authors found a significant pro-female advantage, with faculty rating female applicants’ competence and hirability significantly higher than identically accomplished male applicants"

local_crmdgeon• 3 years ago

That doesn't count as gender bias. Gender bias is when the system discriminates against women. When it does the same against men, it's equity.

onos• 3 years ago

“It’s important to get a grip on what’s going on today and not what was going on in 1985,”

Amen. Some don’t agree though. They say we should favor historically mistreated groups because it’s important context. Yet, in higher ed this often entails favoring the child of doctors who will help diversity numbers over the poor white male.

I believe the culture wars would decrease dramatically if we’d drop the identity politics and simply say: let’s help the poor.

kenjackson13• 3 years ago

But then how do you define poor? I ask because you do enter a new identity politics discussion. Blacks tend to have much lower wealth, even when you control for income. So it’s in the interest of whites to push income and blacks to push wealth.

I also think there’s an optics issue. As you note the poor white males may be getting passed over now. So many would say that it’s really convenient that NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?

letrowekwel2• 3 years ago

"So many would say that it’s really convenient NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?"

Does historical injustice make it right to behave unjust in the present, almost as if it were a revenge? I don't think so.

I agree about importance of defining poverty though. Both income and wealth should be taken into account and taxed appropriately. It's not only a class issue, but also generational issue with lots of old people sitting on super-expensive property, while young families can't afford a home.

datatrashfire• 3 years ago

You measure wealth and income?

2devnull4• 3 years ago

This is daft. Treating wealth as a measure of poverty wouldn’t work. Think about why. It pretends families don’t exist. Total non-starter.

newswasboring2• 3 years ago

No political issue can be solved if all people care about is optics.

letrowekwel2• 3 years ago

I agree. Old school leftists were smart enough to understand that being rich is the ultimate privilege, nothing else comes close. Help the poor, and you will also help minorities which are poor due to historical racism, slavery and so on. Help people based on their skin colour/ethnicity, and you'll unnecessarily make all the poor, unprivileged people not included very bitter, increasing political divisions, racism and people like Donald Trump voted into the office.

It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US.

jandrewrogers• 3 years ago

It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities.

The US already does this. Taxation is more progressive than Europe and large amounts of money are redistributed to poor and troubled schools, in some cases as much as twice the European average. It is not correlated with any of the outcomes you are imagining.

Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. The US has been doing that for decades with nothing to show for it.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

European style model couldn't work well also in the US.

If you lived here, you would find that European style models barely work in Europe

hajile6• 3 years ago

I’ve come to the conclusion that progressive taxes do the opposite of their intent.

Looks at tax revenue vs GDP. No matter the tax rates, the percentage stays the same (fluctuations within a couple points) regardless of official tax rates.

When you increase taxes on the wealthy, they don’t pay more. They either pay for loopholes to be created or they reduce/stagnate salaries to compensate.

Meanwhile, Congress cares more about who pays them than who votes (there’s a reason they argue about superficial stuff and agree about all the worst stuff).

When all the taxes get paid by the rich, the poor lose that influence and still wind up making the same amount of money anyway.

Universal sales tax is better. If the rich buy more stuff they pay more. There’s no loopholes to be found. You can also provide tax breaks to the poor by reducing or eliminating sales tax on consumer goods which greatly affects the poor, but only marginally affects the rich.

eru13• 3 years ago

It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US.

You realise that almost all of Europe is poorer than the US?

Yes, you can make people more equal by making the rich poor as well. But what's the point?

Btw, in the US schools in poorer parts already get more funding. That hasn't helped. See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is...

This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.

throwaway6734• 3 years ago

There's no reason to think that the European style model works in Europe. Most of Europe is facing dire demographic issues.

mbostleman• 3 years ago

What is your prediction of the efficiency of helping the poor that giving the poor money achieves? I assume from your comment you think it's a positive number?

We know that there is a set of people that can't manage money in a sustainable way for themselves. Surely, giving this set of people money produces zero to negative help. But I don't know the make up of all of the "poor" or why they're poor in the first place.

brnaftr361• 3 years ago

Does that actually follow, though?

My own perspective on the matter as someone who sorta bootstrapped from a pretty shitty strating position is: no. If we took a cross section of people doing reasonably well what they've done is complied with society's demands, more succinctly they've served the market. They aren't exceptionally smart, talented, or disciplined, they just selflessly (including moving far and wide) elected a corner of the market that was valuable, and where they were themselves valued. And from my experience: they have really poor spending habits, they have shallow economic and political positions. And this is sort of the paradigmatic flaw with throwing money at people, in a lot of cases they do not have the faculties to comport themselves in such a manner where it is a benefit to themselves nor to their fellows. I fear many of these people, when they're put through some serious adversity, will succeed in recovering themselves.

I'm not trying to make an argument which paints me as some superior element to these folks, but rather these are mistakes that I have personally made and lived through while also existing on the precipice of dangerous self-amplifying poverty. To some extent, and with the way that things are structured, I think this very much attends to the "teach a man to fish" logic, and that lending that kind of real, personalized trivium is the way forward.

Italy has (or had) such a program: they would disburse pooled funds to a minimum of 3 unemployed individuals who were then expected to use said funds to start a business. To my knowledge many of these were cooperatives, which I think is an ingenious way of remediating some of the more egregious issues which we see bubbling up in our day-to-day lives in the US.

Now, I won't discount the fact that having a decent starting position is a huge boon; the crux of my argument here is that modifying it without respect to the nuance, as I've seen it, can lead to even worse outcomes. And I think the quasi-exclusive programs also nucleate certain perspectives, culture, and communities which themselves can be pretty detrimental. For instance I grew up in trailer parks, I have some aspects of white trash that I very deliberately maintain to my own detriment because it is part of my identity and a mark of pride, and sequestration of those habits makes me legitimately uncomfortable.

Also don't bother comparing the US and Europe, the latter without the former has historically been very volatile and I don't believe there's any reason to expect that things will have changed. As to why that matters: the US must have certain integral aspects both socially and politically which favor its position as the "world peacekeeping force" (read: world police), including egregious spending on "defense". And this is apparently perceived at large as justified. Moreover, military participation is also quite high, in part because of the way that America at large is structured. It is very much a multifaceted incentive complex. And I think that, over the years, it has very much seated America as the lynchpin of the globalized system. Personally, I don't like it, but I very much anticipate the effacement of America's current position as a global leader is going to lead to a very traumatic shift in the way of the world as we know it. The US is itself structured in a completely different way than is Europe as well, with considerable contrasts in needs and wants in comparison to Europe and in contrast with our own many, varied, and multifaceted communities. Rural America is not urban America.

Also, I think with (real) progressive policies the socioeconomic rules shift, and those shifts tend to make realizing even a modicum of wealth even more difficult in a lot of cases. For instance the big money print over COVID has destroyed a pretty considerable amount of my savings, and the Biden administration pushing for student loan forgiveness - I could've taken loans, shaved many years off of my opportunity cost, and have saved substantially less money to exit my university program with no debt burden, and I wouldn't have to suffer post-COVID university experience. Instead, assuming it was to be passed, I would be out $10k and I will have paid substantially more than previously predicted given the Feds 2% mandate, in addition to the huge shuffling of staff, policies, and the experience all due to policy changes. To the best of my knowledge, I have elected classical fiscal policy, and lost at every turn while trying to drag myself upwards but it was the paradigmatic road to success that I tried to pave.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

The report only concluded that women didn’t have worse outcomes in acadrmia _after_ getting their PhDs. How are you taking this as a vindication of all affirmative action?

Given through my decade long academic journey I barely saw any African American PIs in biomedical sciences, I don’t think that it’s a solved problem yet for other cases. Even within gender biases, the moment you include PhD enrollment and graduation rates you’ll likely see a massive difference anyway.

joemazerino2• 3 years ago

Sounds like those people aren't interested in the biomedical field. Maybe representation is indicative of desire instead of oppression.

Levitz• 3 years ago

Even within gender biases, the moment you include PhD enrollment and graduation rates you’ll likely see a massive difference anyway.

Might as well go all the way and start caring about college enrollment and graduation rates at that point no?

That'd find gender bias. Against men.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

Seems that you are advocating both for equality of outcome, and equality of opportunity. It's hard to argue for both, since in a free choice world the opportunities may not be taken up proportionally

hajile6• 3 years ago

That’s confusing causes and effects.

This paper is making the case that if a person makes it to college, they won’t be discriminated against while there. The question of whether they make it to college is a far different one.

Whether someone makes it to college and the different factors involved there are beyond the scope of this study.

tomrod3• 3 years ago

This comment is not to agree or disagree with your comment, but to informally provide an interesting finding.

Economies are more or less urban regions surrounded by rural areas with low population density. So, Nashville, DFW, Denver, etc. are regional economies.

I have found it interesting in recent research to find that the level of disparity in health inequity (called Social Determinants of Health, one of which is the 'Area Deprivation Index' managed by UW-Madison) and race/ethnicity is somewhat dependent on which regional economy you review. I can't speak for all regional economies, but the ten I looked into show interesting variation on the strength of economic disparity and the composition of race and ethnic groups.

snapplebobapple2• 3 years ago

So are you then arguing that, since the average is no difference in discrimination except small wage discrimination in favor of men and hiring in favor of women , the reality is larger discrimination against men and women that averages out mostly?

Loquebantur2• 3 years ago

A correlation between ethnic groups and economic disparity is not indicative of causation, much less of what the cause might be?

People having problems with even simple statistics definitely is a cause for racism on the other hand.

I find economists often to be surprisingly bad at math.

jgalt212• 3 years ago

I believe the culture wars would decrease dramatically if we’d drop the identity politics and simply say: let’s help the poor.

That's a wonderful idea, but the elites need sexism and racism as perennial bogeymen as they can always protest, "I'm not racist, I'm not sexist" But the elites cannot reasonably say, "I'm not biased against poor people."

Have you listened to any recent Planet Money episodes? It's racism all the things. They hardly blame the rich or the elites--don't want to irritate your customers.

syngrog66• 3 years ago

bingo, agreed

judge people only by the content of their character. (ie. MLK's dream.) Help based only on their economic means, or their health needs.

I believe some folks in recent years have "gone overboard" and have devised a way to give them an Official feel-good excuse to self-deal or, to discriminate against a new batch of demographic traits. Which in turn just sows the seeds for yet more grievance "back blast" based on identity groups, yet again.

sooner as a society we can all take the higher road, together as one, the better off we'll be

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

The main reason the USA is less "help the poor" than Europe, is because some of the poor in America were non-WASP, and, well I'll let President Lyndon B Johnson say it:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

leereeves• 3 years ago

And the politicians are still dividing us by race so we'll ignore wealth and privilege, but now the message is "help the historically disadvantaged minorities" instead of "help the poor".

That's certainly an improvement over past behavior but it still leaves millions of poor people shivering in the cold.

revelio3• 3 years ago

Paywalled but the paper is this one:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/152910062311631...

rajin4442• 3 years ago

The focus on group outcomes as opposed to efficacy of the discipline is a sign of a sick culture. Groups are fighting over spoils instead of working to solve hard problems and push humanity forward. Ironically, it’s a complacency enabled by those who came before and didn’t have as much concern over the racial / gender / etc makeup of an industry. They succeeded to such a degree our society can afford to waste entire careers in the name of equity.

Who cares if the NBA has horrible diversity? They’re trying to find the best basketball players.

kenjackson13• 3 years ago

The NBA cares. In terms of bottom line, they are helped by having diverse players. Yao Ming opened the game up to a billion audience market. Top jersey sales often go to rising white stars in the game.

Ones of the pushes in the league is to make foreign European players appeal more to white Americans. We’re not trying to have the league match US demographics, but make no mistake that diversity is a big deal to the NBA.

rajin4442• 3 years ago

Diversity should only matter in that it furthers the level of basketball being played. Diversity because it opens up additional markets is an awful incentive. That they only care about diversity because it makes them richer is very telling.

On top of that, the NBA is always going to have a problem with height diversity. I don’t think this is a problem, but viewed with an equity lens it is.

ttyprintk• 3 years ago

When it comes to staff, NBA is the only major sport which didn’t need a Rooney rule.

hombre_fatal• 3 years ago

That just sounds like celebrity, and a celebrity that might come from the fact that there’s only one Yao Ming, not a bunch of them. That seems to work against your supposed argument that NBA should want larger NBA-minority groups.

I don’t think the modern push for diversity means hire a few token members of each minority and them reap their celebrity status.

m-watson2• 3 years ago

Man that is not a great headline from Inside Higher Ed. In the discussion section the authors explicitly layout that this is a specific slice they are looking at not all of Academic Science.

"Before we summarize our findings below, we reiterate a caveat noted throughout this article: The failure to support specific claims of bias does not deny the possibility that broader, systemic barriers against women in the academy exist and/or that significant bias existed before 2000. We did not examine systemic claims of bias, such as the tenure schedule that imposes inflexible time-career paths or structural societal norms that burden women with greater responsibilities outside of their academic jobs or that penalize women for negotiating forcefully for wage increases or seeking outside offers. Other scholars have identified a myriad of such systemic barriers. But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."

ttpphd• 3 years ago

Thanks for spotlighting this. It is encouraging to see people seriously engage with the writing and surface the nuanced words of the researchers themselves.

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

That reads largely like a standard academic paper disclaimer. It’s standard to include a statement about things the authors didn’t explore as a way to set the context and also head off trivial objections. It’s unreasonable to expect them to have surveyed everything everywhere, so highlighting the boundaries of where they stopped is reasonable.

The part at the end hints that they did find bias, but in the opposite direction of what was assumed:

But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 (Henningsen et al, 2021; Solga et al., 2023)."

m-watson2• 3 years ago

I get your point but I wouldn't call it an academic paper disclaimer, it is giving you the scope/breadth of their research. That is why I took the whole paragraph, they are saying they found a bias in hiring. That is a specific slice of "Academic Science," that the HigherEd article is calling out but only a slice. That is why the

"We did not examine systemic claims of bias, such as the tenure schedule that imposes inflexible time-career paths or structural societal norms that burden women with greater responsibilities outside of their academic jobs or that penalize women for negotiating forcefully for wage increases or seeking outside offers. Other scholars have identified a myriad of such systemic barriers. "

part is important, it specifically is saying there has been a lot of work showing systemic barriers but they are not researching that part. This isn't a critique of their research but of the summary articles headline and what some people seem to be taking away from that headline. Even in the HigherEd piece it says there are concerns and this research is to help identify where there has been progress and where we need to focus.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

This is a much better study than this recent one on HN that only looked at publication count, because it has six metric rather than one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699889

There's been a lot of discussion about diversity and equity in the sciences, but fundamentally, efforts to predict what young individuals are best suited to academic work based on their identitarian profile are foolish and doomed to failure.

The best approach is to take the largest possible pool of candidates, i.e. eliminate all restrictions on who gets to enter the pool, and then proceed to put them through the same series of challenges and see who makes it through each successive stage, while also offering the same level of support to each individual. This 'salmon swimming upstream' approach doesn't attempt to predict outcomes based on race/gender/class/etc., it instead selects neutrally based on ability and effort.

Given that only a small fraction of the overall population is going to have the necessary combination of mental ability and dedicated interest that it takes to do painstaking scientific research, you want to start with the largest pool of candidates possible, and this is why limiting that pool to members of one group is a very bad idea if you value scientific progress. This makes clear the point at which anti-discrimination policies should be applied: everyone who wants to should get to enter the competition and have equal initial support.

Of course, there are issues here with academic development in the K-12 pre-college years, related to parental involvement and cultural expectations, economic disadvantages and quality of local schools, etc. but some of the responses - cutting back on algebra for 8th graders in California etc. - are just idiotic.

Incidentally, nepotism is probably more of a problem today, i.e. tenured professors may use political maneuvering and social networking to get their grad students and postdocs jobs as academic professors even though they aren't necessarily the best candidates for those positions.

derbOac• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what to make of studies like this sometimes, as the problem is sometimes more in the heterogeneity than in the typical case. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I've seen gender bias of both forms in academic settings, over and over again. Cases where women were treated grossly unacceptably because of their gender, even if it was mostly implicit and cast in terms of proxy issues; I've also seen cases where things happened in such a way as to benefit women, solely because of their gender, that would cause a firestorm if they were discussed openly in the public discourse.

My guess is on average things might look ok across the broader institution(s), but that average would be burying a lot of problems of both forms. I don't see a paper like this really helping in this regard. Swinging from one form of sexism to another is not the same as being as gender-blind as is possible.

tristor• 3 years ago

Looks like what the study and source material actually show is a bias against men. I'm guessing they don't consider this a bias though, and think it's just desserts, as seems to be the current model in academia. Both in hiring and in graduation rates, there is a bias against men shown in the data in this paper.

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

That will need some support. Citation please?

fuzzybiscuit• 3 years ago

its in the linked paper.

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

The headline seems inaccurate. It first says that there's no bias. Then it says that it is biased toward women. Which is it?

quaz4r• 3 years ago

When I was an undergraduate, about 10% of my cohort were women. I worked for a professor in his lab who called me a cheerleader and would tell me how much he wished he was younger so he could date me and my friends. I presented at a conference when I was 19 and after my talk, a prof came up to me in the hallway and asked if I wanted to go up to his room. One time after sitting a graduate course, I got to overhear some of the senior faculty at my department talk about how they love summer because the freshman women sun bathe in tiny bikinis outside of their office. I worked my ass off to publish a first author paper as an undergrad and get great GRE scores. I collected my letters of rec. One focused on my personality as a young woman (that I wasn't going to be a 'fuss') and my appearance ("fit and modest with natural hair"). I was able to get into a top 5 gradschool in my field with the help of a major grant backing my studies.

When I was a graduate student about 5% of my class were women. I was able to find an advisor my first year. He added an entire section to his NSF proposal patting himself on the back for supporting women in the field and how he is increasing diversity by mentoring me, and sent it to me to read. Later that year, I was sexually assaulted multiple times by graduates in the program. The uni did nothing and I fell behind on course work. My advisor stopped meeting with me. I wasn't invited to study sessions with the other grads. I went to conferences and summer schools to try to make research connections but the conferences were always 99% male dominated and it was really hard to make a connection with anyone, especially with all of my fear. The ones who did want to talk about my work always wanted to do it over dinner. After dinner, one of them told me "I'd really like to fuck you". Another one stalked me near my house for the week he was in town. I found a new advisor. He basically ignored me the rest of graduate school and I did my best to work alone. I was not able to publish first author papers in total isolation. I managed to get second and third author contributions while retooling and applying for grants in a totally unrelated field of science in an attempt to self-rescue.

I was the only woman in my year to graduate from the program with a PhD. Most other PhD holding women in my field have similar experiences, especially if they were single through most of graduate school.

I did not go on to do a postdoc.

All of this is context so I can say: No shit if you look at metrics like hiring after obtaining the PhD it looks biased towards women. At least in my field there are about 2 women per year on the market, who made it through all of the above. This is called the "leaky pipeline" and is unaddressed in the paper. These women will be given extra consideration because they are only 5% represented in department faculty, and maybe 2% in the subdiscipline. And yes, they will likey have fewer papers and less support and less mentorship along the way, making their applications look weaker based on (arbitrary -- and I mean that!) metrics. Those metrics don't relatively measure tenacity and the ability to hunker down and push through adversity; the skills to seek out and find the right mentors; the ability to remain laser focused on a goal. I am just depressed by some of the comments in this section. Lots of people crying bias about hiring in academic departments ...that are still only 5% women.

tpoacher• 3 years ago

So, the conclusion is that in terms of the typical metrics used to get a job in academia (i.e. grant funding and publications) there is no difference between men and women. But there is a difference in terms of getting a job per se (with women hired more than men). But that's ok because the metrics that one tries to tick to get hired are equal. Therefore there is no evidence of sex discrimination.

It's a bit like saying, we found that the CEO works the same hours as their workers (productivity metric), but the pay (i.e. the intended reward for achieving said productivity measured by said metric) was not the same because of the CEO's massive bonus. BUT, since the hours worked are the same, we conclude that there's no pay discrimination. Wat?

There may genuinely be no sex discrimination involved, and I'm inclined to believe that this is indeed the case; but to me the argument above is not as much in support of this statement as the authors seem to think it is.

rhelz• 3 years ago

Not trying to be flip here, but isn't this kinda like the Bible verifying that indeed, the Bible is true?

blep_• 3 years ago

If this was one group studying itself, maybe. Academia is big and has frequent disagreements about itself. Treat it as one group studying another.

(Though one can still make mistakes and misrepresent data when not studying oneself, obviously.)

Research finds no gender bias in academic science

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