And, of course, no one if going to “Summers” the National Academies and criticize them for assigning “unintentional” bias to those of us that comprise the “System.” The trend towards “politically correct” research is an interesting one to watch.

K.T., at 8:20 am EDT on September 20, 2006

I wonder what is the reason(s) behind this discrimination? What someone who says “I won’t hire a woman” thinks and why? Wouldn’t such person realize his own stupidity? I never saw it explained. However, what we know about the CLAIM of such discrimination is that a century and a half ago communists needed to have “exploitation” and the very effective way to do this was relegating 50% of population (women) into “exploited” class.

Michael Pyshnov, What’s behind discrimination?, at 9:55 am EDT on September 20, 2006

The methodological problem with surveys such as this is that they do not properly account for interaction effects.

For instance, if women do have high interests in science careers, but are more likely to do research in, say, environmental chemistry, animal behavior, or female cancers than in say pharemcuticals, cellular evolution, or digestive cancers, then perhaps people have an easy time chalking the differences up to interest. However, there is no reason why women with those specialties could not be hiried.

Similarly, if women have high interest in the science professoriate but also in having children and therefore choose not to conduct experiments at 2 am, that can be considered interest but would more likely be due to structural discrimination against women in the profession.

Or finally, if women are discriminated against in publishing opportunities or grant applications (which are of course blind peer reviewed, but editors and program officers have substantial latitude in interpreting peer reviews), which has been proven true in a number of studies, than hiring personnel are choosing the best applicant but women are still being discriminated against.

ML, at 10:25 am EDT on September 20, 2006

I would say that men have changed when girls were taught the idea that “sky is the limit” and women started making “progress” in science by political means. Unfortunately, there could be this motive for discrimination: someone has learned that hiring a woman would mean having in your lab a “female” (not a lady) with all the political, unrelated to work, attitudes, and, one day — accusations of bias. A real and sad situation.The greatest evil that an employer can do is to make judgement based on statistics. But all that garbage that comes from above and must be obeyed as “gidelines", is first — ignoring the person and obeing statistical fraud. They tell you to hire a statistical average, not a person.

Michael Pyshnov, at 3:55 pm EDT on September 20, 2006

Why is the “main reason” of such great significance here? Isn’t this just the tyranny of the majority washing out any potentially useful information? (And aren’t IHE readers generally supposed to be academics, who can deal with more complex arguments with more than two possiblities and even involving interacting variables?)

If women “choose” to go off the tenure track in order to have children in a culture where women continue to carry out a disproportionate share of child-rearing responsibilities, is that a choice or discrimination at work? I have to say both. Shelly Correll, Professor at Cornell (a perfectly poetic signature) has addressed the matter most directly.

Academics have a responsibility to avoid either/or logic in all cases that do not address situations of two mutually exclusive possibilities. Rather than IHE discussing studies that either/or situations that scream for both/and, it should insist upon studies that produce meaningful results.

Thane Doss, Yomiuri Culture Centers, Japan, at 5:20 am EDT on September 21, 2006

bias or interest

I would like to ask three questions. 1. Everyone seems to assume that subtle bias and discrimination causes underrepresentation of the victim group. Is there any evidence for this? Until roughly 1960 there was open and blatant discrimination in this country against Jews in academia and in the sciences. If two candidates were exactly equal and one was a Jew that candidate would definitely not get the job. This had the effect of causing Jewish candidates to work harder and to excel to the point that they had no equals. And they did and were if anything over-represented in Academia. How can one explain the vastly different presumed effect of subtle and amost invisible bias on women candidates? 2. While all generalizations about groups of people are false, there are conceivaly true generalizations about average behavior of same. In my experience, women on the average are more practical than men. Perhaps they have to deal as adolescents with issues concerning their appearance, with experiences with blood and of the need for cleanliness, among other things far more, typically than do young men. And as a result you tend to see a higher proportion of young men who are entirely improvident and impractical and slovenly than you see such young women. Also, in my experiece, an academic career at a university is a very impractical career choice for a young person. The ability and drive and dedication needed for a high level of success in academia, if applied to almost any other career choice (other than the arts) would almost assure success and pecuniary rewards far beyond those available to scholars. I offer myself as an example. I believe I have acheived a reasonable level of academic success over a long career. Yet my son, who started a business five years ago, now draws a salary from it that exceeds mine. Could it be that highly talented young women tend to go into more practical fields such as law, medicine, politics, or business, rather than devoting all their energies to the relatively thankless and risk prone task of getting tenure? (Especially if they are taught that there are subtle and invisible forces beyong their control preventing their success in academia?) 3. In my adademic field I have encountered a large number of talented young men and women, and a very few of them whose abilities and accomplishments are so great that they take my breath away. All of this latter group have been males. At a level slightly below (but well qualified for tenure at a good school) there are many more people, and a growing number of them are women. But women still represent a small percentage of this group. I hesitate to generalize at all from these observations. But is there any reason to believe that truly exceptional people, one in perhaps a hundred million, are evenly distributed over all groups in the population?

Daniel, at 6:10 pm EDT on September 25, 2006

IT’S NOT ACADEMIC

Discrimination, bias, or whatever you want to call it is something many of experience EVERY DAY in both small and significant ways, even those few of us who have made it to being full profesors at research universities. These datasets are interesting not because they leave open the question whether discrimination is occurring, but why so many fail to see what is going on around them — and in many cases what they as individuals are doing to cause or perpetuate bias. If we weigh anecdotes by the women being discriminated against vs. statistical datasets dominated by those doing the discriminating, and consider that the real debate, we all lose.

FemaleScienceProfessor, Full Professor in Physical Sciences at Big Research University, at 8:20 pm EDT on October 5, 2006

Bias — you never think it happens until it happens to YOU. And then, being a rational person who never thought your clever, respectable colleagues would act this way, you brush it off and think you’re being paranoid. And then it happens again, a little more blatantly. And then you hear something. And then you get the creeping sensation that maybe you’re not being paranoid. And then you try and stop it. But by then, maybe, it’s already too late.

Joolya, at 10:01 am EDT on October 27, 2006