National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track

Abstract

National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia. In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships who shared the same lifestyle (e.g., single without children, married with children). Applicants' profiles were systematically varied to disguise identically rated scholarship; profiles were counterbalanced by gender across faculty to enable between-faculty comparisons of hiring preferences for identically qualified women versus men. Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non-math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Results were replicated using weighted analyses to control for national sample characteristics. In follow-up experiments, 144 faculty evaluated competing applicants with differing lifestyles (e.g., divorced mother vs. married father), and 204 faculty compared same-gender candidates with children, but differing in whether they took 1-y-parental leaves in graduate school. Women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers; men preferred mothers who took leaves to mothers who did not. In two validation studies, 35 engineering faculty provided rankings using full curricula vitae instead of narratives, and 127 faculty rated one applicant rather than choosing from a mixed-gender group; the same preference for women was shown by faculty of both genders. These results suggest it is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science. Messages to the contrary may discourage women from applying for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) tenure-track assistant professorships.gender bias | hiring bias | underrepresentation of women | faculty hiring | women in science W omen considering careers in academic science confront stark portrayals of the treacherous journey to becoming professors. Well-publicized research depicts a thicket of obstacles standing between female graduate students and tenure-track positions, including inadequate mentoring and networking (1); a chilly social climate (2); downgrading of work products such as manuscripts (3), grant proposals (4), and lectures (5); and gender bias in interviewing and hiring (6-9). Numerous blue ribbon panels and national reports have concluded that implicit, and sometimes explicit, attitudes pervade the hiring process and negatively influence evaluations of female candidates and their scholarship, contributing to women's underrepresentation within the academy (e.g., refs. 10-13).Women's underrepresentation in academic science is hardly trivial. In life and social sciences, women now earn the majority of doctorates, but they make up a minority of assistant professors. In 1993In -1995.4% of assistant pr...

Recent advances in conservation and population genomics data analysis

“…Although there are many reasons for this “leaky pipeline” (Gasser & Shaffer, 2014; Goulden, Mason, & Frasch, 2011; Holmes, OConnell, & Dutt, 2015), increasing training and avoiding biases in reference letters may benefit not only women, but also the greater scientific community by promoting innovation through diversity and inclusion. Further, there are many topics such as referee opportunity bias (Lerback & Hanson, 2017), the childcare‐conference conundrum (Calisi & A Working Group of Mothers in Science, 2018), and misconceptions around hiring preferences (Williams & Ceci, 2015) that should also be addressed to reduce disadvantages to women. With the brief mention of this topic, we hope to stimulate future studies of gatekeeping practices in the field of conservation, so institutions can develop initiatives to recruit, retain, and advance women in STEM fields as mentorship will be essential for eliminating gender bias in computer science, bioinformatics, and by extension, conservation biology.…”

Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable

“…These differences may not exist at the start of the employment relationship. In fact, recent evidence has found that female applicants were favored over male ones for positions as assistant professors in science (6).…”

Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Political Correctness in Philosophy

“…Curiously, Steinpreis et al found no gendered effects for tenure decisions, but perhaps most importantly, the sample sizes of around 65 respondents for the female-cv and 60 for the male were not huge-the discrepancy in responses is just at the fringes of the margin of error. 11 Steinpreis et al's results have not been corroborated by STEM hiring audits [77], nor replicated in experiments performed by Bertrand and Mullainathan [63] and Williams and Ceci [51]. Despite this, philosophers overlook these limitations and go on to make exaggerated claims about hiring biases.…”

“…14 But others failed to replicate at least some findings [69], with some contending a systematic look at twenty years of evidence shows no signs of discrimination in publishing, grant competitions, or hiring in the sciences [70]. These results have been reinforced by an experimental study about the evaluation of hypothetical tenure track candidates, which found no anti-female bias across several STEM disciplines but turned up strong anti-male bias by a factor of 2 [51]. Certainly Ceci and Williams' research is also controversial, 15 and there is no assumption here that it should be accorded more weight than any other study, though we must consider whether some of the negative responses they have received are motivated by hostility to their findings-the reader is challenged to even find a favorable mention of their work in a mainstream philosophy journal.…”