Be prepared for a deluge of discussion in the websiteosphere. There’s a new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams (you can haz free access from the link) that’s going to be controversial, for it tackles a subject that has become a minefield in academia: gender bias.
It has long been the conventional wisdom in science that women are discriminated against in publication (female-authored manuscripts are said to be rejected more often than those written by males), in funding (female-authored grants are less successful), and in hiring. This, it is said, accounts for the underrepresentation of women in some areas of science, particularly math-related areas like physics. As Ceci and Williams note, “among the top 100 US universities, only 8.8-15% of tenure-track positions in many math-intensive fields (combined across ranks) are held by women, and female full professors number <10%”.
The authors simply surveyed a number of studies (and there are many) addressing these claims. It turns out that, since at least the late 1970s, the claims of biases in publication, funding, and hiring aren’t borne out by the data: the usual citations of biases are based on only a handful of studies whose results have not been replicated by other work. In general, the authors show that in the three areas of “bias” mentioned above, women are on par with men. An occasional study will show inequities, but these seem to go against men as often as against women. (Their conclusions apply not just to math-related areas, but to science in general.)
The authors are perfectly aware of the political implications of their findings. As Steve Pinker has pointed out repeatedly, the academy does not welcome results like this, and researchers who produce them can be subject to accusations of sexism (although one of the authors of this paper is a woman) and of justifying or enabling further discrimination against women. So when you read the paper, notice that it is loaded to the gunwales with caveats—so many of them that they become almost annoying, like repeatedly hearing “We’re so sorry to have to tell you our findings.” But it’s important to know what they’re saying. First, they’re not saying that discrimination against women in funding, hiring, and publication never existed. It almost certainly did thirty years ago; the authors are talking about more recent studies. And discrimination back then can still affect inequities in the representation of females who began their academic careers, as I did, in the 1970s.
Most important, the authors are not saying that there are no factors that hold women back from achieving parity with men. While ruling out discrimination in hiring, funding, and publication, they note that the lack of parity results from other factors, some of them voluntary, others not. Much of it, as you might expect, comes down to reproduction:
Despite frequent assertions that women’s current underrepresentation in math-intensive fields is caused by sex discrimination by grant agencies, journal reviewers, and search committees, the evidence shows women fare as well as men in hiring, funding, and publishing (given comparable resources). That women tend to occupy positions offering fewer resources is not due to women being bypassed in interviewing and hiring or being denied grants and journal publications because of their sex. It is due primarily to factors surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences—some originating before or during adolescence (3, 50, 54, 58) (SI Text, S9)—and secondarily to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as gateways to graduate school admission (SI Text, S10).
Ceci and Williams don’t talk much about differences in performance on grad-school exams in math (you’ll remember that when Larry Summers claimed that the lower success of women in math and physics reflected innate biological differences, it helped bring him down as president of Harvard). But the authors do note that while this difference in test performance is statistically significant, it can’t account for the disparity in the number of women in math-related fields. That’s because while there is a lower proportion of women in the upper tails of the distribution of test scores, the proportion of female faculty in math-related fields is much lower than even that proportion.
The authors posit that the lower representation of women among math-related faculty, then, is due to women’s lack of those resources necessary for professional success (“resources” include positions at research-oriented colleges rather than teaching colleges and two-year institutions). The reproductive component is seen as important:
Given equivalent resources, men and women do equally well in publishing. A key issue, separable from sex discrimination in manuscript evaluation, is why women occupy positions providing fewer resources and what can be done about this situation. This situation is caused mainly by women’s choices, both freely made and constrained by biology and society, such as choices to defer careers to raise children, follow spouses’ career moves, care for elderly parents, limit job searches geographically, and enhance work-home balance. Some of these choices are freely made; others are constrained and could be changed (3).
I’m not a sociologist, and hardly an expert in this area, so all I can say is that their data seem sound, regardless of the conclusions and prescriptions. And why, exactly, do the authors see their findings as important? Because, they claim, we can’t fix the problem of gender inequity unless we correctly identify its cause. This is what they say in the analysis of “publication”, but it applies to grants and hiring as well:
However, a secondary issue is whether resources themselves are, in fact, evenly distributed between the sexes. The answer is that they are not, for a complex constellation of reasons, such as women being more apt to occupy teaching-intensive positions, part-time positions, etc. Thus, the attention devoted to righting perceptions of sex discrimination in reviewing of manuscripts, which as we show, does not in fact exist (SI Text, S2), focuses on a spurious issue and detracts from the very real problem that does plague women in publishing—the fact that women more often than men lack resources necessary to produce high-quality work.
At the end of the paper, Ceci and Williams suggest a number of solutions for giving women equal access to resources, including changes in the tenure system to allow for reproductive differences, the provision of research help during leave for childbirth, and changes in the policy of funding agencies. These may remedy some of the inequities that arise from even the voluntary choices women make that lead to their underrepresentation in academia. And, of course, the issue remains, politically volatile as it is, whether we should be fostering equality of opportunity (both sexes get equal access to resources) or equality of outcome, i.e., will we be satisfied only when half of all faculty positions in every field are occupied by women and half by men? If we do not achieve this parity across the board, does that prove discrimination?
The prospect of unequal desires and abilities based on biological rather than cultural differences is one of the biggest minefields in academia—so much so that it’s become nearly taboo to raise the issue. This is the subject of Monday’s New York Times piece by John Tierney discussing Ceci and Williams’s paper. Tierney describes the claim of John Haidt, a social psychologist from The University of Virginia, that there is discrimination against conservatives in academia, and that they are woefully underrepresented on faculties.
It [the “bias”] was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Haidt’s equation of conservatives with other underrepresented minorities, and his calls for “affirmative action for conservatives.” (I note in passing that Haidt garnered a Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology.) After all, your political views are something that you choose, but you can’t choose your gender or ethnicity. And conservatives have hardly suffered “oppression” in the same way as women and African-Americans.
But I do think that scientific claims which are perceived as conservative or hereditarian are often dismissed on political grounds alone, and that’s not a good thing. We’re supposed to discuss ideas freely, and adjudicate them on evidence, not on how much they appeal to us ideologically. It’s not good if there is an informal ideological ban on discussing, for example, biological differences between genders. After all, we’re supposed to examine ideas freely regardless of their perceived political or religious consequences: that’s one of the pillars of humanism. We may like the prospect of eternal life, but as good atheists we know that we shouldn’t mistake what want to be true for what is true. A priori suppression of discussion can only inhibit finding the truth.
So discuss the PNAS paper freely, though I adjure you to read it before you discuss it. (Since it’s free, you have no excuse not to read it!) And please don’t take the few paragraphs I’ve extracted as representing the entire contents of the paper.
Granted, I haven’t read the paper…but it occurs to me that making the proposed remedies (helping people raise their families) gender-neutral would be both equitable and do more to level the playing field.
Women should have extended maternity leaves, yes. But men should have equal paternity leaves. And when families have equal choices about who raises children, you’ll find many more men taking those roles. This will both free up women to make different choices and reduce the numbers of men who remain in the workplace out of necessity rather than desire.
If we could also get women equal pay for equal work, questions of gender inequality would, I’m pretty sure, become almost entirely academic.
Cheers,
b&
The lack of paternity leave in this country is shameful, indeed.
Though I have to add that I’m a little embarrassed now that this is appearing at the top of the comment thread. While I stand by my comment, the systemic biases experienced by women are of course far more important issues (though I think Ben Goren has a point that paternity leave would be a small positive step in addressing those issues). I just didn’t say anything about that because I don’t have much to add.
Speaking as someone who considers himself a bit of a pioneer on the equal-parenting front, I agree that achieving equality for women will require shifting some of that burden onto the fathers, ie. accepting that their career trajectory will no longer be what we currently take for granted.
By “pioneer” I mean: when our second child was born in the mid-80s, I was the one who took six months leave. This was before paternity leave was recognized by either private industry or government (in Canada, parental leave is eligible for unemployment benefits). I got straight leave-of-absence, unpaid. Both of us also negotiated reduced working hours — and a couple of years later when cuts came, I was a target as a result.
Note: I’m not an academic; this was in the high-tech industry.
One of the things that impresses me the most about Canada is how generous and progressive maternity leave is compared to many other parts of the world. The second thing that impresses me most is how egalitarian parental leave now is.
It’s not so much that biology is hurting women’s careers, but rather than the issues are cropping up at the social level – not only in our expectations that mothers will be the one to stay home, but also, as you say, the burden on families when they try to do things differently. You mentioned the financial burden already. My father would probably like to add the difficulty in finding a men’s room with a change table.
Exactly — part of the problem may be that there are various barriers to men taking on the family roles that are traditionally assigned to women.
That’s my point.
Consider an all-too-common scenario, where a woman gets all of a few months of maternity leave but the man has to use his vacation and personal days to get at most a week or two. Now consider that the man is making significantly more than the woman, and that the man is more likely to be targeted for staff reductions than his male peers if he actually uses his family leave. A good friend of mine is in exactly that situation.
Is it any wonder that a couple with the imminent financial burden of an infant would, almost without hesitation, decide to have the man keep his nose to the grindstone while the woman does the best she can manage to care for the child?
We need to extend the concept of mandatory overtime and doubletime to include both vacation and leave. When employers are faced with a choice between paying somebody their base salary for six months of parental leave and paying them twice their normal salary for six months for not taking the leave, I can guarantee you they’ll fall all over themselves to make the employees take the leave.
It’s one thing culturally to blame the woman for getting pregnant, but another thing entirely to blame a man for getting his wife pregnant. And leveling the playing field by making men just as likely to disappear for a time to take care of a baby as women will pretty much eliminate the substantial existing discrimination based on that premise.
My friend that I mentioned above? He’d love to have the chance to devote as much of his life to child-rearing as his wife does. It’s just that he’d be out of a job if he tried it. And in this economy? Please. He’s not an idiot.
Cheers,
b&
In Scandanavian countries (e.g., Sweden), there are strongly reinforced laws against gender discrimination. Also, both parents are expected to take leave (alternately) for a baby, although usually the mother takes more than the father.
Maternity leave doesn’t seem to hurt women’s careers much there.
Many some of our Nordic members can elaborate? I only visit there now and then.
Dane speaking here. Yes, it is normal to share the parental leave here. The mother usually takes the first 5-6 months, and the father takes the next couple of months or three.
Later you can apply for more parental leave (not as much money as the one where the kid is a baby, I believe) where you take some months off to spend more time with your older child. I know quite a few men who’ve done that.
I personally think, that it makes a lot of sense that the mother takes the parental leave while the kid is a baby. But then it should be mandatory for the father to take six months off when the kid is 2 to 3 years old. A time where the kid needs to let go of the mother, become more independent – good time for bonding with Dad. (I personally had 8 months parental leave – two of them before birth. I was DESPERATE to return to work when Dear Son was 6 months old :-D. But I was priviliged since my mom stepped in and took care of my son during the day for almost a year after that. I’m rambling now, sorry)
The Guardian’s Alice Bell – a scientist at Imperial – had a bit on this yesterday which may be of interest.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alice-bell
Thanks, Dominic, that was a good article.
“The linear career path of the modal male scientist of the past may not be the only route to success…”
I’ve always wondered how exposure to occupations based on gender stereotypes during childhood influences the perpetuation of covert beliefs about gender differences in adulthood. In the Southeast, for instance, many young females are socially discouraged from pursuing science which may result in internalized oppression.
I work for a hard science department at a research university. I’m still on the young side, so I can’t really say what it’s been like in the past, except that I know that our current (female) chair has had told me she’s had to make a concerted effort over the years to get her peers to hire more women faculty.
Out of 22 right now, 4 are female (and one of those is only an instructor). I think that’s the highest it’s ever been. We have no female emeriti or secondary faculty (totals 5 and 10 respectively), but certainly female collaborators.
What I can say a bit more confidently and optimistically is that undergrad majors here have been ~50/50 female/male for a number of years now, and that the academic “fraternity” dedicated to our science has probably had greater female involvement than males for a number of years now (it didn’t even allow women members until the 1970s!).
What I’d like to know and hope to find out eventually is a breakdown of how many women graduates here continue in research, and how many get jobs in industry, and how many do something else. Because of course even if they take 50% of the degrees, it doesn’t mean they end up as 50% of the professors.
“It’s not good if there is an informal ideological ban on discussing, for example, biological differences between genders.”
I thought those discussions had already taken place like 100 years ago.
Let’s discuss this–and if I don’t like the results, let’s discuss it again!
wut
Really? You don’t know all those studies about intellectual differences between sexes and races and how they were debunked later?
New information emerges, positions need to be re-evaluated. ‘Tis how it works.
Zuska wrote a few months ago about how come female science bloggers blog about work-life balance, and male science bloggers don’t. I think the fact that men so rarely devote their time to thinking about this very important (certainly to half of the population) issue shows quite pointedly to what extent we as a society have accomodated men to devote themselves to their jobs, and make their careers priority instead of family and home life, whereas women are always having to balance precariously between the two. Certainly, while this continues, women will always find themselves in minority in academia, and any attempts to increase their numbers by reqruitment, instead of accomodation to their family obligations, are not going to change that.
My sense (as tenure track faculty in a med school biochemistry dept.) is that there is an unspoken taboo against even entertaining a desire to balance work/life concerns among male faculty, let alone express it openly. It is mostly a remnant of the archetype of the dedicated scientist who eschews his family for the lab 24/7 (my senior colleaques all still have their non-careered wives iron their shirts and pack lunch for them), but is no longer appropriate when most junior male faculty now have spouses who are also dedicated to careers. The stay-at-home spouse no longer works economically, so I agree that a more egalitarian consideration of family needs would help.
It was a pleasant surprise to see this topic discussed here, and to find a well-referenced paper as the basis for discussion. Having been involved with programs and initiatives addressing the same situation in both the skilled trades and politics it is interesting to see how the problem is perceived in the sciences and what solutions are proposed.
Like so many studies I have seen on pay equity and access to employment in these fields, it seems that proper stratification in the survey methodology makes a huge difference in the results reported.
Pay equity studies where “men” are compared with “women” show a huge gap, while pay equity studies where “college educated men with 5 years experience in a profession” compared with “college educated women with 5 years experience in a profession” show statistically insignificant differences.
What is telling is that people are surprised that there is a gap in wage between women working in childcare and men in IT when no one is surprised that there is a wage gap between women in childcare and women in IT. Gender bias is used to explain the former while the latter is “the way it is”.
Having seen some of the attempts to program equality of outcome, such as women on social assistance being streamed toward nontraditional work with offers of additional benefits or threats of revocation of benefits it is interesting to note that in many of these cases as you noted that the desire for such work simply isn’t as strong or as common as it is among men.
Many of the women who particpated in these programs have left these fields of work, ironically often to work for government or NGO’s to promote greater female participation in these fields. When interviewed in the follow-up for the program, they often indicated that they liked the work they had been doing, but not enough to continue.
For those who work in advocacy roles, the irony is often that if it is suggested that they follow their own advice and enter the fields they are promoting that they “aren’t cut out for it” and should be able to choose their career while engaging in activities that restrict the choices of other women to achieve the desired outcome.
The idea that the right combination of interventions and incentives will produce workplaces composed of equal numbers of male and female workers at all levels of the enterprise is the untested assumption on which most of these programs are built. It should be tested.
There should be greatly increased career education and counselling available to both men and women, as well as some means of remediation to address any active discrimination that might be discovered.
Beyond this, there should be properly designed and controlled studies to determine if the gender differences in career choices are caused by bias or innate preference and the results used to inform the workplace of the future.
I liked Haidt’s book, and it’s a pity to see him saying stupid things. If there’s a shortage of conservatives among the “smart and educated portion of the population” is that reflective of liberal tribalism, or of reality’s well-known liberal bias?
What about the possibility, not to say the likelihood, that people who want to be academic psychologists tend to be liberals?
Look at it this way: graduate education is expensive, and becoming an academic is one of the least remunerative uses you can make of that expensive education. The factors that motivate people to do that are probably closely related to the factors that make people liberal (that is, left as opposed to right). I’m thinking in particular of intellectual curiosity. (So this doesn’t depend on saying the left values altruism more than the right does. Being an academic isn’t necessarily altruistic…which may explain a lot of trendy bullshit, come to think of it: it may be a way for academics to see themselves as altruistic in some attenuated fashion.)
I love Colbert’s line about reality having a liberal bias.
One less funny but less inflammatory way of looking at this is that a simplistic outlook or a preference for simplistic solutions is strongly correlated with conservatism and complexity and nuance is correlated with liberalism. I’ve seen this reported in a few places as diverse as dating sites (OkCupid just posted about it last week) and political studies. If there really is a cause and effect relationship there (in either direction), it shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest that academics are overwhelmingly liberal as their jobs are understanding, managing and explaining this complexity.
I trust you also got the “smart and educated” reference? (Google “ray mummert” — though I see I have the quote a bit wrong).
Or culture still promotes the archaic gender roles requiring men to have careers and women to have and raise children.
This is changing, but like other behaviors that helped tribes survive thousands of years ago, old habits, cast as tradition, die hard.
“you’ll remember that when Larry Summers claimed that the lower success of women in math and physics reflected innate biological differences, it helped bring him down as president of Harvard”
A pedantic but important point is that Larry Summers didn’t claim that, he said it was one possible explanation that should be considered.
Yep, you’re right.
Love the new icon! All hail Ceiling Cat!
b&
Is there discrimination in science against women?
Well not in biology especially where I work, were overrun with them. I’m in the minority. It’s the rest of the science disciplines that need to get their act together, you sexist pigs you:-)
Since the early 1980’s more females have received Bachelors degrees than have males. This is presently true at the Masters level as well, and, maybe at the PhD level (haven’t seen any figures). This means that the majority of educated people in the USA is, or soon will be, female. I think this correlates with things I’ve read about many couples with the female more educated than the male, males losing jobs at a greater rate than females, etc. The disparity betweeen numbers of educated females vs number of educated males is particular pronounced in the black community. It seems to me that there is a sociological change going on which isn’t receiving much notice.
Funny, I was just talking to Elizabeth Gould (at Princeton – look-up neurogenesis) about this a couple of weeks ago. She mentioned that meeting times have always been male-centered and now that there are more women researchers, meetings no longer take place when it is time to pick-up the kids at school. She also said that young women scientists have no clue as to the difficulties for women just thirty years ago.
Cant some of this be interpreted as good news for female scientists?
If one of the main contributors of gender-differences in positions/pay/etc is having/raising kids… and Im a female not interested in having kids… isnt this good news for me and young women scientists like me?
The scientific community and society as a whole isnt there yet, but there has been some progress that benefits some women?
Absolutely — I took that as the main message of the paper.
Jerry: “After all, your political views are something that you choose, but you can’t choose your gender or ethnicity.”
Hmmm… Does this mean I coulda chosen to be a conservative? Scary!
Seriously though, one’s political orientation gets determined by genetic and environmental factors which aren’t matters of deliberate choice. Think of how you ended up a liberal. Did you *decide* to be that way? No, you grew up that way. And whether one takes deliberate stock of one’s orientation is a function of the orientation itself – does it encourage self-reflection and embrace fallibilism and empiricism?
Of course these very observations about the genesis and modification of political views come from a scientific standpoint that puts human behavior and choices in a completely causal context. Conservatives will be less likely than liberals to agree with it since they tend to be less aligned with science and more wedded to the idea of an ultimately self-constructed self that chooses its characteristics independent of biology and environment. There’s no evidence for such a thing of course.
Btw, re Haidt and in line with Eamon and Ophelia above, I’d say the reason conservatives are under-represented among scientists and academics isn’t that liberals are biased against them, but because they are by nature less interested in and supportive of the open inquiry that is the raison d’etre of the academy. It’s no coincidence that the war on science has been led by Republicans, as documented by Chris Mooney.
The other factor here is that choice is only one aspect — the other is harmfulness vs. harmlessness.
Take sexuality for one example. While I realize there is tactical value in getting the word out that homosexuality is not a choice, for me it is basically irrelevant because it’s not inherently harmful. What’s the problem with being gay? Even if one’s sexuality were as freely chosen as the color of one’s tie, it wouldn’t change my position on same sex marriage or LGBT rights one iota — they are still the right thing to do, because homosexuality is not harmful.
For a counter-example, take a biological propensity for violence. Ignore for a moment the difficulties in teasing this out — let’s say we could administer a simple test to say whether someone had an unavoidable tendency towards violence. While that might change how we view the punitive aspects of justice, do you really think anyone would be saying, “You know, people who are naturally predisposed to violence seem to be underrepresented in the sciences. That is unfair, and we need to fix that!” Probably not.
Even if conservatism is not chosen (and while I acknowledge that genetically inherited authoritarian tendencies, etc., can strongly bias someone towards becoming conservative, I tend to think there is still a relatively high degree of practical choice) that still doesn’t argue for balance, if the position is harmful. And I think it is. In fact, the association between conservatives and AGW denialism could prove to be more destructive than anyone can possibly imagine.
This might be a malapropos, but Jerry is wrong here.
Though both gender and ethnic group are variables that are very resistant to change, and don’t usually change through conscious choice – both may change. And that change might be willed.
Sex and genetic sub-group are a bit harder to change without surgery or re-defining terms.
There is very serious discrimination against women in the prison system. The women are seriously underrepresented in the life sentence category and on death row. (I’m basing this on the same kind of analysis that is often used to conclude discrimination in the professions).
Back when I was in high school, some of the teachers commented that the very best students were usually male, and the very worst students were usually male. The female students tended to cluster in the middle.
Discrimination begins shortly after birth. Girls tend to be given a more protective nurturing, while boys are treated less protectively and are given more encouragement for independence of action. I think it entirely plausible that such differences have something to do with what my high school teachers observed, and with the statistical evidence of discrimination in the professions and in the prisons.
I think I’m agreeing with the PNAS study, that there are complex cultural influences and that we cannot simply use statistics to decide whether there was discrimination.
For my own experience in academia, I have seen little evidence of discrimination. Sure, a few of my colleagues were sexist, but they were a small minority.
The advent of ultrasonic scans have changed this. Now it starts a bit earlier…
Roles, scripts and expectations are very hard to break. I very much like Cordelia Fine’s take on this in the gender delusion – there’s a nice bit on math ability too. (http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393068382/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297271141&sr=8-1)
Can I haz preview please?
I fucked that up royally.
What was lost:
Expectations, roles and scripts are very hard to break. Gender inequality is very pervasive in society. I like Cordelia Fine’s bit on this in her book the gender delusion. She’s got a bit om math ability that’s quite good too – but perhaps a bit more mean-orientated than top-orientated.
So apparently you find it APPALLING that women are discriminated against in hair salons….but women discriminated
against in academia?…psshhh, well that just doesn’t exist!
Do you practice your reading skills very often? And did you read the article?
I hope Newman’s post is a joke, because nowhere have I ever said that women aren’t discriminated against in academia, or that I approve of discrimination. It is, of course, deplorable.
I said that the study shows that discrimination doesn’t seem to appear as publication, grant, or hiring bias in the last thirty years or so.
Jerry: I did not even imply that you approve of discrimination. Of course I know you don’t.
While I agree with the idea that attributing unequal abilities and desires to biology vs. cultural differences is taboo in our society, I think it is naive to claim that women are underrepresented in academia because they WANT to be.
It’s not so much taboo as an area where there’s a lot of crap going on. Bad biased research, sloppy methodology and a lot of people jumping the gun.
The societal effects are pretty oblivious. The purely biological differences are a bit hard to determine. There might be some, but separating the pair is night-impossible.
What we do know is that whatever biological differences there might be isn’t a hard determinant. They shouldn’t be at the core of policy-making anyway. So in a certain perspective: They are irrelevant.
Biologically I’m not supposed to fly 10,000 feet above the air – but I do.
So if you try to stick women and men into a 1950’s family pattern based on your perception of the “biological essence”: Stuff it!
Nor did I claim that–or the authors of this paper. They said that some of the “choices” that women make that result in underrepresentation are voluntary, while other stuff is forced on them by society or its expectations. No one, I think, is claiming that women want to be underrepresented in academia!
To TheBear: You’re Not Helping.
You realize that those are fighting words in these parts? Care to elaborate?
Oh, I realize it. More than you can imagine. No, I don’t care to elaborate–except only to say that your comment to which this was a response reminded me a lot of TJ…
If you don’t care to elaborate – you’d better not speak in the first place.
I assume you are pointing towards my 1950’s reference. This is of course a reference to the period that’s the human race’s “natural state” in bad evo-psych.
Note two things:
1: The key word “if” in the original piece.
2: The key word “bad” here.
If you got some good research proving me wrong – put up. Otherwise – shut up.
No, I was responding to this:
“Do you practice your reading skills very often? And did you read the article?”
Ah, that was more of a gut reaction from what you wrote first.
And if you expected another level of feedback – perhaps you should have phrased your post a bit differently.
“The primary factors in women’s underrepresentation are preferences
and choices—both freely made and constrained:”
My criticism of such papers is that there seems to be an unexamined assertion that women are underrepresented in certain fields. I think that this is almost certainly true in some cases – *but* if men and women were not limited by constrained choices, what would the numbers be?
Would we see a 50/50 split in (say) mathematics, or would the unconstrained outcome be a different ratio?
Just to widen the debate, most of the primary school teachers in the UK are women. Is this a case where mens’ choices are constrained. This is not a cry for male victimhood by the way, but an example that should also be addressed by whatever gender differential representation ‘fixes’ we try.
Paul Krugman discussed the Haidt piece yesterday. Money quote:
I posted a link to that article on a rant thread on FB on the topic yesterday and got called a “doofus” for referencing Krugman, who they claimed unfairly defamed Palin over the Arizona shooting.
Let’s just say that I didn’t turn the other cheek, and things escalated a bit.
I (briefly) read the article, and plan on reading it more in-dept later, but I think it only addresses part of the problem (while acknowledging this).
It has already been mentioned above, but Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender is a good introduction to how society’s stereotypes can have a negative effect on women without there being outright discrimination.
I’ve read the article, but I’m not sure I’ve digested it properly yet.
AS a first-impression-esque view I mostly agree – but I would love to see more and more thorough work on this.
It’s very plausible that large-scale discrimination can’t be found because some cases of discrimination is balanced by informal affirmative action.
I also think they make a bit light on the social bias that shape decisions and home-work balance distribution.
I agree with Ben at the top that more equal childcare/homecare distribution is a key. It’s very hard to achieve though. Long, fully compensated (but *not* from the employers parental leave in equal parts for men and women might go a long way – but no-one has implemented such a measure yet. As long as a sufficient period isn’t fully payed – women will take more responsibility for the childcare since they earn less and reduction of their working time will hurt the family less finacially. And women earn less and get worse positions because both their employers and women themselves assume they have to take more of the “home” side of the home/work balance of the pair.
Numbers of people going into and staying in a field will also influence the numbers at the top, most competitive end. This is what I think of when the whole Larry Summers issue is brought up–if I’m remembering correctly he was commenting on gender imbalance at the very top of certain fields. But if more men than women enter that field in the first place (and all of the talk about family leave and so on highlights the fact that it is not only aptitude that determines who stays in a field, course) then the ‘tail’ end of the talent/success distribution will skew male as well, even if the percentage of ‘ability’ (whatever that is and however you measure it) is distributed evenly between the sexes.
There were three very interesting studies done in the past few years looking at gender imbalances among chess players. Chess has the interesting feature of having winners and losers, and a very highly developed and sophisticated rating scheme to rank players, and also has huge gender imbalance: only one of the current top 100 players is a woman (Judit Polgar), and there is lots of reinforcing cultural baggage about chess that is involved with gender, such as spatial reasoning and competitiveness, and so on.
One (http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/papers/SexDiffsChess.pdf) looked at who went into chess at a young age:
“The study finds that gender differences in chess performance do not exist in locales where at least half of the young players are girls. The authors conclude that the greater number of men at the top levels of chess can therefore be explained by the disproportionate number of boys who enter chess at the lowest levels.”
Another (http://www.physorg.com/news150954140.html) published by the Royal Society looks at every player who partipated in tournaments in Germany:
“A team of researchers from the UK has shown that the under-representation of women at the top end in
chess is almost exactly what would be expected, given the much greater number of men that participate in
the game at all.”
And a most fascinating one (European Journal of Social Psych. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440/abstract ) that looks at how women do in games over the internet when they know the gender of their opponent:
“Forty-two male–female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via Internet. When players were unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males. When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent. When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male opponents.”
——–
The Polgars are a good illustration of what the numbers are showing. It looks like their success was almost entirely due to the quantity and quality of their training and not some innate ability (especially not an innate, gender-specific ability). Even within the family, it was the girls who worked the hardest who achieved the greatest success, just as you’d expect if this ability was something that anyone could learn rather than what is present at birth in some but not in others.
The desire to train and enter into chess may have some gender component or it may be societal, and it is probably this which is restricting the number of female chess players rather than a more broad gender difference.
But the number of people of a given gender already in the field also affects the number of people of that gender entering the field – so it’s a Catch-22
In part the rationale for radical affirmative action.
Not that radical affirmative action doesn’t carry a shitload of problems too. I’m seriously in doubt if it’s worth it or not – but it’s one way to potentially solve the problem.
The academic scene is particularly vulnerable to reproductive inequality because of the way careers are structured. Getting tenure is the toughest stage in an academic career. When do most academics go up for tenure? In their 30s. When do most women spend most time raising kids? In their 30s. Women are most distracted at exactly the time they need to be most focused and competitive.
From the Tierney piece:
Alrighty, then. I think we’re starting to get at the problem here.
For me, the science is easy and the politics are hard
Thank you for this excellent post. This post is unforntually red meat to certain special intrest groups out there that wish to ignore the progress that is made and tilt at windmills. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent encouraging women to STEM fields and all it has seemed to do is to send women into medical school. This money is being spent on the belief that it is primarly discrimentation that is the barrier but its studies like this that can actually start us on the path to finding out what the actual barriers are and how to address them instead of continuing to dump millions into ineffective campigns that only make NGO’s and fill in the blank studies departments feel good about themselves.
(subscribing)
I think I might be able to bring a Swedish perspective here. I read the paper and noticed several references to the situation here, both the initial study that indicated a possible problem and the later studies that seemed to show more even results. First, the issue is taken seriously here, both at the level of actively seeking to address the imbalance and in the creation of social conditions that counteract the historical conditions that disadvantage women. In terms of the social policies there is a policy to have long maternity leave that either parent can take (and frequently do).
This policy, however, is not designed for scientists in mind. It is for society as a whole and designed to ensure that taking time off for child rearing is shared between the sexes.
From an academic scientific viewpoint I would suggest some additional factors that perhaps come into play here.
First, academic science is not like other jobs.
There is a time period in science where you have to make your career – frequently this is very short, just a couple or five years. If you fail to be successful within this brief window then your career is over. Usually this time period occurs immediately after you finish your PhD when you are trying to start up your own independent projects, hire your own researchers, students etc. With a limited amount of funds available the upshot of this is that researchers are incredibly wary about which people to hire. There is an unfortunate consequence of this for women researchers. Female Swedish scientists usually qualify with a PhD around the age of 30. They are frequently married or with a partner at this age but have not started a family. Financially and social security-wise it makes much more sense to begin a family while in full time employment rather than as a student and this is what usually happens here. People get a post doc position of two years and have a child during this period (both men and women). I speak both anecdotally (having seen dozens of examples within just my small group of scientific acquaintances) and personally – this is also what I did. On the other hand I felt pressured by my group leader to not avail of the paternity leave (which I legally could have done) since he was under pressure to get results from his projects.
I don’t think this is so unusual – male scientists not taking paternity that they are legally entitled to take. To an employer with limited fund and within a short career window this means that a particular type of female scientist, despite equal qualifications and publication record, may be a second best choice.
I say “a particular type of female scientist” since there are plenty of single foreign (usually Chinese) female scientists employed here and they are attractive to employers for two reasons – both associated with the social security system. First they can be employed outside the normal taxation system (therefore no social security payments and thus they are cheap compared to locals) and second, since they cannot avail of the maternity laws they are not thought to be likely to get pregnant during their employment!
Even if maternity laws are amended everywhere to be the same as Swedens the inherent competitive and sort term thinking involved in academic science it will not make it an even playing field.
I have no ideal solution to things. Swedens laws make it better for women scientists but they don’t solve everything.
“And, of course, the issue remains, politically volatile as it is, whether we should be fostering equality of opportunity (both sexes get equal access to resources) or equality of outcome, i.e., will we be satisfied only when half of all faculty positions in every field are occupied by women and half by men? If we do not achieve this parity across the board, does that prove discrimination?”
Why is this even an issue? Equal opportunity should be the main goal of society. Equality of outcome might result or might not. If it doesn’t, then fostering the latter is just another form of discrimination.
Many people make the mistake that since there was discrimination in the past, there must be discrimination (and just as much) today and it is the reason for inequality of outcome. But there are many, many other factors.
Also, why the focus on science? Women are underrepresented in many fields: star cooks, chess players, rock musicians (name me one well known female rock musician who is not a singer, not related to or in love with a boy in the band or part of an all-girl band!), garbage collectors, soldiers, politicians, the list goes on. (Of course, there are also many fields where men are underrepresented, but few care about that.)
This Rock-musician thing has been thrown around here in Denmark as well – I simply don’t get it??? Is it NOT good to be a singer? Is it BETTER/more prestigious to be guitarist? I think this example is utterly strange. While I agree with your general point, that there are inequalities everywhere, the article from which the OP was inspired is about academia/science. So that is the answer to your question “Why focus on science?” – I think.
WOW. Thanks for sharing this Jerry. This is important stuff, as Feminist propaganda is taken to be gospel truth by most of the population. Well done.
Vincent, you really need to read the article better (and Jerry’s post), if you think it goes against “Feminist propaganda”. What the authors are saying, is that overt discrimination has fallen, but that there are structural discrimination going on. Something most feminists would agree with.
In other words, this is actually good ammunition for feminism, not an argument against.
There is much truth to what Vincent is saying. The mainstream of feminist thought in the United States represented by the womens studies departments, the feminist press and blogs, and the large feminist groups like NOW, AAUW and similar do in fact come right and say their is stright up gender discrimination by the decision makers in science departments. They have in fact repeatedly lobbied for a equility of outcomes soultion to problems. These groups have repeatedly downplayed the role that womens choices have on their long term careers.
Sure its nice to say that if only maternity leave was extended everything would be better or if more parental sharing took place all would be better but this is more wishful thinking than anything. When the most producitive years of research are in the child bearing years maternity leave means nothing more than missing a rather large chunk of the persons most productive time. The only way to cure this is to force every one to take large chunks of leave during their more produtive years.
On males taking a larger role in child care this would take a huge societal shift that again this feminist groups have been one of the biggest voices in shaping. These groups where and are at the forefront that have driven men away. NOW for example has repeatedly fought against shared custody and pushes the falsehood that males that seek custody are by and large abusive. These groups also where a big part of the preschool satanic scare of the 80s and 90s that all but labled men child molesters. Than of course there is the studies that show higher divorce rates for couples where the wife earns more than the husband or the playground gossip circle where the stay at home dad is refered to as the loser. I hope one day this changes but the groups that claim to want this change are just about the biggest group working against this change. Of course this gain applies mostly to the US and to a lessor extent other Anglo countries.
Any amount of awareness that there is even a voice of disagreement in the world is a good thing. Of course the myth of “institutionalized sexism” as part of the “matriarchal system” (ha) will be tough to die, but at least there is some discussion emerging.
Christina Hoff Sommers, who has also published a book on women and sciences, discusses this article on NRO:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259744/science-saturated-sexism-christina-hoff-sommers
I actually did bother to read the paper; I wanted to mention some criticisms.
Firstly, I would refer you to Allison Gopnik piece in “Slate”. She points out that Ceci and Williams found that discrimination went away after controlling for variables like teaching load and institution type. Arguing discrimination doesn’t exist at all entails the assumption that bias doesn’t impact those factors.
Secondly, many of the sources that Ceci and Williams depend on aren’t restricted to math-intensive fields. For example, they include journals in the life sciences in their manuscript reviewing section. Much of their grant funding work also looks at the life sciences.
Lots of people have made attributions to what Larry Summers said. It would be useful to have a transcript out. This is some of what he said: “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” This implies proposing or suggesting, not just saying it’s possible. (I don’t think it should have cost him his job.)
No, there shouldn’t be an invisible barrier to talking about these things, but it’s worth noting that plenty of discourse on this stuff takes place. Diane Halpern has discussed innate contributors to sex differences for many years, and she is quoted in the media and became President of the APA in 2004. Her textbook on sex-related variation is often recommended by people in the field. Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke both quoted her in their debate on this topic. Judith Elaine Owen Blakemore was also President of the Midwestern Psychological Association and she co-authored a textbook “Gender Development” with strong consideration of data on the “nature” side of the story. (These are excellent textbooks for anyone eager to learn…). Susan Pinker won the William James award for her book “The Sexual Paradox.” Her text often didn’t mention considerations of sample size with respect to neuroscience studies. She also may have knowingly used outdated statistics to bolster her case on the magnitude of greater male variability.(Her book cites a study showing there were 13 males for every female among 12-13 year olds scoring 700 or higher on the SAT. More recent numbers show lower sex ratios, and sources mentioning this were listed in her bibliography, particularly the Ceci-Williams volume Why Aren’t More Women in Science)
In terms of “wanting to believe” things, the knife may cut both ways. Ceci, Williams, and their collaborator Barnett wrote in their 2009 review, “While not dismissing the possible
causal role of biological factors in sex differences in STEM
careers, we find it worth noting that in the past, biological hypotheses
have often been believed out of proportion to the evidence
supporting them.” (“Women’s Underrepresentation in Science: Sociocultural and Biological Considerations.)
Moreover, one group noted, “Testosterone has a bad reputation. It has been stereotyped as the hormone responsible for all things “masculine” including aggression, dominance, risk-taking, and anti-social behavior. This assumption that testosterone encourages masculine behaviors is held even among scientists, which is surprising given that empirical evidence is mixed.”
http://www.spspmeeting.org/index.php?Page=symposium_detail&id=1224&Time=Friday%2C+January+28%2C+2%3A00+-+3%3A15+pm%2C+Room+7&talks=
Also, Melissa Hines argued in her book Brain Gender that researchers were too quick to embrace some relationships between hormones and cognitive ability when consistent evidence hadn’t come in.
People may on their face “prefer” environmental explanations, but find themselves seduced by innate explanations with compelling but inconclusive data. Although the former certainly hinders pursuit of the truth, the latter probably doesn’t help it.