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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science

We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and 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.

It's amusing that one of the categories where women are disadvantaged is also one of the least important categories (who cares about teaching ratings? especially at an R1 institute), and the category where women are most advantaged, hiring, happens to be the most important one - being hired in the first place is the necessary precondition for being able to compete in any of the other categories at all! Salary can't be said to be wholly unimportant, but, most people aren't going into academia for the money anyway.

The discussion related specifically to hiring is in the "Evaluation Context 1: tenure-track hiring" section. For example:

In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"? How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead? It seems to me that the existing ideology is so entrenched that it could only be overcome with a Kuhnian paradigm shift - no matter how much the actual empirical facts change, ideology will only (possibly) catch up after a generational shift and a changing of the guard.

Not that I think it's appropriate to just say flat out "women are privileged" of course, as a simple pure reversal of the leftist claim of pervasive male privilege - reality is obviously much more complex than that. But, as this paper suggests, the last several decades of feminist activism has obviously succeeded in securing certain concrete privileges for women.

You misunderstand. That women are advantaged so is proof they are systematically disadvantaged because they won't be able to find partners that make as much as them. Look up "golden penis syndrome" (no I'm not making this up).

Ideas do not die when they are proven wrong but when their spirit is broken. So long as it is convenient to believe the ills that befall men are caused by the metaphysical conspiracy of Patriarchy, the only cure for the lapse in morale will be subsequent beatings.

We most likely have decades or centuries more of this kind of thinking to suffer in the West until the pendulum swings back so you better get used to it.

"Men increasingly alienated from an education credentialist complex that hates them; women and their hypergamous impulses hardest hit."

Also related is polygyny, with Merited Impossibility to boot. Ugh, young women definitely don't prefer being a side-chick to a Chad than the main-chick of a Brad, but if they do it's only because male shittiness creates female-dominated environments, so young women are the true victims here in having no choice but to be polygynous.

Polygnyous hypergamy takes some bizarre forms in academia, e.g. I knew of a famous academic who looks like Buddy Holly, with an astounding lack of either normal social graces or the ability to (successfully) imitate WASP norms, but who had two model-level grad students he was screwing (with their knowledge, but with their hope that "he'll choose me eventually") one of whom was semi-openly cucking her Gigachad-looking husband. And they were just the women I knew about.

Oh, and that's with a skin condition that means he can't use deoderant/cologne, plus (according to one of those beautiful women) a notably small penis.

Sort of encouraging, if you're academically successful and don't look like Gigachad.

A lack of competition has led these men to develop “golden penis syndrome” — an arrogance that stems from the assumption that a steady supply of females will be sexually interested in them.

So it's the inverted version of the cock carousel, except showing up on medium, Daily Mail and New York Post as opposed to /pol/ or /r9k/.

The naivete of some of these writers is fantastic:

So, you could easily say that there is a Golden Vagina Syndrome, but it’s interesting that no one writes articles about it. Perhaps because we are so familiar with and accustomed to women celebrating their bodies and exercising their ability to choose.

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