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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28346 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.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"?

I suspect none, because it was never evidence-based to begin with; the "evidence" in favour, such as it was, was just to reinforce existing biases. Everything that doesn't confirm the conclusion that is desired will be ignored.

How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead?

The limit does not exist.

This is the same mistake people make in discussions about Affirmative Action or diversity quotas or whatever have you; these movements and advocates aren't actually out for equality, they're supremacist movements looking to loot as many spoils as they can for their in-group, and the language of equality is useful for them insofar as it moves towards that goal. Men are defined as an Oppressor Class; and as an Oppressor Class they can never be oppressed, it's just axiomatically impossible. Even when the gaslighting girlboss in chief grinds the entrails of the last male CEO into the oval office carpet, it will be impossible for men to be oppressed, because they are defined as an Oppressor Class.

A big part of it is really just hypergamy, it allows them to become extremely choosy. I've met so many young liberal men who are displeased with modern feminism. I do believe that decades of affirmative action and the expansion of the dating pool for women via dating apps has finally taken its toll, and as more men become partnerless or end up with a less desirable partner, they're going to agree that society has had "enough feminism". I do not see a solution to this, even if we were actively working towards pushing for policy designs to raise the TFR like "three child policy" and improve male SMV through "masculinity training" like China is currently doing, I'm not optimistic about their scale of impact.

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