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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"?

You cannot make someone understand something when their livelihood, status, identity, and sense of self-worth depend on not understanding it.

This is not a shocking result. Unfair hiring practices discriminating against men have been the norm in quite a few white collar professions for a while now. The data has been there for a long time. It doesn't matter. Men are axiomatically assumed to be advantaged. As others have pointed out: evidence of male disadvantage is always proof of female disadvantage. At best, it's the patriarchy hurting men, too. The solution to the latter is, of course, more feminism, which translates into more female advantages - which aren't really advantages because...

I know people who are personally involved in creating hiring practices that discriminate against men and they are immune to viewing this as such. At best, it is compensating for a (real or imagined) female "disadvantage" somewhere else. There are more men three rungs up the ladder? There you go, discriminating against men is just. Which of course makes it non-discriminatory. If not, more male CEOs in unrelated fields or in politics will suffice as a justification. If all else fails, there is always the Hail Mary of historical injustice. You see, every single woman was personally oppressed for tens of thousands of years. Now it's their turn and turnabout for the next couple of centuries or so is dandy.

It's a supremacist movement and completely immunised to reason.

Edit: A good point of comparison is perhaps the claim that women earn significantly less for equal work. The evidence for this being wrong has been out since the 90s, I believe. It was still used as a cudgel to justify anti-male policies way into the 2010s. Hell, it is still used as the bailey of the gender pay gap narrative.

You nail this 100%. I see it play out at my woke tech company. I find it incredibly tiresome and annoying, and while I'm sympathetic to people who've had a shitty experience, and I think everyone should be judged on their own merits, the constant whining without evidence is so tedious, and I have no patience for it.

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