Wow, thanks for sharing this. It’s alarming that men and women both rated female students lower, and those salary numbers are really depressing. Sometimes it seems like we’re making progress, but then I see things like this and wonder what it takes to overcome seemingly pervasive implicit biases?

Joey, very true. And, among conference organizers in science media as well.

Jacquelyn: ” I see things like this and wonder what it takes to overcome seemingly pervasive implicit biases?”

Simple in theory: double blind hiring. All identifying information on applications is removed, so applications are only judged by the content of their material.

Orchestras did it: http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5903.html

Re: Fig 2. Your y-axis makes my math itch.

I like how there isn’t any mention regarding whether those reviewing the applications were looking for specific qualifications. You can’t just report that they turn down the women if they’re also turning down men, and then later- after the review process is done and they’ve chosen someone- focus only on the percentage of men. This poll seems partially flawed. What if (in the spirit of speeding up the hiring process) those reviewers just went with the first qualified resumé? Sometimes it’s men, sometimes it isn’t.

@ Adam:
Read the last sentence of the second paragraph

#11: “I like how there isn’t any mention regarding whether those reviewing the applications were looking for specific qualifications.”

Did you miss this part?

“The substance of the applications were all identical…”

This study would suggest a similar bias also exists against female authors. Double blind peer review would even the playing field

What’s most interesting is that female faculty were more biased than male faculty were (at least in terms of salary offered; Table 1 of the paper). It’s not a statistically significant difference, but it’s consistent with my anecdotal experience.

I’m honestly super surprised by this, though maybe that’s because I’m in a bio lab? All our lab managers are women, basically, and my (admittedly sexist!) bias is that women tend to be more conscientious and organized. I would have thought that for an equally skilled man or woman, I would prefer the woman…?

Adam-I like how you missed that the applicants were IDENTICAL, other than some having male names attached, and some female. So……now what?

Kris: no, but I have preferentially hired recent immigrants to the same effect. It’s funny when a skilled civil engineer is thrilled to get a job as a building manager (custodian in the US?), and I’m thrilled to have him (or her) because they’re good, dedicated and will work for lower wages than similarly competent locals. Of course, they do leave after a year or two but they all have a list of replacements organised well before then. Two years working locally plus a good reference from a native speaker makes a huge difference to employability.

“[L]eaving a man with a greater potential for growth” seems like a pretty bold assertion to me. Is there a some secret cap to one’s potential for professional growth that might be fully used by the time one is applying to become a lab manager?

“I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally.”

I’m not sure that the issues can be so completely separated.

Suppose that you applied the same test, taking a CV and switching out a feature, but instead of sex you used PhD program, e.g. Harvard vs University of Florida. In each case you see the same publications, but you might give more benefit of the doubt to the Harvard PhD, since the Harvard PhDs have higher performance on average and there is noise in the data. You might also favor the Florida PhD for achieving more with less resources. Using your prior information about the distribution of ability for Harvard and Florida PhDs gives more accurate estimates than ignoring it, but penalizes folk from one school or the other.

If it is really the case that aggregate performance for female applicants (or male applicants, as seems to be the case for undergraduate students at the median) lags, then an accurate estimate of a female applicant’s quality will have to take that prior information into account, in addition to the other evidence in the CV.

There are then two questions to address regarding hiring bias. First, are the stereotypes accurate regarding real applicants in the world (there is a large literature on stereotype accuracy indicating that stereotypes usually are pretty accurate: http://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4318390.aspx)? If not, then the bias needs to be countered by means such as blinding hiring committees to the sex of applicants, and hire quality can be increased at the same time as sex disparities are reduced.

If the stereotypes are accurate then we need to consider distributional consequences. Using the stereotype will improve the overall quality of hires, but a given woman will suffer relative to the sex-blind policy absent a countervailing hiring preference for women, and it will make sex and gender salient. So we may want to take a hit in average hire quality to promote equality of outcome between the sexes by sex-blinding hiring (although sex-blinding interferes with affirmative pro-female preferences). But we shouldn’t pretend that treating people with equal non-sex indicators of ability equally is necessarily the same as treating people of equal actual ability equally if there are group ability differences, since our measures of ability are noisy.

TW, I see absolutely no flaws in your argument. Be sure to prominently note on your CV that you regularly worked below your potential. I’ve heard employers love that.

Really? Only females are discriminated against? What a simple world that would be!

What about the dozens of submissions from Asia to American and European journals that get nowhere, owing only to the biases of the referees and editors? Why are they able to get away with reasoning that is flawed at best, when rejecting papers? Why not talk about that?

We don’t seem to have this problem.

The last jobs we advertised (research assistants) we had 90 applications, 34 of whom were eligible on qualifications.
Ranking on experience only, we gave interviews to the top ten. Nine were female; the one male didn’t show up.

It would be good to see a similar study on how women and men are chosen as peer reviewers. Are selection criteria applied fairly? (http://www.apeer.org/2012/06/29/peer-review-pie/) Becoming a peer reviewer confers some of the advantages – recognition and a chance to shape science – that Sunil D’Monte mentioned above.

@AI & TW

Please, let me introduce you to federal laws. Following them will avoid the next woman you don’t hire suing you for it.
There’s this one:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

Title VII prohibits not only intentional discrimination, but also practices that have the effect of discriminating against individuals because of their race, color, national origin, religion, or sex.

Title VII’s broad prohibitions against sex discrimination specifically cover:

Pregnancy Based Discrimination – Pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions must be treated in the same way as other temporary illnesses or conditions.

*******************************************************************************

A rational employment system would ensure that the compensation for work performed was enough so that the financial gain from returning to work was actually that, a gain. Many women with intentions to return to work find a net loss when factoring in the cost of day care to (see above) already lower-than-male budgets. Perhaps if women were paid equally the $12,000 yearly cost in child care wouldn’t matter (as much) in their calculations. As I look at it, if a woman starts $5,000 behind, and then has $12,000 a year in child care costs, she has a compensation gap that will only get larger as she starts being shunted aside due to “low productivity”, usually because supervisors see more personal breaks being taken for nursing, pediatrician appointments, etc, all of which are most evident and necessary in the first year of a baby’s life than any other, exactly when employers are judging the woman’s competence and trying to decide whether “she’s still focused on her work”.

A rational employment system would provide on site day care so that female employees could return to work sooner without risking their child’s health by having to pump breastmilk in bathrooms for infants at sub-par care facilities.

A rational science field would allow for work-life balance because healthy, well-adjusted employees and scientists are freed to focus on the task at hand. We don’t have a rational system by any means. The laws attempt to correct for that.

@Cory: Have you considered in your calculation that men die earlier by three years or so, and therefore have reduced the pension contribution for male scientists?

Jodi @ 17:
This study would suggest a similar bias also exists against female authors. Double blind peer review would even the playing field

As chris (@32) pointed out, double-blind peer review is, in practice, very difficult to achieve, since it’s often rather easy to figure out who the authors are. This Inside Higher Ed article mentions several economics journals giving up on double-blind peer reviewing for a number of reasons, including the infeasibility of double-blind review; the editor of one of the journals mentioned that “[his] journal did an experiment typing in the titles of 20 recently submitted papers and was able to correctly link almost all of them to authors, who post working papers, talks given at meetings or information about their research on various websites.”

In addition, I think the available current evidence is that there isn’t any significant bias against female authors in peer reviewing at scientific journals (at least within biology); see the meta-analysis in this PNAS study from 2011. (Of course, this leaves open the possibility that bias can still exist in some fields or sub-fields; most of the studies discussed in the meta-analysis were in biology.)

@ TW

The same laws that apply to discrimination against women apply to discrimination against handicaps, as you describe your condition.

As per your statement, you are saying that you would just accept not being hired if you knew for a certainty that the only difference in the decision was your physical handicap? Even knowing that that was an illegal practice? As long as women don’t get any “favors” either?

I am inclined to believe that you are not that lacking in self-interest.

Cory I am only talking about logic – pregnancy is a factor for females and so a rational decision process should take it into account. The things you cite in your post only support this.

Now if a society decides, for whatever reason, that equally qualified females should have equal opportunity for hiring this effect has to be countered somehow, for example by enacting laws penalizing discrimination similar to ones you cite or rewarding hiring of females.

I sometimes feel less comfortable and able to voice my concerns around female colleagues than male ones. Sometimes it seems to me that my female mentors and colleagues, more so than the male ones, have expectations for how I should make career and family choices and view me more critically for not choosing according to their idea of correctness. This is particularly difficult because they are perceived “on my side.”

I have drastically fewer data points for female mentors and colleagues than male ones, though, so I suppose that impression is not reliable.

@Statistical Discrimination: By far the most interesting comment.

However, I can see how you and the authors of the study (or others) would end up talking past each other, as they might be working under a different assumption. You admit the possibility that there could be an overall statistical difference in the performance of men and women, whereas they might assume that cannot be the case. If they are correct, then the results of their study can be due only to (unwarranted) bias. (And yes, you do admit that possibility, and suggest that blinded applications would then be appropriate.)

We clearly have some way to go, although I would also be very interested in seeing whether and how these attitudes change after actual interviews with the candidates. That could indicate an even more sexist bias.

@TW are you serious?!?! If two people perform the same it doesn’t make any difference in the job they’re doing. If one is working below their capability and one at the top of their capability, what does it matter if they get the same results? I see more problems with the candidate who is lazy as he/she is clearly not interested in personal growth no matter what their potential. I think laziness is a far greater handicap than a uterus. I knew plenty of lazy boys at university that were ‘naturally smart’ but utterly lazy. Not a one of them graduated and I would never hire them as they lack the drive to work. Just for clarity, I have known my fair share of females like this too, and wouldn’t hire them either.

Unfortunately I do see your point with pregnancy, but most women I have worked with in this community have taken minimal time off work and shared maternity leave with their partners, so the men take almost as much time off as they do. Me and my boyfriend are both finishing off PhDs in physics and have agreed to share maternity leave (when the day comes) as much as possible as we have similar aspirations. I would expect both of us to be considered equal for any job.

@cory
My life is actually much more pleasant if I hire and retain the best people possible, so I’m always selfishly going to strive to hire the best, based on the info available to me. If I have the luxury of being able to conduct detailed 1 on 1 interviews with every plausible candidate, then that’s wonderful. If, as is more likely, I have a pile of 200 plausible applications, all boasting their rather homogeneous achievements to the max, then I have to whittle that pile down with quick, efficient choices. So yes, a nerdy white guy, with no affirmative action protection and no obvious powerful friends greasing his way, is more likely to make that first cut than someone with ostensibly identical qualifications but who I suspect has had other “factors” helping them in previous applications, whether social connections or legal statutes.
Even more importantly, if I’m wrong and he turns out to be a disastrous hire, I’ll be able to fire him without having to worry about being hit by some fake discrimination lawsuit. Have you ever tried firing a lazy, dishonest, incompetent? It’s a real pain. How about one that also happens to be pregnant? Now, that’s basically impossible.

Not that it makes the finding any less sad, but I noticed in the application from the online supplementary material an excerpt from the letter of recommendation:

“… although (Jennifer/John) admittedly took a bit longer than some students to get serious about (his/her) studies early in college, she has impressed me by improving over the last two years of her science coursework and has made every effort to make up for lost ground… (she/he) has been a strong research assistant in my lab, and I know (he/she) is capable of serving as a dedicated lab manager”

Although this may show my own stereotypes , to me this seems to fit with a typically male narrative. Smart male (1430 GRE), who after slacking off for a year or two got his act together. The rest of the application is quite generic (e.g. “I am a motivated student”), and this is the last part of the application and therefore might really play a large role in how the professors judge the application. It would be interesting to know how the inclusion of this may have impacted the results.

I can understand the “pregnancy objection”, though I’m not sure if it has any actual consequence in the real world; even if it were a real issue, anyway, the proposed cure is completely absurd. The right thing to do would be to somehow “force” a balance between man and woman in maternity/paternity leaves; not hiring an otherwise competent woman just because you’re scared she might decide to have a baby is counterproductive and simply unjust.

That said, it’s really offensive the message that has been passed around that basically women might be hard worker, but on the other side they have definitely less potential than men; I’m really surprised that things like these have been said by so-called scientists after an evaluation based on *anectodal* evidence. Even by not considering the fact that it’s simply absurd to be able to think something like that, I think it’s a serious flaw in reasoning to argue, even on the internet, on anectodes. For a scientist in particular it’s something that can’t be forgiven.

It’s a testament to how powerful peoples’ preconceived biases are. In my experience, female scientists and scientists in training, as a group, outperform their male colleagues. While it is somewhat of a competitive advantage for me that my colleagues don’t see it this way, it is an unmitigated disaster for the field that this kind of bias, and other challenges, drive so many women away.

@Megan: Why should I be denied a job because I *might* have a child in another 5 years…

I don’t get your argument. That’s like saying, why should I pay for insurance just because I might have a car accident?

I never said that women should be denied employment per se. I am just saying that deciding on the best candidate: the risk of pregnancy is a real disadvantage. But so are many other things like your prospective boss doesn’t like your face, you remind her of her ex-husband’s new wife, you are 5 years to old for your boss to apply for a special grant, or whatever…

@TW Do you have any actual evidence to substantiate your claims that pregnancy is a real disadvantage and actually has a substantial impact on productivity, or is it just something else only based on anectodes? And even if this was actually the situation, do you think that the right thing to do would just be to accept it and discriminate women?

So discouraging.

As for as the pay gap, I’ve seen it quite a few times in my short experience. The latest is maybe the most egregious: My boyfriend and his classmate, who he is close with, were hired by the same firm after graduation. They graduated from the same program, same school, literally all the same extracurriculars. She was actually ranked slightly higher than him and had a few years experience working in the field whereas my boyfriend had never had a job outside waiting tables in high school. They got talking and found out he’d been offered $5,000 more starting salary than her. She took it up with management with much more grace than I think I would have been capable of in her situation. They claimed the difference was a “typo” on her paperwork. I haven’t been able to ask her yet in private her reaction to the whole thing, though my boyfriend apparently found it amusing. He kept teasing her about it. Again, such grace! I most surely would have punched him in his adorable face.

@ Odexios

Here is an excerpt from a study I found that shows an actual increase in worker productivity with the enactment of maternity/family leave policies. It’s a PDF but here’s the title & authors:

The Impact of “Family-Friendly Policies” on Women’s Employment Outcomes and on the Costs and Benefits of Doing Business

Janet C. Gornick Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Ariane Hegewisch Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)

On page 20, it reads:

Research Finds Overwhelmingly Positive Effects of Leave on Employers in High Income Countries

Research on the impact of leave on employers is more limited than on the impact on women, but finds little evidence of substantial costs or problems for employers in response to leave.

A 19- country OECD study of trends in multi factor productivity (MFP) in response to maternity/ parental leave from 1979 – 2003, comparing female to male dominated sectors, found no negative effects on productivity, and concludes: “If countries with no unpaid maternity leave (such as the US) introduced this measure at the average OECD level (15 weeks), they could increase MFP by 1.1 percent in the long run.” (Bassanini and Venn, 2008:11).

It has been an uphill battle, especially in the sciences for pay equality. It would be good to think about why the gender bias exists. Is this why so many young girls leave the sciences?
I don’t agree with the idea that women should get less pay simply because they might become pregnant at some time. Think about what kind of society we would have if only uneducated, unemployable women had children.

I agree with the main premise and see it in my workplace all the time too (I’m in engineering grad school), but the second graph shows your bias. The fact that the y-axis begins at $26K rather than $0K gives a misleading picture about what the difference in salaries is: still significant, but much less so than the chart would have you believe.

You’d be wrong, Brett #104. For example, female RNs make 86.5% of what male RNs do. For social workers, it’s 90%. There are a few occupations where women earn more than men, but the highest one the Bureau of Labor Statistics could find was food preparation workers, where women earn 112% of what men do. Compare that to multiple professions where women earn 70% or less of what men do: http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2011/women/pdf/women_bls_spotlight.pdf

Not happy about these results, but they do seem to be pretty hard to deny. I am curious about the root of this bias, and what causes it.

I think the next focus of study could be demographics on the individuals who evaluate women lower than men. For instance, how strongly correlated are these results which favor men over equally qualified women to individual evaluators? Is the trend very broad, or are a few rotten apples spoiling the whole thing? Is there an age association with this sexism? What about regional or cultural association? And how about gender association. It is noteworthy that both men and women discriminate against women in this regard. I’d like to see more specifics on these numbers.

Also, I wonder what would happen if you matched a male applicant against a slightly more qualified female applicant? In other words, how much (if any) of the gender bias arises solely when the two applicants are otherwise equally qualified?

Somehow I’ve escaped the biological urge to do all these womanly things suggested by Papovich at #112. What I have done over the last 10 years is a lot of hiring in academia, mostly students (undergrad and graduate) and postdocs. It has given me a fair sample from which to draw my own conclusions about what is desirable in a trainee, though who knows whether the outcome is affected by innate biases affecting my interactions with those trainees.

In addition to the sub-conscious biases uncovered in this study that seemingly lurk within each of us, I have developed acknowledged (to myself) prejudices based on my experiences with trainees. In particular, applicants from one particular country have shown themselves, when hired, to be nothing like their transcripts, awards, recommendation letters suggest, and have performed very poorly in comparison to other trainees with less stellar resumes. This means I have a prejudice against applicants from this country. I don’t reject them out-of-sorts, but I don’t believe the publicity. It would be unfair of me to dismiss the individual applicant from this country because of my prejudice. Instead, I have developed a set of exercises and questions which I pose to all candidates who make it past the first screening. It is more difficult for applicants from this country without a track record including refereed publications to make it past the first screening because I have less to go on than other applicants, and I regret that. It is probably also more difficult for a candidate from that country to impress me even if they get beyond that first screening.

I think it is important to acknowledge our prejudices and to treat each applicant as an individual, and it can be very difficult.

@Odexios: “@TW Do you have any actual evidence to substantiate your claims that pregnancy is a real disadvantage and actually has a substantial impact on productivity, or… based on anectodes?”

Of course, it is. The woman is simply NOT at work. If that is not a disadvantage, I don’t know what. I have seen 4 of my colleagues being pregnant and work just stopped for months. 3 had not interest for work after the child was born. But I also have to say that the law makes it worse. Most women when in the late stages are still happy to contribute and work for several hours from home, but are NOT allowed by law to have tasks assigned, even though they wouldn’t mind and bore themselves to death at home.

@Greg: @TW and other commenters, why is pregnancy the only gender factor you cite?

Pregnancy risk is a risk affecting all woman and a very clear SEX (not gender) factor. I cannot think of any other, except men having to do military services or being exposed to claims of paedophilia when working with kids, or women not having the necessary physical strength.

@McJibJab: Please stay on topic. No need for personal attacks. We are just presenting counter-arguments. Force-retiring is certainly discrimination: one ideology simply pushing out those that do not agree. And for the record, I still have at least 25 years to retirement. In fact, most young woman are not moaning. It is the women of my generation from 35 upwards that moan. And many blame their failure on discrimination rather than on any other factors.

@Sean: No need to use the word “troll”. I would like you to give counter-arguments instead and engage in the debate.

What were the sexes of the scientists who were questionned!? I suspect if you were to only include the data from male scientists you would have a stronger male bias, whilst if you only took the responses from females scientists, you would have a female bias!?

To all who question the validity of Figure 2 on the basis of a non-zero axis: Wow… are any of you actually scientists? I am a researcher at Caltech and the majority of my published graphs do not have an axis that begins at zero. If differences between data points are statistically signifcant, there is no reason why you cannot adjust the range of a graph to more clearly visualize a trend. Go back to stats class. Oh wait… according to TW, classes don’t mean shit for men. I guess this is why there are so many male commenters who do not understand this extremely basic principle routinely taught in high school science classes.

@MarriedToaScientist: You did not read the second post. Men at university usually do other things than focus on coursework, and that does not mean that they don’t learn something for life. You equate grades with success in science. I disagree. it’s maybe true for an administrative job but not for a science job (except maybe tedious lab work).

I also did not say that laziness should be rewarded. I am just saying that if both men and women have the same grade. I expect the men to have more potential and the women to have worked harder for the grade on average. That is how I would decide. If you are the boss, then just decide how ever you want to decide. I don’t care. i just care about output.

@TW – Seriously? You really need to expand on the females you have encountered in your life. What if they don’t want a kid, ever? Ever met one of those? Do you think it’s fair to not let them have the job, even if they’re more qualified? Especially when, you “prove” that they study and focus better than men. Yes, you’ll find that quality more common in women because they have to work harder to even be given a chance in the first place, but you will also find that quality in men too. I’ve met many men (and women) who work hard and push their limits to the max… it’s varies from person to person. What you’re implying is that men are smarter than women even when they don’t try. That’s called sexism, so don’t be surprised if you’re pissing a lot of people off. Imagine comparing the hire-ability of white men against black men. If the white man was higher that wouldn’t be fair either and something would be said and done about it. But in this case nothing gets done about it because “men are the bosses”. Try putting yourself in our shoes.

Anyway, you’ve taught me that if I apply for a job now and get rejected, I’ll have to sink to asking “Is is because I’m a woman?” … I really thought we were beyond that …

@TW, your initial post stated that you were ‘not convinced about the interpretation’, because people ‘use all the available information, including gender’. This is a ridiculous argument. The study was designed to test the specific hypothesis that gender would explain variation in how CVs were judged in terms of candidate competence. Therefore, the researchers controlled for other sources of variation (e.g. qualifications and so on), and only changed the gender. So the interpretation that gender explained a significant amount of variation in how these CVs were assessed is a totally justified and straightforward interpretation.

Further, it’s also strange to me that you disagree with this interpretation, then go on to make a chain of sexist and unjustifiable remarks, based on anecdote and your own personal biases – which brings in to question your own ability to make a judgement based on scientific data, as well as rather ironically supporting the researchers’ interpretation of their data, since you are openly admitting to exactly the kind of sexism that their research suggests is happening elsewhere.

Your comment that women should be treated as some kind of ‘risk’ factor because they are able to get pregnant is ridiculous. Yes, a woman might take time off work while they are pregnant, but then a person of any gender might need to take time off work for any number of reasons (illness, family bereavement etc.), and it is not the employer’s position to guess how likely these circumstances might be, nor do they have the necessary information to make any kind of reasonable guess.

I am a young female scientist who so far has shown a lot more scientific skill than many of my male cohort. I am also biologically unable to have children. Should I state this at the top of my CV to improve my job prospects??

@TW: It makes me sick to think that someone with dated and unscientific views like yours might be in a position to judge applicants for a science job, or any job for that matter.

I am not very surprised by this level of gender bias in science. It is completely ridiculous from the ethical point of view, while at the same time quite expected from the performance point of view. The employer takes into account the potential absence of the applicant due to pregnancy leave, and as a result favors males, or offers less salaries for females, or both. It’s a simple calculation of potential damage control. It is completely unfair to women, but then again business in general is never fair. It’s always about effective exploitation — a man can be exploited more effectively, since he does not get pregnant. Therefore prefer men when hiring. As simple as that.

Lucy (126):
“What if they don’t want a kid, ever? Ever met one of those? Do you think it’s fair to
not let them have the job, even if they’re more qualified?”

I wonder, what if the boss requires the applicant to sign a document that he/she will not ask for a paternity/maternity leave during the lifetime of the contract? How many women would agree to sign such a document in order to be treated equally as men? I am assuming that most men would have no problem signing such a document, if they really want the job.

Also, would such a thing be legal? Can an employer ask the applicant to give up their right to go on a maternity leave, in order to get the job? If the employer actually asks for such a document, would that eliminate the gender bias? Or would it just eliminate women who want to have an open option wrt. pregnancy?

Btw, regarding the legal treatment of pregnancy on the same footing as being sick — it is just ridiculous. Illness is something a person will always avoid if at all possible. Pregnancy is something that can be wanted and planned, several times over. I just cannot believe that pregnancy leave can be treated on the same footing as cancer-treatment leave, or such. US laws always keep amazing me with the level of nonsense in them.

I’d like to address my fellow female scientists who are commenting that they don’t intend to have children so they should not be discriminated against based on the pregnancy issue:

I appreciate the point that you are trying to make, but your comments make me a bit uncomfortable because at some level they validate the argument that a woman being pregnant/having a child makes her undesirable as a scientist. It seems clear to me that the “pregnancy catastrophe” is a specious argument attempting to put a veneer of logic/pragmatism on what is really just regular old sexism.

Does PNAS also include social sciences ??…I don’t understand why this shitty article was published in PNAS…..my physics paper which had original experimental observation for the first time was recommended for society level journal and here they are publishing this kind of crap…I can’t believe it….

Statistical Discrimination made the most interesting comment. This is a bit of conceit on my part, as I made almost the same comment when I heard about this study. Here’s a simple example of how this can happen using real facts.

The average IQ (or g factor) for men and women is equal, but men have significantly higher standard deviations. If you condition a sample from these two distributions conditional on some minimum intelligence, the resulting distributions will have men with higher intelligence on average.

In other words, the average male and female intelligence are equal, but the average intelligence of men with at least 120 IQ is higher than that of women with at least 120 IQ. If you assume that people applying to jobs in STEM are of above average intelligence, when you work out the math you actually get a correlation between gender and intelligence. This could be affecting people’s perceptions even subconsciously, given that our brains are designed to notice patterns and trends.

Of course, IQ is hardly a perfect measure of job performance, and so on. It would be interesting to look at reasonable measures of grad school success (i.e. number of papers published or sum of impact factors during PhD) and compare them between men and women in the same field, to see if people in academia have reasons to make a connection between gender and competence.

#134: “And as irresponsible as it is for people to claim that there is no gender bias, it is equally irresponsible (based on this data) to reduce the argument to this must be another case of the uterine-free oppressing the uterine-endowed. Discuss.”

Andrew, there is nothing to discuss. You apparently lack basic reading skills. The authors of the study wrote: “Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.” This has been pointed out several times in this comment thread. No one is interested in discussing your straw-man argument.

In my post, I said I was giving my personal experiences, as many others did. If you read what I wrote in the previous post, you will see that I don’t think men are better at math. The averages are pretty comparable and the average is the only thing that’s meaningful to talk about when you use the simple word “better”.

There are a lot of people out there though that still strongly believe that males display greater variance in intelligence (I would say it’s a majority, but I don’t know the field well enough. It might well be a majority however). It’s controversial and there are people who don’t agree, but believe me for every paper you find that claims the variance is the same I’ll find one that claims it’s larger.

A larger variance means that men are over-represented amongst people with high intelligence, as they are over-represented amongst people with low intelligence.

All this was already posted. You can disagree with my claims or reasoning, but to say I have no data when I bring up a very standard claim in the testing world for which dozens of studies have been performed and agree is ridiculous.

Nothing you do would justify discriminating against women. Justification has nothing to do with it because the people in the study are not (at least, as far as we know) doing it consciously. That’s the whole point; we want to try to figure out what and why that is, and ideally if practical eliminate it. But you can’t accuse someone of being immoral for having an unconscious bias, everyone has those. But someone who willfully displays a bias is acting immorally.

PS Just to give you an idea, a quick google search on “gender variance intelligence” yielded the following hit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886906000420. In the abstract, the over-representation of men in the upper extremes of intelligence is taken as a GIVEN. Then data is given supporting the reason for it is greater variance.

PPS I like how you use the word “inherent”. A difference between two groups of people can only be from two sources: their genetic code, or the collection of events that happened to them since conception. So really what you meant was “biological”. The nice thing about inherent is that it’s sloppier and more volatile.

I’m not buying this. Funding is tight, job market is tight, and people are vying for whatever edge they can get to land what they need to support themselves and their family. Because of these, everyone imagines some form of discrimination (including reverse discrimination) if they take a blow to their ego and don’t get what they were hoping for.

Equality is here and we’ve all seen it…sure we’ve seen isolated cases of discrimination and we’ve also seen cases be taken to court. Everyone has the opportunity at this point to apply, be considered, and even fight the outcome by legal means if they feel it is unjust.

This is an example of using a personal interest and common fear to try and gain an edge in the marketplace (in this case it is likely funding seeking or continuance of funding). This study is despicable and very hard to control for ambiguities and experimenter bias.

@Nir What name did I call you again? Yes, I have a job that must limit the time I spend being goaded by anonymous blog commenters, sorry about that. It doesn’t make me less of a scientist for not wanting to talk with you (personally) on this subject further.

@Corinne Moss-Racusin @Meowmeows

I think it’s an important study and I don’t doubt the results. I was merely suggesting that it was not an optimal representation. When axes cross, it looks like a “0″ point. When bars are used for plotting, it is natural to compare the lengths. These features could be improved upon.

I thought I was commenting on a less contentious topic than the gender issue itself, but apparently not!

BTW, “I am a researcher at Caltech” gives out an “argument from authority” vibe.

@Erin @Nir

Hilarious to see a domineering male shout down a woman, appealing to reason rather than emotion. You can come armed with all the facts in the world and be as loud, as confident and as right as you want, but at the end of the day, you’re still what you are. And with the indignation about her hiring practices… heaven forbid a better qualified white male ever get passed over for a job he deserves. In your ideal world of “fairness”, “equality of opportunity, not outcome” etc., women and minorities get the short end of the stick. Justify it however you want.

@Nir, you are not the first male scientist to point to the greater variance in male IQ as a convenient argument to excuse the gender bias in academia. I remember there was quite a raucous when MIT published an article with a similar argument. I just don’t find it satisfying, especially when IQ trends for men and women are not at all static.

For example, type in Men and Women IQ into Google, what are the first articles that you see? There titles follow something like this: “Women overtake men in IQ tests for the first time in 100 years…”

I went to the article that you sited:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women
And found the following quote:
“Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence: Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people. And men in every human population are taller than women. So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller. Our analysis of a large representative American sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health shows that this is indeed the case. In fact, once we control for height, women are slightly but significantly more intelligent than men. Further controlling for health, physical attractiveness, age, race, education, and earnings does not alter this conclusion. Height has exactly the same effect on intelligence for men and women: Each inch in height increases the IQ by about .4 point. The partial effect of height on intelligence is more than three times as strong as the partial effect of sex.”

Now, this is still talking about average and not variance, but I like the way it introduces a new factor to the equation and challenges previous findings of sex differences in IQ. Instead of discriminating against women, we should really be discriminating against short people (JOKE).

The results about higher variance in men’s IQ fit so snuggly in your preexisting bias that you immediately adopted it into your schema as the logical reason for why you’ve noticed better male mathematicians in your field. You yourself admitted that IQ might not be the best measurement of intelligence. Have you ever thought of how the biased society in which your women and men colleagues were raised might have caused their apparent differences in math ability in your observation?

I had a very interesting conversation with a UT Austin graduate student earlier this year about a study that showed the effect of self-bias in standardize testing. It went something like this: if asian students were able to check a “race” box at the beginning of the exam identifying themselves as asian, they were significantly more likely to perform better on math portions than other races. However, if asians were allowed to check their sex as well, the boost of being asian was negated by being a woman. I don’t know if this has published and a preliminary search has not turned out anything, but it has long been known that minorities self incorporate cultural biases to their own detriment. Could inner biases against women be present in your female colleagues, could these biases account for historically lower performance by women in STEM fields?

In this article: “Is the female of the species really more intelligent than the male?” I found some interesting quotes, please enjoy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9404856/Is-the-female-of-the-species-really-more-intelligent-than-the-male.html
“For years, the cause of the Flynn Effect (increasing IQ scores over the decades) was a mystery. One thing it could not be was genetic: the effect is happening too fast for any form of evolution to be occurring. In the end, it was Flynn himself who solved the mystery. The effect, he argued, is not due to innate changes in our brains, but to how they react to the sort of problems that define the modern world. In this sense IQ, or rather differences in IQ, may not be so much a measure of intelligence as of modernity…It is this that may give us a clue as to why women are not only catching up with men but, in some places, starting to overtake them. There may be something innate about the way women’s brains are put together (or the demands placed upon them) that allows them to cope with complexity and the need to systematise. As Prof Flynn said at the weekend: “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen, but women’s have risen faster. This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.””

Now, I’m not going to wield the results from these studies around like a piece of armor or safety net. I’m not going to cherry pick quotes or results from articles to support a claim that somehow women are more intelligent than men, or whether they are more likely to succeed in life. I’m not going to accept these results as never-changing facts. I’m not going to use these findings to excuse sexism. And I am not going to use these findings to influence my hiring practices or to deny anyone their fair chance at opportunity, when the day comes for me to be in the position to do so. Do I sometimes wish men like you will in your next life be subjected to the existence like that of the male angler fish, hyena, or jacana? Yes. But men like you are on the decline, and when you are gone, the world will be the better for it.

So to all men like Nir, please don’t be so smug with yourself. Don’t use one finding to justify your sexism. Women and men both have a lot to offer. When girls are raised in a society that encourages them to pursue science and math as much as it encourages boys, I can only imagine that you’ll find yourself among more capable, confident, and assertive colleagues.

PS. Gender bias in earnings is all across the board, not just for jobs in science that require people who have >120IQs. So, what’s your excuse for that? Sexism is more dangerous when it is subtle, so thank you, TW, and others for your candor, it exposes the mindset of people who might be in power to influence hiring decisions.

Anonymous, until people make the legal complaints that they should, labs and others will get away with asking those personal questions. But please remember–EVEN ASKING YOU THOSE QUESTIONS is ILLEGAL. If no women answered those questions, but instead redirected the interviewer, that would help. Every one of us needs to defend our rights or they will be eroded. Do not reward their illegal acts by answering!

This is from employment.findlaw.com:

llegal Interview Questions to Avoid

It’s not that women have an unfair advantage over men during the interview process, yet some federal and state laws prohibit prospective employers from asking certain questions that primarily relate to women.

Examples of questions that may discriminate include:

Do you have any children? If so, how many and what are their ages?
Are you single, married, divorced, or engaged?
What kind of childcare arrangements do you have in place?
Are you currently taking any form of birth control or fertility treatment?
What are your plans if you get pregnant?
Does your spouse work? If so, what does your spouse do for a living?
Should we refer to you as Mr., Miss, or Mrs.?

and here is an appropriate response, from Dummies.com/how-to/answering-job-interview-questions-about-family:

When cornered, try this tactic to assure you won’t become a staffing problem down the line:

Whether or not I plan to have children in the future is not central to my career. Like so many other energetic women today, I intend to work and have a career no matter what happens in my personal life.

Next level of analysis would be revealing. To what extent do the differences in competence, mentoring etc. account for the differences in salary recommendations? Or, do the differences in compensation exceed that which would be predicted by the differences in perceived competence etc.?

Omg it’s hilarious to see all the men defending men on this by coming up with some dumb, petty excuse.

this is a study that proves it yet they’re still not willing to believe it exists. this is some sad, sad stuff.

As a supplement, they note that “of participants, 74% were male and 81% were White.”
And everyone seems unanimous to maintain the equilibrium!

@ TW,

If women are getting lower ratings for the exact same resume in a workplace, is it really that much of a jump to think that maybe they are also getting lower ratings for equally good school work? I have known plenty of girls in college who completed assignments/ take home exams with a male friend, and received a substantially lower grade on the assignment/ exam than male friend, despite having turned in identical work.
Before you decide that two candidates of the opposite sex have the same grades and therefore the man is the better choice, maybe you should think about the possibility that the woman was already having to perform better just to receive equal grades.

you didn’t “clarify it out” for anyone, you just assumed I was attacking you and made an ass of yourself by making a stereotypical trolling comment. I also don’t think your a man. I think you’re just claiming to be a man to try and make a point. I’m sorry you feel that every attempt at coexistence and equivalence of the sexes is an attack on you. My point IS that it’s about how people like you and men like those you specified, do pick on each other like whiny and pathetic brats instead of making logical points so that something can be accomplished in a discussion. Your previous comment, and this one, are simply spam due to their pointless and snarky nature. Like those men you spoke about, you are an inverse extreme on the spectrum of dumb and petty excuses.

@ David

If you are running a business and haven’t considered, before starting the business, what would happen if you actually employ both men and women–I hope the rest of your business plan was more carefully thought out. Because I think eliminating half of your potential employee pool at the start would be rather short sighted.

Maternity costs to you might occur. So might prostate cancer costs. So might granting leave to a male employee who chooses to stay home with a baby. So might granting leave to a male employee whose father has a stroke and needs 24 hour care.

I would hope that, for your customers’ sake, you have installed bathrooms for both sexes. Although I don’t see why men and women can’t each clean up after themselves and have a unisex restroom. I don’t know the legal requirements on that.

The truth is, rightly or wrongly, that if you are considering the person’s sex when you don’t hire a female employee…you are breaking the law. If you are considering the person’s sex when you do hire a female employee, but offer her less than her male counterpart…you are breaking the law. I surely hope that you are not describing your own business practices re: hiring women with your “just drop the price down” comment.

This is the 21st century. Women can own property and vote, too. I’m curious to know what “your” business is, that you think is so complicated women might not be able to handle. In my immediate family, women have been stage managers, union welders, rock climbing instructors, union carpenters, professional landscapers (both design and planting), heavy equipment operators, and plumbers. Oh yeah, and in several instances–the boss.

See my comments on the same topic at http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/09/23/bias-against-women-persists-in-science/

@Meh:

Wow, way to throw away any credibility you might have had.

@David:

“Basically I see this is an opportunity for women. From a small business point of view if i can hire a woman that can do the same as a man i would – generally speaking (abit more complex in my business). Therefore you’d expect that women would have more chance of getting the position initially. The rest is up to that individual. ”

This assumes that human beings are rational economic actors. Behavioral economists have demonstrated time and time again that this is simply not the case. Ever hear the phrase “No Irish need apply?” Why were employers intentionally forgoing the most inexpensive labor in favor of WASPS back in the 1800′s? Because human beings do not make economically optimal choices.

In what ways are humans irrational? Well, they discriminate on the basis of variables that are poor predictors of competence and productivity. Read the thread for examples — TW and Papovich are striking ones.

@ Meh

Wow, man. Just because I believe in an equal and non-biased job playing field it automatically makes me a woman? That’s not really how gender or sex works at all, and I am completely positive that I am in fact, male.

No, I support it because I’m tired of under-qualified coworkers who don’t know a thing about what they’re doing that could have been replace with a more profitable worker. Also, I didn’t think I would have to remind you that this is MY opinion. You calling me an asshole, a troll, and a “whiny brat” or whatever just for not agreeing with you is insanely childish. I wasn’t trying to attack you in my previous comment. I was only trying to clear things up and you took it the wrong way, I understand.

But to insult my beliefs is just being rude. I’m sorry if you don’t support equality through gender. You don’t have to.
I picked at men because I looked and saw that male names were the majority of the comments making excuses, it was the logical thing for me to observe at the time.

I am also not going to go back and forth with this either; there isn’t really a point to it. This is the last comment I’m making just for the sole purpose of standing up for myself and my values.

In my experience in the US, women in science leaving on maternity leave are gone for a max of 2 months, more usually 4-6 weeks, so really not a big deal. So at least in the US, this is a non-issue, even for a limited term postdoctoral appointment.

I suggest that women who decide not to return to work immediately and TW’s women over 35 who are “moaning” about workplace discrimination may both have recognized that they’re not getting anywhere because of sexist evaluation of their skill, their competence, their ambition, and their leadership. Speaking of leadership, this is for whoever said men were naturally seen as better leaders:

“Research shows that incongruities between perceptions of female gender roles and leadership roles cause evaluators to assume that women will be less competent leaders. When women leaders provide clear evidence of their competence, thus violating traditional gender norms, evaluators perceive them to be less likeable and are less likely to recommend them for hiring or promotion (Eagly and Karau; Ridgeway; Heilman et al.).”

This is from the brochure mentioned above about bias,
http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/BiasBrochure_2ndEd.pdf

A friend commented, “It’s just not a discussion of a study that proves sexism exists without a bunch of men denying it.”

@Drake

If you want evidence about equality of math skills, look on my blog post (http://mickteaching.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/women-in-science/). That post has a link to a review about stereotype threat – this result is highly repeatable: women and men do equally well at mathematical tests, until the participants are told women do worse. Then the women do in fact do worse. Substitute any group that has a tradition of being unfairly discriminated against, and you get the same result.

As I understand, there might be some gender-based reason for the extreme tail of exceptionally high performance in mathematics. But it is hard to disentangle that very slim tail from questions of opportunity. Such studies are necessarily correlative, so they have limited explanatory power.

The study that on which the initial blog post was based is fully experimental, as are the studies on stereotype threat. They also produce repeatable results.

@Julia

I don’t think discussing the topic will reduce bias among those who consciously believe that women perform worse the men. However, there are plenty of people with unconscious gender bias. Making those people aware that unconscious gender bias exists should help (and the evidence suggests it does).

Moss-Racusin, et al. (2012) erroneously interpret the failure of the subjects of their study to commit the base-rate fallacy (ignore background information) as sexism. That the applications were designed to reflect ‘slightly ambiguous competence’ makes the background information (the sex of the applicant) all the more important, and exacerbates the authors’ error. The sex of the applicant contains important information, there are significant sex differences, actually dichotomies, in terms of motivation. In order to attract a high value mate, men have to compete with other men for their rank in the male dominance hierarchy and this translates directly into men contesting each other for positions within organisations. There is no parallel for women. The article by Moss-Racusin, et al. is ill-motivated (in reality, there is no intersexual competition), wrong (the authors commit the base-rate fallacy) and sexist (the authors implicitly deny sex differences).

@Drake

Michael answered your question, but

“It seems you want to claim that this vast difference is exactly accounted for by vast amounts of discrimination, social gender pressure, etc etc, that exactly balance things out.”

You don’t know what I want to claim, so you just go straight to the extreme opposite of your beliefs as a straw man argument. You are 1. completely wrong about the existence of a vast difference between men and women’s mathematical abilities, and 2. already confident in your beliefs about women. No data will convince you of anything different.

Also @Martin Sewell Is the idea that women should be paid less when they have the same qualifications for the same job, because they are less motivated, from an evolutionary perspective, because they don’t need to compete to find a mate ? That’s pretty funny. The world, and people, are more complicated than that. Modern hiring laws are definitely more complicated than that.

This seems a good place to bring up my old chestnut. Why are there so few famous female rock musicians who are not singers, not part of something marketed as a girl group and not romantically involved with someone else in the band? Can you even think of one (keep the “famous” criterion in mind)? Not that there is anything wrong with these, but most male rock musicians are not singers, not part of a boy group and not romantically involved with someone else in the band.

Consider that in other fields of music, there are often even more women than men.

There are gender inequalities in many fields: nursing, chess playing, three-Michelin-star chefs, garbage collectors, lorry drivers, models, highly paid porn participants. Is there an individual, field-specific explanation in each case, a common explanation, or some combination?

Because of PC the idea that women are not as good at sciences is never tested or entertained. Some things women are better at than men and that’s accepted yet the opposite is shunned. Gender bias studies are biased.

@Drake I wonder why you point to those statistics and make unwarranted conclusions about women’s innate biology/cognitive ability vs environmental factors working against women in those fields? I’d love to know if you your believes could be wavered in the face of studies like the ones Michael posted. For example, look at Fig 9 and 11 showing increasing representation of women in STEM fields. Do you think these trends are due to women becoming innately smarter at math and physics?

An example of how environment and upbringing can affect outcomes, how do you think gender-biased teachers would unconsciously treat boy vs girl students, and how that might affect the career they choose later in life, if this study’s findings are true?:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform

I agree with Sean in the comments. Optimistically, I guess it’s a good thing that the deniers (yup, I am making a parallel to the climate change debate) have now moved onto the “it is happening, but it isn’t a problem” phase.

Someone mentioned this in the middle of the discussion; I also thought about the possibility that women were less likely to give higher pay because they themselves were paid less, but if you look at the study, table 1, you will see they would pay the male applicant about the same (a little bit less, not significantly different) as their male colleagues would. Apparently if I’m reading the table correctly, what they would pay the female applicant is not statistically significantly different from what the men would pay her, which is contrary to some of the reporting I read, but that’s a minor point.

And re pregnancy. I think paternity leave of the same length as maternity leave is a good idea. Yes, it might make employers discriminate against parents, but there are not really that many people who go their entire lives without starting families (although I’d hypothesize more in academia than elsewhere). While it’s illegal to let this affect hiring decisions in pretty much every western country I’m certain that it still does. It’s really the low-hanging fruit to solving this problem, since it’s so easy. The economic impact is nothing to worry about. Plenty of countries already do it and employment has been generally unaffected (productivity and gdp might be slightly lower, but they are just relative numbers really).

Men might still choose to take less paternity leave, but I think as a society we’re growing much less tolerant of absent fathers. It will just take a long while for something like this to really shake out.

BTW I hear in Finland they’ve managed to create a system where you can take up to one year of parental leave. Even CEO’s of large companies do it. Strangely, their economy hasn’t melted down yet. Just saying.

” academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. ” Can nobody see that this article is a hoax? That’s like saying “All white people are racist.” It’s a tip off that this should NOT be taken seriously. If anybody reads something about people like them “being held down,” their natural instinct is going to be outrage and playing the victim. This article is just playing on that, with terms like “heir-ability.” There is more to that then grades, there are things like work experience, schedules, and adeptness for the particular position. Saying all the applicants were identical you KNOW is non-sense. Do you know what the odds are of having two people with the same intelligence, physical capability, experiences, and scheduling are? This article was meant to put panties in a bunch and nothing more. Also look how close the numbers ACTUALLY are, they used a bar graph simply to make the difference look more drastic, the test group they got simply had more qualified males than females, so they exaggerate it but putting a big space on the graph and crying sexism. It’s like rolling the dice 3 times and saying odd numbers are less common because two of the times it was even.

what you mean people do not produce results which are calculated in the same way a computer might!? shock horror!! the writer of this article seems to be unaware that the human brain uses heuristics to produce outcomes – ie to simplify what is a reasonably complex task of decision-making into a less complex task using some rough past experience. is it perfect? hell no! should we expect it to be? hell no! would we be better off letting a completely fair computer decide? well i’d like to see a study done on that

but to illustrate my point, consider an example: a person (male or female) has been burned in a relationship with a blonde who had a playful yet occasionally savage personality in the past. this person makes a new acquaintance – a blonde with a playful personality. they hit it off and the blonde asks the person out on a date. despite the fact that the person has no reason to suspect that the blonde might be occasionally savage, the person is fearful of this and decides not to accept the offer.

now, supposing the blonde did not infact have any traces of savageness in their personality, was this decision fair? of course not. however, the person made the best decision they knew how, given the available information.

it is not possible to get an honest answer if you ask somebody. “are you a vengeful person?”, just as its not possible to get an honest answer if you ask a future employee “are you a hard worker?”, or “are you smart?”, or “are you planning on getting pregnant in the next couple of years?”

i would say that the differences in pay reflect the employer’s past experience which has been projected onto their future expectations. this may not be fair, but no human is completely fair.

Evolution has Created Gender Bias in Modern Society

Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago. The transition to behavioral modernity with the development of symbolic culture, language, and specialized lithic technology happened around 50,000 years ago according to many although some suggest a gradual change in behavior over a longer time span.

It has been assumed that the human race is thousands of years old and probably tens of thousands by some scientist. DNA says about 50,000 years, with humans not related to anything else─ no macro-evolution. The Bible would say about 50,000 years also when the gaps in the genealogies are filled in.

For thousands of years primitive man possessed little knowledge except that which was necessary for bare existence. He killed whatever animals he was able to, and ate the fruits, nuts, and berries that grew wild. Humans have existed for thousands of years but were just very primitive. They had simple tools, and perhaps a very primitive sort of communication… like pointing and grunting.

Gender bias in survival mode or bare existence with primitive communications either did not exist… or if it did exist, it wasn’t communicated or even recognized.

Technologically, we have evolved in the last 100 years the most. In that time we have seen jet passenger planes, automobiles, indoor plumbing for the masses, electricity as a common utility, and color TV, computers, and on and on.

As the modern life evolved and women joined the work force to supplement family income or to support the single parent family unit… the competition for jobs and business became more profound and so did the incidence and awareness about gender inequalities. What were feminist groups and women doing for all of the thousands of years up until then? Why did it take so long? Were women just unaware or unconscious or what?

The social advocacy on gender equality from the feminist movements and GAD programs remained far from reality to reduce gender bias. It holds that there is now the liberation of women as their human rights and freedom is now equal to all men. In the contemporary time, the gender equality is at the pinnacle of success in the human liberation of women. I believe they have done so much to change the gender culture awareness in the western societies. These have been the result of the gender success in developed countries:

• The high incidence of divorce and single mother because of the “fucking shit” father whose main interest is on masculinity, dominance and most of all the sexual drive for beautiful women.

• The women kept on dating compassionate and good men as future partner. These are the genuine partners you can find for family now in developed countries.

• The rise of feminist movement to sustain the fight against the gender discrimination including the responsibility of UN in the advocacy of “Gender and Development”

However, the sexual drive of men in developed countries remains active based on this “age of commercialism” as the object of demand in economics:

• The commercial products on whisky, scotch, beer, and red wine with theme of highly desirable for the physiologic response may find advertiser to use the sexy and beautiful women.

• The commercial bar provides women in action as GRO and prostitutes. It also includes the use of magazines and pornographic materials where in the women are exposed in degrading sexual object just to meet the sexual drive of men.

• Women rights are fighting on all the social fronts of gender bias; gay rights, lesbian rights, rights of abortion, and all other rights just to break the gender bias.

• The breakdown of family is culturally imminent once the women’s rights movement gathers momentum to disrupt the highly societal structure.

The bottom line is…

Gender bias against women has existed, in one form or the other, for thousands of years. Evolution and technology advancements, including global communications, have created gender bias to become more visible and thus debated in our modern society.

However, gender bias is not going away soon; as long as procreation is at the core of survival and continuous evolution of the human species… whatever miserable consequences might happen to the female gender.

Anant B. Goel

Producer CEO RKNet Studios

Based on and excerpts from media articles, blog articles, and sponsored research articles.

Modern qualifications don’t discriminate for ability, you can get a 1st class degree with 70% or 99%. Females have achieved equal scientific qualifications with males mostly because the higher ability class has been so dumbed down that the average attainment between males/females looks the same.

Can the females please discover some great things, like the males do, in proportion to their numbers in the science establishments?

No.

I’ll give you one of the (mostly unconscious) reasons a successful woman scientist/engineer/any-women-underrepresented-professional might rate an unproven entry-level type woman lower than an entry-level man or offer them a lower salary. In general, the successful woman doing the evaluating has always had to fight the initial impression that she might not be qualified. She’s always had to prove herself. She’s always had to be better then the men at the table. Everyone is just starting to truly accept that women CAN be good at $profession, and not be surprised about it. It does no harm to her position – to the “image” of women in her profession – if the male candidate turns out to be lousy or just mediocre. But if the woman candidate is hired and turns out to be mediocre? Geez, we’ve spent years trying to prove women can be darn good in $profession! All we need is some mediocre or lousy woman dragging down the stats, hurting the overall image of women in $profession. Successful women in $profession will only want new entry-level women in $profession if they are confident they are not going to lower the average perceived performance of women in that profession. I think one reason the evaluating women only partly consciously rate women lower is this “risk” to themselves and women in their profession. They also offer lower salaries to “hedge their bets”, giving the women a chance, but not saying they are in their class of “successful in that profession” women.
I have not gotten a chance to look at the “application materials” the study used, if they are available. It sounded like the materials portrayed the applicant as good/mediocre. Here’s a study I would like to see: try the same double-blind thing with changing only the name to appear male or female. But repeat it with 3 levels of resumes/materials – one mediocre at best, one a bit above average, and one documented superstar. I would be very interested to see if the “risk factor” I talk about above – the risk to themselves of lowering the image of women in the profession bears out. Would the rating women rate a female applicant with a rock-star proven track record lower, the same way that happened in the original study? My gut feeling is they would not, but I might be proven wrong. I think they would rate a “sure thing” woman higher than an equally qualified male, but a “so-so” applicant as lower than an equally qualified male.

@ TW As a woman who almost never needed to study for most of her chemical engineering exams throughout college, still got a high GPA, and also regularly picks up skills in industry with more speed than the average person to this day, I think the problem with your analysis is you. Any person male or female is likely going to have to work much harder than you to understand things if what you say is true. Have you really not noticed the same thing with men? I doubt it – they’re probably just less likely to admit it! (or you’re more likely to project the image of working hard on the woman than you are on the man)

I could actually look at my experiences and conclude the same thing about men. The male valedictorian in my high school class was known for his intense dedication to studying from late afternoon to the wee hours of the morning – I, only a few ranks below with a few people with similar reputations above me, had quite the opposite reputation. Clearly his inferior male mind is why he had to work so hard compared to me!

See the problem with that logic?

I brag only because you do, whether you know it or not, by the way. I have a feeling that you are sharing this tidbit because of some intense desire to go on an ego trip about how much better you are/were than that clearly intellectually modest, hardworking woman – as somebody who never had to study for exams I am usually quite jealous of the amazing determination people like that have developed. Are you as well?

@Drake

Perhaps it’s because women have always incorrectly been told that they can’t do science and therefore there haven’t been *nearly* as many women in those fields as there have been men over the lifespan of those awards? You’d think your superior brain would be able to deduce that as a very clearly obvious reason for not many women having received those awards.

Oh, and…here you go: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=anything-boys-can-do (not a direct cite but it’ll lead you to all the facts you clearly need)

I always have to wonder why men are so afraid of women being able to do science. Isn’t more people joining the science party a good thing?

To the person asking women to make significant contributions to science – Ada Lovelace: programming? Marie Curie: radiation? Jane Goodall: chimpanzees? Mary Cartwright: nonlinear differential equations? Just to name a few famous examples. All of these women would’ve done their studies in a time that was significantly more negative about women studying math and science and they seem to have done just fine.

And Re: maternity leave – in the US, federal requirements for paternity leave time are already the exact same as federal requirements for maternity leave time. Look it up. A lot of states are riding that equality train as well when they require or provide paid family time.

Well, I work in the technical nosebleeds with computer geeks, and I’m a girl. I must be a freak, yeah? Look — all the discouragement and slights I encountered (the many put-downs, the harassment, slurs, and firing-offenses) did nothing. Don’t expect pity, and don’t expect that a lot of guys are going to understand, or give a crap. A lot of guys are set in their ways. Don’t bother. Just stick to the ones who are jazzed you’re there. They’ll help you through the crappy days. Do know that if a girl wants it, she can do it. Everything anyone else says to you is nothing compared to what you say to yourself, and what you choose to believe.

If you are going to claim women aren’t as good as men at some things you are going to have to cite some studies.

Even if gender bias exists everywhere in society we should still try to work against it wherever it may be found.
I did not see anyone suggesting that we should try to force the issue with some draconian measure but the first step to solving a problem is to understand it and the factors that influence it. That is why discussion about gender bias in science is important.

I’m sure an ethnicity control study would have results even more sensational.

Have a read on implicit bias: http://www.ncsc.org/IBFAQs
It’s the reason why subtle institutional discrimination such as that which this article suggests is here to stay for our lifespans at minimum.

People tend to follow their nature. They pay others what they’ve been conditioned to think they’re worth. This is why if you come from a marginalized social group ownership, not employment, must be the collective goal so you can hopefully come together and finance in-group organized social infrastructure. It’s the only way things will become fair. Out-group members will never care enough to genuinely defend another group’s social interests because economics run according to primarily selfish incentives.