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posted by janrinok on Friday October 23 2015, @10:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the wot,-no-bias? dept.

This headline "Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men" over at Frontiers caught my eye this morning. After an admittedly quick read (look, I'm busy, do you want a non-paypal cc processor or not?), I decided it was at least worth a sub. Here's the paper's summary:

Audits of tenure-track hiring reveal faculty prefer to hire female applicants over males. However, audit data do not control for applicant quality, allowing some to argue women are hired at higher rates because they are more qualified. To test this, Williams and Ceci (2015) conducted an experiment demonstrating a preference for hiring women over identically-qualified men. While their findings are consistent with audits, they raise the specter that faculty may prefer women over even more-qualified men, a claim made recently. We evaluated this claim in the present study: 158 faculty ranked two men and one woman for a tenure-track-assistant professorship, and 94 faculty ranked two women and one man. In the former condition, the female applicant was slightly weaker than her two male competitors, although still strong; in the other condition the male applicant was slightly weaker than his two female competitors, although still strong. Faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the more-qualified men over the slightly-less-qualified women, and they also preferred the stronger women over the slightly-less-qualified man. This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males.

You may now commence flaming without having RTFA.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @02:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @02:21AM (#253877)

    The current male dominated academic system has been driven to shambles over the last 60 years or so. Build a competitor, do not jump onto a sinking ship. Women just need to get enough funding together to start trying to replicate the establishment results and reveal the truth. Humanity needs something like that to get away from the descent into pseudoscience. Maybe google, etc can do it, but I doubt profit motive will work out much better than the current hybrid.