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Women Twice as Likely to be Hired for Academic STEM Posts as Men

posted by CoolHand on Monday April 20 2015, @11:49PM   
from the gender-equality dept.

Bill Dimm writes:

A Chemistry World article summarizes a study by Cornell University psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci finding that faculty members asked to evaluate hypothetical male and female applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology gave preference to female applicants. Quoting the study:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers.

The article concludes:

To be hired, women must first apply and the authors question whether ‘omniprescent and discouraging’ messages about sexism in academic appointments makes them reluctant to do so.

• Re:That makes sense Re:That makes sense (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @10:10AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @10:10AM (#173465)

  My favorite was the one who taught a 300-level course who could never consistently decide if you started an array at 0 or at 1.

  An array starts best at whereever it makes semantically sense for it to start. Of course, many people are brain-damaged by the arrays in C which are basically glorified pointer arithmetics. Indeed, already the idea that the array index has to be a number instead of an arbitrary enumeration is only caused by certain languages (well, programmers who know nothing but C and languages written by people who learned programming with C probably now wonder what's the fundamental difference between an enumerated type and an integer …)

  If you are worried about efficiency of non-zero based arrays, just buy a computer that is less than two decades old. Unless you happen to program heavy numerics, adding a constant in the machine code absolutely doesn't matter.

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• Re:That makes sense (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 21 2015, @02:54PM

  by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @02:54PM (#173535)

  I could except that if it weren't for the fact that it arbitrarily happened throughout the same example, and was always happening with abstract stuff, not things like datetimes or things where having a nonzero index might make sense.

  for (i=0; iarray.length(); i++)
  {
            for (j=1; j=otherArray.length(); j++)
            {
              ...
              }
  }
  for (i=0; i=thisWontEndWell.length(); i++)
  {

  Crap like that. Confused the hell out of me the entire class.

  --
  Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!

  Parent