Today is
Ada Lovelace Day, where writers across the blogosphere celebrate women in the
STEM fields. For the uninitiated,
Ada Lovelace is the world's first computer programmer. (She literally wrote the first algorithm intended to be used on Charles Babbage's
analytical engine.)
On Ada Lovelace day, bloggers generally write about a woman in the field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. It's relevant because even today, in 2012, we have far, far too few female STEM professionals. I'm not sure if the reason has anything to do with people thinking women can't succeed as well in these fields, but if so, it makes sense to celebrate feminist scientists on at least one day each year. And today is that day.
However, I wanted to do something a little different this year. Instead of telling the story of someone significant in one of these fields today, I'd like to share the results of a study that was published only a few short months ago:
Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by
Corinne A. Moss-Racusin,
John F. Dovidio,
Victoria L. Brescoll,
Mark J. Graham, and
Jo Handelsman).
This study is perhaps the most depressing study on sexism in science academia I have ever read. It is so distressing that upon first encountering it, I thought that it was surely wrong, and that a quick glance through their methodology would show why their findings were wrong. But, after careful consideration, I have to admit that this study is completely legit. I couldn't find even a single flaw in their approach.
As
Scientific American reports, this study has conclusively proven that significant gender bias exists in science academia. They used a double-blind randomized controlled experiment -- and when I say, controlled, I mean
controlled. They even made sure that the names used (John & Jennifer) were pretested as equivalent in likeability and recognizability. They covered every conceivable base. And the results are horrifying.
They created a single fake resume/application that was good enough to warrant a hire, but not so good as to necessitate it (as established in a prestudy). They then sent this application to 127 science faculty as though it were real. (After the study was done, they went back and asked these people if they suspected it was fake; none did.) The 127 faculty chosen had demographics corresponding to both the averages for the selected departments and faculty at all United States research-intensive institutions, meeting the criteria for generalizability even from nonrandom samples. Not only was their sample representative of the underlying population, but they specifically chose 127 as the optimal sample size needed to detect effects without biasing results toward obtaining significance.
These 127 science faculty judged the applications on competence, hireability, and whether they would offer to mentor the applicant. Males were significantly preferred over females on all metrics. Furthermore, the faculty were asked to estimate what salary would be appropriate for the successful applicant. Males were offered far higher salaries.
The sexism in today's science academia is
real. While this doesn't mean that science faculty are overtly sexist, nor even consciously sexist, there is a distinct significant privilege that exists for male newcomers to science academia.
So today, on Ada Lovelace Day, when you read stories of female success stories in science across the web, realize just how hard it was for those standouts to achieve what they did. Even in today's world, being female in science is
tough.
EDIT: After writing this article, commenters pointed out problems with the graphs used. In particular,
satt pointed out that the use of
dynamite plots here is possibly misleading, and unnecessarily obfuscates the actual data points at best.
Unfortunately, the charts were taken directly from the
original paper, and so I do not have access to the actual data needed to create better plots for this article review. I have e-mailed the lead author, Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, to see if they have any violin plots with better axes that they could use to alleviate these concerns.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
