Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men
نویسندگان
چکیده
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.
منابع مشابه
Are We There Yet? Biases in Hiring Women Faculty Candidates.
T here's quite a debate in the popular press right now on the topic of how women are faring in the academic STEM fields. On one hand, we have a Nobel Laureate unapologetically calling for single sex laboratories 1 because " girls " distract male scientists, and on the other hand, we have a group of human ecology researchers claiming a significant hiring preference for women over men in STEM fac...
متن کاملNational hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track.
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia. In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assi...
متن کاملRetention and promotion of women and underrepresented minority faculty in science and engineering at four large land grant institutions
RESULTS BY GENDER In the most recent cohort, 2002-2015, the experiences of men and women differed substantially among STEM disciplines. Female assistant professors were more likely than men to leave the institution and to leave without tenure in engineering, but not in the agricultural, biological and biomedical sciences and natural resources or physical and mathematical sciences. In contrast, ...
متن کاملThe Economics of Gender Differences in Employment Outcomes in Academia*
This paper summarizes research that examines the relationship between hiring, promotion, and salary for tenure track science and social science faculty using data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR). Gender differences in hiring and promotion can be explained by observable characteristics. However, gender differences in salaries persist at the full professor rank. In particular, women...
متن کاملThe Gender Equity Report
www.upenn.edu/almanac ALMANAC SUPPLEMENT DECEMBER 4, 2001 www.upenn.edu/almanac I The Gender Equity Committee was established in June, 2000, by Provost Robert Barchi and Faculty Senate Chair Larry Gross at the recommendation of the University Council Steering Committee. The charge was to undertake a systematic review of the status of women faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Four subcomm...
متن کامل