Women, men and mathematics

[finneco]

Oh boy.You may recall, back in 2005, some controversial statements from Harvard's President Laurence Summers on the issue of the underrepresentation of women among the faculty of hard science and mathematics departments in top tier research and higher education institutions. Most of the responses to this event were underinformed on the current

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[finneco]

Not specifically, no. They did pull out research that emphasised how the same actions of infants, children and adults are interpreted to have different value depending on the assumed gender. Spelke I think did the research on showing people (maybe specifically parents) a video of an infant playing and being surprised by a jack-in-the-box, and then asking them to interprete the child's expression. When the child was given the name David, respondents said that "David's face was angry", while the others thought that "Jane's face was fearful".

The study that hits the academic arena specifically had professors consider two CV for potential hiring into faculty position. One CV was a gold star obvious shoe in candidate, while the other was pretty good but not amazing. Different groups got different gendered names at the top and here is how it went (to quote Prof. Spekle):

"People were asked a series of questions: What do you think about this candidate's research productivity? What do you think about his or her teaching experience? And finally, Would you hire this candidate at your university?

"For the walk-on-water candidate, there was no effect of gender labeling on these judgments. I think this finding supports Steve's view that we're dealing with little overt discrimination at universities. It's not as if professors see a female name on a vita and think, I don't want her. When the vita's great, everybody says great, let's hire.

"What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve's and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, "good productivity" when the name was male, and "less good productivity" when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not."

What shocks me about this result is that people have trouble admiting this kind of pattern. When a decision isn't obvious on any issue, tiny little prejudices have a huge impact on nudging between one result or another - that is not just chaos theory, it's common sense. What sucks is that it may be difference between my being happily employed by an institution or not.

[finneco]

Not that I normally read or refer to it, but the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review has a pertinent short article on page M17. There are probably copies hanging around campus somewhere, the geeks like to read it.

[w1ldc47]

I heard about that. I think Sinead talked about it on the most recent Science Dude. Also, there's data to show that when authors' names are withheld from reviewers, the frequency of women getting published automagically goes up to representative levels.