How do MRAs explain this study revealing gender bias against women in STEM?

-redditardation- · 2017-03-15T04:01:48+00:00

Let's try this with a 50 year old man applying for a job at child daycare and see if the effect isn't the same.

Also lets actually do a real test where people have to pay money not offer imaginative bucks. Real money has a tendency of making people frugal.

feedmecarrots · 2017-03-15T04:43:54+00:00

I thought that, in the real world, Jennifer has twice as much chance at landing a job in STEM fields as her male competitor.

ralphswanson · 2017-03-15T05:20:23+00:00

This study has a small sample size of 'over a hundred' and it is not stated if the $4k is even statistically significant. In a much bigger study of 873, Women were preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions. Literally thousands of professional feminists are trying to prove that women are disadvantaged, because their job and even career depends upon it. Regardless, actual evidence that women are disadvantaged in hiring is very weak at best.

oscarmeyeir · 2017-03-15T04:23:21+00:00

"The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student."

That quote from comes from the study itself. It's an interesting study and may show a bigger issue that we need to work on as a society but MRA aren't against equality of the genders.

William__F0ster · 2017-03-15T04:24:12+00:00

If someone brought up this point in a discussion about the gender pay gap (and the MRA is arguing that the pay gap is justified or nonexistent), how would the MRA respond?

I'm not sure what your purpose is here, but I feel you have take a misstep here from the outset in assuming this is an issue that is only relevant to MRAs.

Putting the whole MRA/Feminist antagonism aside for one moment, look at this from a research point of view and ask yourself this:

Have these findings been replicated elsewhere? By whom, when, where etc.?
Are the conclusions drawn the consensus view in the field / relevant fields or are they limited to a handful of papers (or just this one paper)?
How generalisable are the conclusions from that study to work in fields other than STEM?
What were the limitations of that research and what further research is needed?

These ought to be questions that anyone would ask, anyone would query and it should have nothing whatever to do with whether someone is or is not a feminist, is or is not an MRA, is or is not either one of those two.

As well as what I've just said above, if I were in conversation with someone about this I would not be inclined to go off half-cocked but to find out more from that person why they think it's relevant to a discussion on the wage gap. I mean, it's one paper - a paper whose findings contradict those of others (see '[National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track]'(http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract) for instance) - and even if its findings were true it relates to one very specific set of occupations.

dejour · 2017-03-15T04:50:14+00:00

Well, personally I'm willing to believe that there is a 2 or 3 % bias in the wage gap. And for a particularly "male" field like STEM, maybe it's larger. Say 5%.

I think that both men and women have advantages and disadvantages in life. Just because I'm an MRA doesn't mean I think that women have no disadvantages.

About this particular study? I wouldn't put great weight on it. Maybe John is seen as a smart name and Jennifer as a dumb name. Would the results have been different if it was Justin and Bernadette? What if they were Wei and Jing?

What were the details of the resume? I remember a study comparing African American names and white names on resumes and they found that when the resumes were excellent African Americans got more responses. And when they were poor African Americans got more responses. However, when they were average, white names did better. The authors noted that that was probably the most important part of the bell curve, so probably white names would do better overall. But if they only sent out an average resume, it would have exaggerated the amount of bias measured.

Publication bias is an issue too. We hear about studies like this that produce numbers like 13%. But when someone does a study that produces no difference, they don't find it noteworthy to publish.

MattLyte · 2017-03-15T08:28:41+00:00

How many times has it been independently verified?

DavidByron2 · 2017-03-15T18:56:02+00:00

http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

There was a long exchange I had once where we went back and forth over a number of experiments like this one. Many show men are treated worse instead of women. Some say it depends on what job you are applying for. Maybe it's just a bad experiment. At any rate these results just are not good science.

TibsKirk · 2017-03-15T04:22:32+00:00

At best this study documented unconscious biases on the part of search committees, not systemic discrimination. They have to spin it multiple times to try to make the point about systemic discrimination on the part of search committees. Still, that stuff means something, if true.

I would like to see a similar study surrounding race to see how a white male candidate fares in liberal arts compared to a black woman with a similar resume. There is enough of this stuff to go around. What, in the end, does it really prove? And how?

orangorilla · 2017-03-15T10:13:55+00:00

and the MRA is arguing that the pay gap is justified or nonexistent

Not quite true. I often argue that the plain numbers are not due to sexism.

I think you conflate opposing the "women get 77 cents per dollar for equal work" and opposing the "sexism exists, and can influence wages."

Most of what I oppose is the lies about the scope.

coyotecall · 2017-03-15T04:00:46+00:00

The article is pretty vague as to the actual results and means of the study. John and Jennifer's resume were never showed to the same institution. Were the institutions Jennifer applied to paying less on average than the other institutions. Tough to say that this is a meaningful conclusion.

IvanDagomilov · 2017-03-15T04:16:20+00:00

After two whole years of being lied to, study after BS study, poll after BS poll, you still haven't learned.

HMAN17 · 2017-03-15T04:32:41+00:00

Air Conditioning is expensive ...;)....., jk

Dank_Meems · 2017-03-15T18:47:24+00:00

Ask anyone in a STEM job. Women. Don't. Apply.

Hirudin · 2017-03-15T21:24:44+00:00

Several possible reasons.

1) Jennifer has a higher change of leaving a six figure hole in the company's budget when she decides to use maternity leave, return to displace the temp replacement who had to be hired and trained to cover her position, then only work part time before quitting, therefore requiring another replacement to be trained.

2) Due to affirmative action, there's a higher chance she isn't as qualified because she never had to be before, and someone else will have to be hired anyway to pick up the slack.

3) The study doesn't seem to address benefits or flexible scheduling which may have been offered, or anticipated to be required, instead of raw income.

4) If she doesn't work out as a hire, it will be much more difficult, and expensive, to fire her.

Despite all this though, Jennifer is still twice as likely to get an offer of employment in the first place.

peaches6666 · 2017-03-15T19:12:53+00:00

"Working" for a STEM professor isn't working "in STEM". That's working in academia. That's the biggest issue; the article is changing the goalposts. Perhaps there is discrimination in the very tiny job market of CS grad TA's and professors. If so, let's fix it together.

But this small area is vastly overshadowed by the amount of people actually working in STEM. How do feminists explain data showing improvements and parity there from an organization that would know, because they do STEM job placements?]

And that's the second fault in the logic. Discrimination in one small area (if true) does not mean there's discrimination everywhere.

I'll answer my own question in one case I saw: banning & getting kicked off a STEM message board for posting the above link and suggesting that we should celebrate success.

SPQB · 2017-03-15T16:02:22+00:00

The study used a small sample group. That could effect the validity of its findings. As others have noted, there are also studies that points to the opposite conclusions. So more research is necessary.

But you may be starting from a false premise. Why would MRAs need to explain this away? As far as I've seen, the core thesis or the MRM isn't that men are always disadvantaged and women always preferred. It's that each sex enjoys a mix of benefits and burdens, which we should try to understand and address in a fair and open-minded way.

If the research is good, and women are disadvantaged in STEM job applications, we should do what we can to fix that. But we should also be open to the idea that, as the other study suggests, it might be the other way around, at least in some fields. And we should be prepared to prioritise other problems, such as the discrimination against boys in schools, even when they don't fit in with socially approved narratives.

BurrKing · 2017-03-15T20:45:21+00:00

Why are professors doing the hiring?

A single resume was sent to over a 100 academic persons to do the mock wage pay.

Were they in different regions? Was that taken into account? Pay in 1 city/state is higher than in another?

Also the fact they are academics not in the real world changes things even more. What are the baseline metrics of this?

jslnk · 2017-03-16T03:01:04+00:00

I'd say that as a former STEM professional who participated in many hiring decisions, I have NEVER seen a salary offer made off a resume alone without an in-person interview.

The "study" is not indicative of real world situations. It is a contrived study with a preconceived result and, as others have pointed out, the position was not a STEM position, it was an academia position.

Skidmore College is a social justice institution, not a research university. They're very open about having an agenda. Take them at their word.

Aeternalis_ · 2017-03-16T05:00:17+00:00

There's no such thing as gender bias in a career field against women.

Alzael · 2017-03-15T20:20:45+00:00

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits.

Not as an MRA, but simply as a rational person I would simply respond "How do they determine this?"

There is not actual data being presented or any criteria being shown. How do you know why they did or not evaluate the resume a certain way? Especially since you asked completely different people each time. Some of the reviewers simply could have been having bad/good days and so were harsher/more favourable. Or they may have seen something they liked or didn't like in one that the others didn't. We don't know because no information that would let us know is presented. Assuming they even collected it in the first place.

We don't even know the degree of harshness with which the resumes were judged or not. It simply be a normal statistical variance.

Everything in this is nothing more than an assertion. No data is being presented to review.

peaches6666 · 2017-03-15T19:18:48+00:00

A second rebuttal: Women are currently much more highly sought after in STEM than males. This is plausible because of how progressive and social-justice oriented big STEM companies are. I saw evidence when I was following a back-channel conversation of activists talking about the wage gap, job gap problem in STEM: they related conversations with female STEM presenters and women who blog about STEM. These women are practically barraged with calls and emails from recruiters. It's become a "problem". There was so sense of introspection among the activists that this is evidence against their thesis of discrimination.

By the way, great question. It's important to be open-minded about the data.

manifesto18 · 2017-03-15T12:03:40+00:00

I could care less about the wage gap, show me a good ass gap and I might be interested

Title	How do MRAs explain this study revealing gender bias against women in STEM?
Author	Doubt_Cloudy
Upvotes	3
Comments	26
Date	March 15, 2017 3:40 AM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/5zh43l/how_do_mras_explain_this_study_revealing_gender/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/how-do-mras-explain-this-study-revealing-gender.929067 https://theredarchive.com/post/929067

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