For several years feminists have been claiming that philosophy departments are biased against hiring female faculty. Finally people are looking at the data and (... surprise) the bias is actually against men.

ckiemnstr345 · 2015-03-24T03:11:22+00:00

[permanently deleted]

ZimbaZumba · 2015-03-24T01:54:59+00:00

The Big Lie really does work.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2015-03-24T14:47:10+00:00

I remember one of my feminist instructors regailing us with a tale where she went to some philosophy conference, and not one of the speakers was female.

I asked her what percentage of philosophy academics were women. She said "not many, but shouldn't there at least be one speaking?"

To which I responded "Shouldn't the speakers be chosen based on the merit of their contribution?"

namae_nanka · 2015-03-24T17:07:44+00:00

Made this comment in an ELI5 thread about wage gap, also touching on how these studies work:

accounting for every variable except sex

Actually they don't account for 'every' variable except sex. They do consider a number of them, but not 'every'.

For example, Yale did a study

for rooting out biases against women in STEM fields. Curiously that study was about lab managers who don't really go on to become luminaries in their fields. A better study focusing on the those who do came to the opposite conclusion,

A recent large-scale national tenure-track-hiring experiment was specifically designed to address the question of whether the dearth of women in math-intensive fields is the result of sex bias in the hiring of assistant professors in these fields. This study sampled faculty from 347 universities and colleges to examine bias in the hiring of tenure-track assistant professors in various STEM fields (W. M. Williams & Ceci, 2014).[19]

This finding is consistent with the other evidence on productivity presented below, which also fails to show female superiority in hiring outcomes as being due to objectively higher female quality. These experimental findings are compatible with the hiring data showing gender neutrality or even a female preference in actual hiring. There are a variety of methodological and sampling factors that may explain the seeming divergence between earlier experiments and the Williams and Ceci experiment. Notably, in this experiment, candidates for tenure-track positions were depicted as excellent, as short-listed candidates almost always are in real-life academic hiring.[20] In contrast, many of the most prominent experimental studies have depicted candidates as “ambiguous” with respect to academic credentials. For instance, Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) described candidates for a lab-manager position, which are a level of applicants very different from those who are finalists for a tenure-track position, as having ambiguous academic records (i.e., in addition to having a publication with their advisor, they had unremarkable GPAs and had withdrawn from a core course).

The above mentioned Moss-Racusin study is the one you linked to.

And you can again find discrimination against men in studies that are focusing on the racial angle and hence not popularised as such.

https://archive.today/hhkP5#selection-703.0-715.29

Or studies that don't even happen because finding discrimination against women is the only thought in the researcher's mind.

Although she knew that being first author was important, Ms. Jacquet also wondered whether it was because she is female that she had had to take the initiative in publishing all of her own scholarly articles, while Mr. West had been asked to collaborate on several peer-reviewed articles.

But the data, she says, show that female professors in the study actually were more likely to be second through fourth authors than first. It knocked down her theory that male scientists had failed to ask her to collaborate on academic articles because she is a woman. Since she first visited Mr. Bergstrom's lab, in fact, she has published three academic articles on which she is not the lead author. The article on gender and authorship will be her fourth. "For me," she says, "this really showed the beauty of science, that you can have this personal experience that isn't reflected in big data."

https://archive.today/E9sQJ

A rather overlooked 'variable' in these studies can be the underperformance of boys in schooling so that their credentials end up worse than what their aptitudes should reflect. Nevermind the rampant grade inflation.

So that when they start putting in more effort than women(they're getting paid for it after all), there can be substantial differences between them and women with similar credentials.

iongantas · 2015-03-24T05:55:11+00:00

Gee, you think philosophy might be mostly men because mostly men are interested in it? One suspect it is the same with STEM.

scrubbyscum999 · 2015-03-24T04:21:07+00:00

As a philosophy major, there are generally more men who major in philosophy and then way more who actually want to go PhD level. So yeah, unsurprising.

sillymod · 2015-03-24T15:13:31+00:00

I have heard that quantity of publications is not a good metric to determine quality of a professor. It doesn't test test the quality of the publication.

So you could have alpha prestige people with amazing papers publishing once or twice a year, and beta prestige people publishing mediocre papers many times a year. These results would remain the same, but the interpretation of them would change.

I could imagine this is a much more nuanced topic than what is presented here, though these are interesting findings. It is interesting to have quantifiable data.

lafielle · 2015-03-24T09:04:25+00:00

Has this article been published in a scientific journal or the proceedings of a conference or some such? I'd really like to use it as a source, as it is well written and scientific, but fear that it may be dismissed as non-authoritative, as it is "just a single blog post in a blog with no other posts".

worthlessfucksunited · 2015-03-24T13:43:17+00:00

They just love getting useless degrees, don't they?

xNOM · 2015-03-24T14:03:38+00:00

There is a similar situation in physics. Yet the women in STEM whiners persist.

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