WASHINGTON POST: "Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM" | Are there other studies similar to this? What do you personally believe is the reason for gender disparity in STEM?

SchalaZeal01 · 2020-04-21T20:50:40+00:00

“The perception that STEM fields continue to be inhospitable male bastions can become self-reinforcing by discouraging female applicants, thus contributing to continued underrepresentation,” they wrote.

Always figured feminism made it worse.

Egalitarianwhistle · 2020-04-21T21:37:31+00:00

Best guess- gender theory has been wrong from the beginning and there is a difference in average distribution for various skills.

The beauty of the Patriarchy Conjecture is that it allows you to advocate for women over men into infinity. It sets the bar for gender equality impossibly high because unless men are owned by women as chattel, it's still not eqaulity yet.

After women have owned men as chattel for a few millennia, then equality will be restored.

2020-04-21T21:55:39+00:00

No shit. Affirmative action was coopted by racist white feminist so they could grab hold of additional power. Affirmative action was intended for primarily just black folk and native americans but, the racist feminist establishment completely coopted it to their benefit.

mhelena9201 · 2020-04-22T04:15:20+00:00

“The bias in favour of women “was totally unexpected,” said psychologist and co-author Wendy Williams of Cornell University. “We were shocked.”

Research has consistently found that women are given jobs over equally qualified and even more qualified men, especially in STEM. At least one study was cut short because it was run by a feminist and the preliminary results showed a bias against men, not women. Although to her credit she did later own up to these findings in a Washington Post interview.

Studies below:

The hypocrisy of feminism:

The MRM has adopted a policy of encouraging gender blind recruitment because it appears to remove hiring biases against men. It's also just a fair way to do it regardless of who benefits from it.

And not to go back to feminists, but there are feminists who have realized this and are advocating against blind recruitment, which really doesn't make sense. Its because they understand that people have a sexist bias to prefer women over men, so gender actually helps women in this case.

Most recently there was a campaign to end a decades old practice of blind recruitment in the Canadian symphony, since men were being picked more often than women. The cognitive dissonance in that case was really obvious on a Facebook post where women were saying, "I don't want an unfair advantage because of my gender" and then saying in the next sentence, "but I think something needs to be done about the fact they're hiring mostly men".

STUDIES

Williams, W. M., and Ceci, S. J. (2015). National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 5360–5365. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1418878112. [PDF] Available at: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/17/5360.full.pdf

Turner, Karen. (2016, July 25). This tool gender-swapped the voices of tech job candidates. Here’s what happened. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/15/this-tool-gender-swapped-the-voices-of-tech-job-candidates-heres-what-happened/

Begley, Sharon. (2015). Academics rate women job applicants higher than identical men: study. REUTERS. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-gender/academics-rate-women-job-applicants-higher-than-identical-men-study-idUSKBN0N421420150413?irpc=932

Strikester101 · 2020-04-21T20:10:52+00:00

Though the conclusion should be heartening news for proponents of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), who have long argued that hiring bias is holding female scientists back, it contradicts other prominent studies of the issue — a fact that has subjected it to skepticism from other researchers.
Joan C. Williams (no relation to Wendy), a distinguished professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law and co-principal investigator for the Tools for Change project, which tries to level the playing field for women in STEM, told Inside Higher Ed that the Cornell study is “seriously flawed” in its conclusion that science is now a welcoming place for women. She argued that hiring has never really been the main source of discrimination against women.
Joan Williams and others noted that the fictional female candidates in the Cornell study were exceptionally well-qualified, a factor that may have mitigated gender bias. A similar 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at more moderately qualified graduate student candidates for a job in a lab, found that male applicants were much more likely to be hired, given better salaries and offered mentorship.
“I think it’s too soon to say, ‘Okay, problem solved,’” Virginia Valian, who researches gender equity at New York’s Hunter College, told Science Magazine. “We haven’t solved the problem of underrepresentation of women in the sciences … and I wouldn’t want people to think that this paper demonstrates that we have solved it.”
Speaking to Reuters, Wendy Williams countered that criticism.
“We’re not saying women do not face discrimination” in academic science, she said. “But these data speak to a real change. People seem to have internalized the value of gender diversity, and are consciously or unconsciously upgrading women candidates.”

This is important. Hence, I want to know if there are studies which demonstrate whether there is a gender bias or not.

eldred2 · 2020-04-21T23:17:26+00:00

This is only a "surprise" to people who have no experience in STEM.

romulusnr · 2020-04-22T03:23:25+00:00

TBF I think this heavily depends on the specific STEM job.

Like, there's a lot of women PMs and SQAs in software, but not as many devs, not even SDETs. But all would be considered STEM jobs.

hectorgarabit · 2020-04-22T15:43:05+00:00

I have seen articles (very sporadically) stating the exact same things for many years now. Women are favored and have been favored in stem for a long time.

What is really happening in my opinion is that feminists tried to push the false narrative that women are at a disadvantage in STEM for a while. It didn't work, the majority of people don't buy this lie. I suspect feminists are becoming more overtly disliked because of things like that.

Instead of saying we were wrong all along, feminists will say, we were wrong but now the problem is solved. (It's extremely easy to solve a non existing problem)

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