Science News

Czech physicist Luboš Motl, at the Reference Frame, reports on a study about gender bias in academia.
All the other columns reveal a 2-to-1 up to 2.5-to-1 preference for female applicants. Senior women in engineering prefer female applicants by more than a 3-to-1 ratio.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015 … Cornell study in PNAS: women STEM faculty are 2-to-1 overrepresentedThe fair fraction of female faculty is 2 times lower than the current one. Steven Pinker called it a shocker of a study but I am not surprised at all. The results coming from the paper I will discuss pretty much agree with my estimates based on the insider knowledge of similar mechanisms. Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci (Cornell) just published a paper in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
The title is
Lots of fictitious male and female applications were sent to places where they 873 faculty members hire new tenure-track faculty. The compositions of the male and female applicants were the same – the same percentage of single and married applicants among the males and females, and so on. Various random reformulations were applied to the applications to hide that the people have the same credentials etc. Read entire article at The Reference Frame. |

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