It says that women make up over 50% of undergrads, as well as graduate school students. Then when it comes to professors, they decline in representation. Why is the implication that this is due primarily to sexism? Populations differ in their representations for vocations across the board, why is the default assumption that sexism is the primary contributor?
There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication. If we have concrete data that is only explainable via anti-female or pro-male bias, we should probably conclude that bias (sexism) is the primary cause for disparities in career progression. Other factors may also contribute to the effect, but arguing that sexism isn’t a primary factor, despite data showing sexism has a strong explanatory effect, is not much different from arguing that the world’s warming probably isn’t human caused because we’ve been coming out of an ice age regardless of human activity. While likely true, we have enough data to conclude that’s not the primary explanation for recent global warming.
It's not as though this assumption hasn't been incredibly off base in the past. The entire earnings gap started off at women earning 77 cents on the male dollar, until we controlled for field, and then specific profession, and then hours worked, and seniority. Controlling for each of these things has moved the earnings gap to less than 5%, and people still will claim that the last 5% must be due to sexism. My question is, why? It's been the wrong hypothesis so far.
When I was hiring folks female candidates always asked for less money than male candidates. Even when counseling female friends about what they should ask for during their job search they still low-balled themselves.
I’m not sure why you’d assume that the field people choose is not related to sexism, or why seniority is not related to sexism. Maybe they aren’t (I don’t know the data either way), but this specific article provides data that shows even when a field is dominated by women at the undergraduate level, it is still dominated by men at the tenured professor level, who make sexist decisions at various points in the pipeline.
Each of your controls could easily be explained by sexism.
Seniority: if men are given promotions when their work was the same quality as women who were passed over, that’s sexism.
Hours worked: if men are given full time employment, women part time, even when both want full time, that’s sexism.
Field and specific profession: if women are encouraged by the exact same mentors to choose different fields, despite having the same credentials as men, that’s sexism.
I’m not saying these factors are the result of sexism, but it’s a bit weird to assume it is, while having data in the original article that indicates all of the above, at least in academic professions, are significantly affected by sexism.
Is controlling for hours worked and seniority just controlling for the specific methods sexism works through? Seems like you could implement a sexist pay gap by rewarding bums in seats even when it's not economically productive, or by only promoting men, and that these measures would then be controlled for.
At this point, though, you would have conceded the point that women are not simply paid less than men on the basis of their sex, the earnings are actually a function of hours worked and seniority. The earnings gap would simply be a downstream effect of the new proposition you are putting forward, which is that the hours worked and seniority are denied to women on the basis of their sex.
This is not something that has been demonstrated to have been true, of course, but that would be the correct way of framing the argument.
No, it isn't, because controlling for those things means comparing the same job to the same job. The gap complaint is women being paid less for the exact same job and hours. It's different from the sexist glass ceiling.
This assumes that there is some essential demographic difference that causes fewer women to end up in these professions. While this may be somewhat supportable in the few fields where muscle mass is relevant, the contention here is that disparity in fields like higher education or software engineering is in itself due to sexism. It's nice that the pay gap isn't that large for women who do manage to enter these fields, but that doesn't address any of the underlying structural causes that prevent women from entering these fields in the first place.
There are many possible hypotheses apart from "sexism against women" though.
Consider the hypothesis of "sexism against men": society considers all women valuable, but only values men who earn a decent amount of money. Men who earn little find it hard to date and have children.
Wouldn't this "sexism against men" spur men to choose high earning (but maybe not fulfilling) professions, while women would feel more free to aim for personally fulfilling (but lower earning) professions?
By the metric of earnings this might look like sexism against women, but by the metric of life satisfaction, it might look more like sexism against men.
I'd strongly reject the argument that "society considers all women valuable", but even so, it's irrelevant to the discussion. Whether it's sexism against men or sexism against women, the disparity is a problem for women who want to enter these professions or for men who want to enter "more personally fulfilling" professions. Regardless of the framing, it's certainly true that inequality can lead to bad outcomes for both men and women.
I think it's relevant to how we approach a solution.
If the problem is "discrimination against educated women" then we need to educate people not to be biased against educated women.
If the problem is "discrimination against low earning men", we need to educate people not to be biased against low earning men.
My guess is that if women didn't prefer to date higher earning men, a lot of the wage gap would disappear. The social pressure to find a partner is huge, probably one of the strongest social forces in existence.
From all available evidence females across most mammalian species strongly prefer and reproduce with the most successful males.
In humans women strongly prefer men who are more successful than them, are the gatekeepers of reproduction, and generally a greater proportion of women are able to pass on their genes than men.
By Darwinian logic this will inevitably result in a subpopulation of men who the most highly accomplished in certain sex selected traits in the species. This isn't excuse making its nature. I am consistently bemused at how the selfanointed intelligentsia of society that pride themselves on their rationality and scientific acumen refuse to accept this. You might as well cry about Gravity and hop up and down hoping you eventually fly up to the moon.
Why are women writing standard rated higher than men?
For every concrete data point that record a difference between men and women we could argue sexism as the cause. The idea that a higher graduation rate for women in education is caused by a biased education system against men is far from new.
When people talk about sexism as the cause for gender segregation I always look at studies and employment statistics from Sweden. The employment rate between women and men is practically identical, as is the ratio of women and men who work in gender segregated professions. A staggering 85% of women and 85% of men is in a profession that is classified as gender segregated. At the extreme end with higher than 99% gender segregation there is a slight higher number of women, and last year there was one university program where every student was of a single gender (female), but in general it look very similar for both men and women. The small 15% of both genders that work in gender equal professions is quite a small minority.
Arguing sexism as the primary factor for gender segregation is also the claim that both men and women face an identical amount of sexism. The Swedish numbers also support this. Yearly studies on harassment and sexual harassment in the work place show that both men and women face identical harassment when being a minority (down to a few percent variance). The report for 2018 actually marked nursing as the singular worst profession to be a gender minority in, where men reported highest rate of gender based bullying and sexual harassment. If I recall right, construction (women) was the highest the year before that.
But let me introduce an alternative theory to the idea that 85% of the population in Sweden is sexists. An old, about 50 years old study in human behavior that occasionally still get cited in psychology papers claim that most humans who perceive themselves as belonging to the majority group has an increased feeling of safety and confidence, while being in a minority has the opposite effect. This provides for a simple explanation to the gender equality paradox. There more equality and choices there is in choosing a profession, the more likely that the only difference between several professions is which group holds the position of dominance.
> There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication.
That paper assumes that "higher writing standards" means "simple vocabulary and short sentences".
So you might get a bad score for
> There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication.
And a better score for
> The article refers to examples like women writing better, and rewriting their work more.
Whether "simple words" really means better writing for academic journals is not clearcut to me.
Overall, the readability calculator here: http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-... scored your comment "difficult to read", which the paper would have said meant bad writing, and the OP article would have called a man's "poorly written mush".
I'm not saying this to insult you, but to point out that the article's definition of good writing may not be something you agree with.
As an anecdote, living in a college town, I know many academics at various levels in their career. I happen to know 3 couples where both partners in the marriage are in academia, and actually in the same general branch. In all three cases, the women have been talked to about how they must be treated tougher because their spouses are in academia as well and it the administration needs to prove to the academic world that the women are not riding on the coattails of their husbands.
The men have not had any such discussions with their superiors.
Additionally, why is assuming there is no sexism and proceeding with the status quo better than the assumption there is sexism and trying to improve the situation?
Because if there is no sexism, then what needs to be improved? Strategies that have been used in the past, such as affirmative action or quotas arbitrarily seek to create representational parity regardless of the input. That is a bad thing, and you're acting like it's at worst neutral.
Its called burden of proof. And its the core of scientific thinking
we don't automatically put the assumption that gyms are secret powerplants that exist to siphon off energy to feed space aliens at equal likelihood to its negative. Likewise the existence of sexism, especially at the broad global conspiratorial heights at which it is postulated is the more complicated hypothesis so its up you you guys to provide the compelling evidence.
>Likewise the existence of sexism, especially at the broad global conspiratorial heights at which it is postulated is the more complicated hypothesis
It's no more complicated than the hypothesis of the existence of false accusations of sexism, especially at the broad global conspiratorial heights at which it is postulated. Beginning with the assumption that sexism is not a big problem only gives the appearance of neutrality.
In reality, we probably all agree that sexism exists and false accusations exist, and we're trying to determine how prevalent each is. That is an extremely difficult task.
No...I don't think it works that way. You can't bootstrap the likelihood of one hypothesis by proposing a counterhypothesis. The existence of the Easter Bunny doesn't become more likely because someone hypothesizes that there is a global conspiracy to cover up the existence of said Bunny.
BTW, the 'false accusation' movement in sofar as it exists is a drop in the bucket compared to the sexism victimhood industry.
This is your hypothesis, which illustrates my point perfectly. You are not merely refuting the existence of a certain degree of sexual harassment, but you're hypothesizing that a "sexism victimhood industry" exists. The fluff about "hypothesis" and "scientific thinking" is just useful subterfuge.
Yes, I made an additional point but that doesn't invalidate the main response that a bigger burden of proof than men/women are different == MUST BE GLOBAL THERMONUCULAR SEXISM is on its feminist advocates. If you're upset that I think the sexism victimhood industry is bigger than its opposition you can set me straight on how billions of dollars over decades, tony institutes, college majors, federal/state regulations, corporate campaigns etc etc are equaled or exceeded by a few neckbeards complaining on Roosh.com.
It absolutely does invalidate the main response, as was my original point. Your position isn't neutral or scientific; erroneously bringing hypothesis testing into the discussion is an attempt at appearing objective, and nothing more.
We do assume the accused of rape or sexual harassment against a woman is guilty though. In that case, it's guilty until proven innocent. Allegations only are enough to ruin a man's whole career.
From your link: "In civil proceedings (like breach of contract) the defendant is initially presumed correct unless the plaintiff presents a moderate level of evidence and thus switches the burden of proof to the defendant."
There is absolutely a moderate level of evidence of discrimination against women.
My BIL is on the hiring committee for his CS dept at a state school. They recently have been barred from ranking candidates because it was embarrassing for the administration when they would offer positions to lower ranked candidates while no-offering higher ranked candidates.
Though, he said, in most cases it doesn't matter, because the lower ranked candidates who received offers were usually preferred minorities who received several offers from other more desirable schools.
This was addressed in the article from multiple angles:
The first being that women have to work harder than men for recognition, and that they benefit less from co-authored papers with men (because it's assumed that the man did most of the work). There's also feeder labs with male PIs that are less likely to hire women in addition to sexual harassment potentially stymying professional growth.
So while none of these are directly responsible, each individual piece contributes to the systematic sexism women face and can potentially explain the gap.
"Sexism" is a fuzzy concept. I came from a department with rampant problems with sexism (by personal observation as well as legal decisions), and I never heard anyone express anything about women being inferior. The way the sexism was manifested was far more indirect and subtle.
One way this occurred was in discussions about sex-differentiated choices. So, for example, a big problem the department had (has?) was (is?) groups of male faculty deciding that the choice to have children is a choice against a career. The implied assumption was that women stay home, and men have no reason for family leave or any impact on their working. This eventually led to sex discrimination lawsuits by men as well as women surrounding family leave and promotion policies surrounding tenure, but the problems didn't entirely go away.
The far biggest problem that I saw though was what I'd call indirect sex biases, where the biases were against sex-differentiated interpersonal styles. So the bias wasn't against gender per se, but against traits that females differed from males in on average. This struck me the most clearly when we were hiring faculty one year; the female faculty candidates tended to be more polite, calm, and deferential in research talks, but no less competent; the male candidates tended to be more aggressive and dominant. The hiring faculty in the audience, though, would see the female interpersonal style as a sign of weakness, and become more aggressive in their questioning, later concluding that the female candidates were less competent, when they were subject to much more stringent questioning the male candidates were never subject to, solely because the male candidates were more aggressive in their responses. This came up in other ways as well, such as in promotions; the department lost a sex discrimination lawsuit after women who were objectively more accomplished were less successful in tenure promotions primarily because they were seen as not socially dominant or attention-seeking enough.
I could go on and on.
We are seeing a lot of evidence that academics is increasingly a narcissistic pissing contest. I suspect a lot of women just get out while they can because they see it for what it is, and are on the losing end of a game whose rules they disagree with to begin with. Some of it is outright sexism, but some of it is bias that affects women differentially because of average group differences.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I've noticed when labeling the reasons for something as being due to systematic sexism, or racism, the statement implies something greater and beyond an individuals control is holding them back, rather than personal choice, or maybe a multitude of variables.
This creates and easy explanation/scapegoat for a problem rather than trying to actually figure out all variables involved.
It very well could be that when taking into account all the variables, it is systematic sexism/racism or whatever the claim may be. However one should be careful to jump on the ship that claims sexism/racism first without looking at all the other reasons and factors that could be at work. (Biological differences, family vs career importance, instances of sexism/racism, instances of reverse sexism/racism [helping an individual solely based on their race/sex], subjective influence, personal upbringing etc.)
> This creates an easy explanation/scapegoat for a problem rather than trying to actually figure out all variables involved.
He certainly doesn't help that impression with the florid language he uses:
"THE QUOTIDIAN MACHINERY of patriarchy functions as a complex of many moving parts. The same mechanisms that pull women down are the ones that push men up, compensating for the latter’s initial lack of numbers in undergraduate studies until they become an overwhelming majority among the academic elite. All these various parts, some seemingly innocuous and others quite abominable, operate together, defeating attempts that remediate only a single aspect of the patriarchal machine."
Wait, so, more women than men get bachelors and graduate degrees. And, women are almost at parity with men for faculty positions [1]. But, yet only a small portion of women get tenure. I'm calling Occam's Razor here.
I think that their statistic of women being full professors being lower than the percentage of women assistant professors, highlights that women aren't promoted as much to higher levels. Full professors and assistant professors are in the same vocation, and I would doubt that someone (regardless of gender) who has spent decades in academia to become an academic wouldn't want to become a full professor.
But there being less full professors than assistant professors isn't evidence of them not being promoted on the basis of their sex? Are they dropping out at different rates or different ages? Are they putting in the same hours? Are they accomplishing the same things? Are they in the same fields? The analysis of the gender earnings gap showed that these assumptions that all of these things were a given to have been equal between the sex populations were actually far from it. There are so many variables at play. The argument would be much more compelling if it didn't just offer the single variable of their sex, with the assumption being that all else considered, the candidates are identical.
Well, whether or not IQ correlates to intelligence, we do know that males tend to have greater variance in IQ while females tend to be more clustered around the mean - while also having a higher mean IQ.
If IQ correlates to academic success (which I believe studies have shown it does) then this would lead one to reasonably conclude there should be more female undergraduates and graduate students, and an equal number (or possibly slightly more) male assistant professors; we'd also expect a greater proportion of full professors who are male. This is in fact what is observed.
I'm not a biological determinist, and it's certainly possible the IQ test itself is sexist/ not unbiased, but this is one possible explanation where we can observe what we do without the presence of sexism.
It's also certainly possible there IS sexism preventing women from becoming professsors, I'd just need to see more compelling evidence than what's presented here.
>Why is the implication that this is due primarily to sexism?
Well perhaps because of the persuasive evidence the article cites from peer-reviewed journals. For example, in the paragraph below from the article:
"In one experiment, reported by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and her coauthors in PNAS, 127 US scientists were asked to hire an undergraduate lab assistant and decide on a salary based on fictional CVs of equally qualified men and women. The scientists were more likely to offer the position to men as well as more hours of mentorship, and gave a lower salary to women, about eighty-eight cents to the dollar."
It isn't the default assumption. It is the conclusion of decades of research and analysis that have sought alternative explanations and been left with bias.
Lol every time a piece like this gets posted some 'experts' come out of the woodwork and go like 'but what if women actually liked having low-paying low-status jobs though? Something something population differences something genetics something evolution blah blah.' (Note that none of these people are in fact evolutionary biologists) It's like a broken record, despite the enormous literature accounting for sexist biases in hiring, promoting, rating performance, evaluating stereotypes, etc. At this point I'm left to wonder if any of these people are arguing in good faith.
I want to ask two (genuine) questions. Note that these are not statements or attempting to imply something, they are just questions and I am looking for answers, not critiques of my questions (it is silly that I even have to state this, but I do).
1) What percentage of women in each stage of the pipeline want to become full professors?
2) What is the expected level of sexism at the university? I have always seen universities tending towards very liberal, progressive views (generally speaking), both in the student body and the staff, but that is just my observation.
It's almost impossible to give a meaningful answer to the first question. Asking people doesn't really answer the question because the meaningful version of the question is a nuanced counterfactual that would never really be asked in surveys. Lots of people would want to be professors under the right circumstances. If you make a career path that's needlessly precarious and and the only people who "want" to risk trying to have that kind of career are privileged people, then you could just throw up your hands and say "well I guess no one else wants to be a professor," or you could be honest about what people's motivations are and try to create a more humane system.
I think you are correct, it is a nuanced question. But perhaps some insight into statistics around factors that push females towards or away from professorship might be useful.
> What is the expected level of sexism at the university?
It remains high.
A friend of mine has been told by a potential adviser that he does not accept female students. My wife has consistently been asked whether I will give her permission to work as a postdoc at schools she is applying to (it might harm my career, the horror!). I know several women who have hid pregnancies while on the job market and many women who have hid their marital status when applying for faculty positions. Word gets around quickly when people start asking weird questions about "will you be able to handle the work" when making assumptions about having children. My wife and several other friends have had uncomfortable comments (both positive and negative) written about their physical appearance in student evaluations on their teaching.
We're also missing: What percentage of women are accepted for a open professor position? It doesn't make sense to look at the number of male vs. female professors currently employed. These are positions where people stay for decades, and we've only truly been focused on the issue for the past 10 to 15 years.
Hidden deep in some statistics from the Danish ministry of education the numbers show that women are now more likely (edit: I was wrong about this part, it is just as likely, not more) to get hired as professors that men. It will take years to hit 50% male and 50% female professors, but the alternative is to fire existing professors, solely become they're men, or create new jobs, marked for women only, even if you technically don't need more professors.
The main point is that a woman is just as likely to be hired for an open position as man is. The interesting part is that women only make up 30% of the qualified applicants. So a women applying for a university job has a better chance of getting hired, compared to her male rivals. Page 73.
For your second question: sadly, liberal and progressive views do little to combat innate biases. Every single person on the planet has some biases that they might fail to recognize and there've been some recent studies that showed students respect female professors less than their male counterparts and evaluate them lower overall. That's not some systemic hatred toward women, that's just a result of the way society views female educators.
For examples, look at these studies: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science...
I think this is generally true (the distinction between innate and conscious bias). Still, I am curious what kind of experiment might be able to reveal such innate biases (perhaps if an applicant worked remotely and their name and sex were hidden, but that is not easy to setup in many circumstances).
Speaking to your second point, the faculty's political leanings depend a lot on the department, and even then you can be surprised at the varied political views within a single department. Some of my profs in my dept. seemed very liberal, but that doesn't mean they won't sexually harrass people. I've overheard my old profs talk about women's breasts in their offices across from mine (this was a former job).
And there are some profs who will straight up leer at their students. It only takes one or two like this to cause a lot of tension in a workplace.
As with most positions of power, I am certain there is some abuse, although in some cases it can also be mutual attraction (probably more rare). I recall in my college that students "frequently hooked up" with their TAs, (whether or not this was a myth, I do not know).
From the article: "Given that women have been the majority of the undergraduate student body in many countries for the last three decades, one can no longer argue that equality can be achieved by simply waiting for young female scholars to emerge at the end of the academic “pipeline."
Isn't having less men as undergrads and grads, sexism as well? This time against men?
If the principle being proposed by the author of the article, is that "not having equal outcomes is sexism", then one should expect the ones demanding that principle, to extend it to every situation, not only to the situations that suit their personal ideology.
I believe there are logical inference errors in the paper. I'll mention one example:
"Given that women have been the majority of the undergraduate student body in many countries for the last three decades, one can no longer argue that equality can be achieved by simply waiting for young female scholars to emerge at the end of the academic “pipeline.” "
The author should familiarize themselves with Simpson's paradox*. This maps almost directly onto the classic UC Berkley case in the Wikipedia article.
Slightly tangential, but Planet Money did an interesting podcast on how an econ student was shocked to find rampant misogyny in an econ job forum, and she ended up using the data to quantify sexism in the field as part of a study:
The article doesn't attempt to control for any variance that would lead to unequal outcomes even if there were no bias.
For example, men make up the majority of people with very high (and very low) IQ's. If you randomly sampled the general population, binned to the IQ distribution of tenured professors, what gender ratio would you get?
Okay I gave this a chance and while it has a formidably long citation list every argument essentially boils down to difference found between men/women =MUST BE SEXISM.
The rest is generally the author like most 3rd wave feminists using these few vague usually deeply flawed correlative data points as a jumping point for wild theorycrafting and speculation. And they salt the article liberally with words like 'patriarchy' and a generally hostile tone to the point that this reads more like a forum post on resetera than an actual technical/scientific article.
Which is fine as long as everybody realizes contribution quality to HN is apparently now random blog musings the likes of which hundreds? of thousands/millions are generated everyday by the vast swath of upper/middle class privileged coeds of the western world and their male hangerons.
> coeds of the western world and their male hangerons
"Coed", in most contexts, means women. But you really tip your hand when you list "male hangerons". This clearly implies that the other subject is female.
Not sure if I'm going to express an unpopular opinion on that matter but I'm pretty sure that ot was already said somewhere in the comments in some different form. Not sure if my opinion even counts to people like ones who authored this strange piece of text since I'm from the mischievous and sinister kind of people collectively called "straight white male", and thus I may not have the fitting amount of oppression points to be heard. But I'll try anyway.
I think that the article itself revolves heavily about some prestige or whatever. So here comes the first question: does the person who cares about prestige more than science possess the amount of dedication and discipline to get to the higher ranks? In my opinion, the answer is strong "no" at the very least. To be proficient and productive, to be useful, you have to dedicate all your hard work towards your chosen discipline. Apparently you must be interested very much in it. It doesn't just fall down upon the "privileged cast", it's a competitive field, and outcome of that, if any, depends on dedication and the ability to act smart without relying on anyone or anything else too much.
The second question will be: do you actually know better than the people who make their own life choices? I mean, they do things or don't do them for a reason. Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, but if we talk about education and science, it's nothing close to sexism in the vast majority of cases.
The third part is simpler. What will happen if we enforce/regulate/implement quotas? The amount of useful output will decline. You can't force people into being effective and they will not be effective by "getting there" just by regulations and quotas.
And for the last one, some personal part. Last couple of years I study quite complex math (abstract algebra mostly) on my own out of pure interest in it. I don't have any mentorship, and I don't suffer from it. My dedication compensates for it. It's a bit anecdotal but I believe that you can achieve a lot just by being dedicated and interested. You will not get even close by being placed there and babysat until you're "big enough".
