Passions Supplant Reason in Dialogue on Women in Science

Article here. Excerpt:

'We’re not new to studying women in science. Nor are we insensitive to the prejudice some women experience in academic science.

For the past decade, we have researched some of the challenges female scientists face that their male counterparts often don’t, such as balancing work and life demands like child care (see our 2012 article in American Scientist). Our guiding principle has been to follow the data wherever it takes us. We have found, for example, that women and men have comparable rates of success with grant and article submissions, and that affirmative action doesn’t lead to a preference for less-competent women (forthcoming), and that women have a harder time getting tenure in biology and psychology and are less satisfied with their jobs than men in the social sciences.

However, none of those findings have aroused the passions that our most recent research has. In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we published an article on data from five national studies that took us to an unexpected destination. The data showed that, in tenure-track hiring, faculty prefer female job candidates over identically qualified male ones.

Because that finding runs counter to claims of sexist hiring, it was met in the news media and in academe with incredulity and often panic. We have responded to those criticisms in five pieces in the Huffington Post (parts one, two, three, four, and five), as well as another essay in American Scientist and one on the website of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Some critics saw in our findings a disavowal of their own experiences with academic sexism. Even though our study examined only entry-level hiring, they viewed it as invalidating biases they faced outside the hiring context and as an attack on their advocacy for women. But data from multiple studies using different methods kept revealing the same striking preference for hiring women. So we reported the empirical data, hoping to generate an honest, productive dialogue about modern discrimination in the academy. Since hiring is no longer a roadblock, where else might we need to direct efforts and advocacy to help more women succeed?'