Has Academia Become More Gender-Fair for Women? Findings From an Adversarial Analysis of Gender Bias

Article here. Excerpt:

'These findings, Ceci said, suggest that academia now offers a largely gender-fair, and in some cases female-advantaged, environment:

Women who earn PhDs and apply for tenure-track positions are often more likely to be hired than their male peers, the authors found through a review of existing studies and their own analysis of data from the National Science Foundation.

Grants are awarded to women and men at approximately equal rates, the authors found from a meta-analysis of 39 studies including data from more than 2 million applications to 27 grant agencies.

Scientific articles where women are the first or last authors were about as likely to be accepted for publication as those written by men, according to the authors’ meta-analysis of 33 articles on journal acceptance rates.

When the researchers compared the findings of nine studies that analyzed letters of recommendation written from 1990 to 2017 for the fields of psychology, physics, biology, medicine, chemistry, and geoscience, they found no gender bias. Compared to letters written for men, letters written for women after the year 2000 were no shorter, raised no more doubts about women’s ability to do a job, and used no different words to describe applicants.'