The results described below suggest that faculty evaluators of STEM job applicants tend to favor women over men. Certainly, most departments receive strong incentives and signals from above to increase numbers of women and underrepresented minorities among their faculty. Women could still face obstacles at other points in their careers, such as during promotion or merit reviews, or in the competition for resources such as grant funding or lab space. Nevertheless, I think gender discrimination has decreased significantly during my adult life.
This article is also discussed in Nature. See also STEM, Gender, and Leaky Pipelines and Gender differences in preferences, choices, and outcomes. Earlier blog posts citing research by Ceci and Williams.
National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track (PNAS)
Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia. In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships who shared the same lifestyle (e.g., single without children, married with children). Applicants' profiles were systematically varied to disguise identically rated scholarship; profiles were counterbalanced by gender across faculty to enable between-faculty comparisons of hiring preferences for identically qualified women versus men. Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non–math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Results were replicated using weighted analyses to control for national sample characteristics. In follow-up experiments, 144 faculty evaluated competing applicants with differing lifestyles (e.g., divorced mother vs. married father), and 204 faculty compared same-gender candidates with children, but differing in whether they took 1-y-parental leaves in graduate school. Women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers; men preferred mothers who took leaves to mothers who did not. In two validation studies, 35 engineering faculty provided rankings using full curricula vitae instead of narratives, and 127 faculty rated one applicant rather than choosing from a mixed-gender group; the same preference for women was shown by faculty of both genders. These results suggest it is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science. Messages to the contrary may discourage women from applying for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) tenure-track assistant professorships.
