January 2015
Academic science
has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile
workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against
women. Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences,
computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior
faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the
inhospitable work environment is to blame.
Our country
desperately needs more talented people in these fields; recruiting more women
could address this issue. But the unwelcoming image of the sexist academy isn’t
helping. Fortunately, as we have found in a thorough analysis of recent data on
women in the academic workplace, it isn’t accurate, either.
There’s no argument
that, until recently, universities deserved their reputations as bastions of
male privilege and outright sexism. But times have changed. Many of the common,
negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of
older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s
not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is
largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. As we found, when
the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small
number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a
given field on a specific outcome.
In contrast,
our work, which is forthcoming in the journal
Psychological Science in the Public Interest and
was written with
the economists
Donna
K. Ginther, of the University of Kansas, and Shulamit Kahn, of Boston
University, reports the results of several hundred analyses of data on hiring,
salary, promotion, productivity and job satisfaction for eight broad fields of
science at American universities and colleges.
Our analysis
reveals that the experiences of young and midcareer women in math-intensive
fields are, for the most part, similar to those of their male counterparts: They
are more likely to receive hiring offers, are paid roughly the same (in 14 of 16
comparisons across the eight fields), are generally tenured and promoted at the
same rate (except in economics), remain in their fields at roughly the same
rate, have their grants funded and articles accepted as often and are about as
satisfied with their jobs. Articles published by women are cited as often as
those by men. In sum, with a few exceptions, the world of academic science in
math-based fields today reflects gender fairness, rather than gender bias.
Moreover, in
contrast to frequent claims that outright bias pushes more women out of
math-intensive fields, we actually found a greater exodus of women from
non-math-intensive fields in which they are already well represented as
professors (like psychology and biology, where 45 to 65 percent of new
professors are women) than from fields in which they are underrepresented (like
engineering, computer science and physics, where only 25 to 30 percent of new
professors are women). Our analyses show that women can and do prosper in
math-based fields of science, if they choose to enter these fields in the first
place.
So if alleged
hiring and promotion biases don’t explain the underrepresentation of women in
math-intensive fields, what does? According to our research, the biggest
culprits are rooted in women’s earlier educational choices, and in women’s
occupational and lifestyle preferences.
As children, girls
tend to show more interest in living things (such as people and animals), while
boys tend to prefer playing with machines and building things. As adolescents,
girls express less interest in careers like engineering and computer science.
Despite earning higher grades throughout schooling in all subjects — including
math and science — girls are less likely to take math-intensive
advanced-placement courses like calculus and physics.
Women are also less
likely to declare college majors in math-intensive science fields. However, if
they do take introductory science courses early in their college education, they
are actually more likely than men to switch into majors in math-intensive fields
of science — especially if their instructors are women. This shows that women’s
interest in math-based fields can be cultivated, but that majoring in these
fields requires exposure to enough math and science early on.
In contrast to
math-based fields, women prefer veterinary medicine, where they now constitute
80 percent of graduates, and life sciences, in which they earn over half of all
doctoral degrees; women are also half of all newly minted M.D.s and 70 percent
of psychology Ph.D.s. However, those college women who do choose math-intensive
majors like engineering persist in them through graduate school and into the
academy at the same rate as their male counterparts — again showing that women
can and do succeed in math-based fields if they develop interest in them and
commit to them.
Today’s story about
women in math-based academic fields is clear. While no career is without
setbacks and challenges, life in fields like engineering, physics, mathematics
and computer science — when viewed by the numbers across the population of
academics today rather than through the lens of testimonials and overgeneralized
findings — is life with reasonable pay, flexibility to meet family demands, and
the chance to make meaningful impacts on the state of knowledge and the next
generation of talented young people. Academic science is a rewarding career for
many, men and women alike. We are not your father’s academy anymore.
Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci are professors of human development at Cornell University.
New York Times, Sunday Review, October 31, 2014.
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