April 2001
February 5, 2001
Nine members of the patriarchy met last week at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to ink the latest concession to feminism’s Under representation
Industry. The high-ranking representatives of the nation’s most elite universities
pledged their commitment to “equity for, and full participation by, women
faculty.” Their institutions, they said, “recognize that barriers still
exist to the full participation of women in science and engineering.” What
those barriers are remains a mystery – the statement cites not one obstacle
that is causing women to become doctors and lawyers despite secret longings
to be particle physicists.
All of this was nothing if not predictable: The latest chapter in a
saga of sex, lies, and science that began two years ago, when MIT released
a report confessing to discrimination against senior female faculty. The
kvetch-filled document, penned largely by the same females whose complaint
of discriminatory treatment had spurred appointment of a committee to study
the “status of women,” was greeted with near-universal acclaim. Press coverage
was remarkably uncritical – often crediting the report with characteristics
(such as evidence) that it did not have. Its principal author, biology
professor Nancy Hopkins, was even feted at the White House by the President
and First Lady. The Ford foundation promptly kicked a million bucks into
MIT’s coffers, making possible last week’s conference and other initiatives
to “improve opportunities for women faculty” at MIT and elsewhere.
Not a bad track record when you consider that this is a report for which
“hatchet job” may be too charitable a description. And not a particularly
artful example of the genre either. With its collective intelligence, one
might expect MIT to find it fishy that the report declared female faculty
to be underpaid despite admitting that its authors lacked access to “primary
salary data.” Or that it would consider it in bad form for the same women
who filed a complaint alleging discrimination to be charged with interviewing
others to see if they, too, felt “marginalized.” Or that its scientific
literati would see a certain hypocrisy in MIT requiring students to include
not only conclusions, but also supporting evidence in their work, while
refusing to provide any documentation for the report’s claims that women
were denied their fair share of compensation and resources. Intentionally
or not, MIT seems to have put itself above the kind of full disclosure
and open debate universally understood to be the price that scientists
pay for the esteem accorded them.
And now for the really hard part. Last year, a colleague posed a hypothetical
question. What if MIT actually released evidence showing that the claimed
disparities between males and females truly exist? I conceded that this
might indicate discrimination, but that first, one would have to consider
other factors that often account for differences in salaries and working
conditions. In one form or another, the question kept coming up.
Eventually, I enlisted the expert assistance of James Steiger, a statistician
and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Together
we produced a report, “Confession Without Guilt?”, that examines the productivity
of two groups of MIT biologists. One is comprised of younger professors,
the other of their more senior colleagues.
The results for the younger group were actually rather heartening. One
of its men had a truly extraordinary output. But otherwise, the males and
females were generally competitive with each other.
But in the more senior group, the results were – How do I say this politely?
– noticeably different. Not that anyone had an unimpressive record. All
had published a respectable number of research papers. Their work was cited
in the scientific literature many times. But though all were impressive,
some were far more so than others.
Three of six males in the group had published more than 100 papers in
the last 12 years – a distinction held by only one of the five females.
By contrast, four of the females, but only one male had published fewer
than 50 papers.
Even more dramatic were differences in the number of citations to these
publications, a common way to measure a scientist’s influence. The most
cited female scientist had fewer than 3000 citations. Three of the males
had more than 10,000. One of the three was also principal researcher for
23 million dollars in federal grant funds that he raised for MIT during
an 11-year period. (Not that the rest of his colleagues – male or female-were
losers in the money game. All but one raised three to nine million from
federal sources during the same time.) We made several statistical adjustments
to account for factors that might enhance or detract from productivity,
but these had little effect on the basic pattern of the results.
So, what do I conclude about sex discrimination at MIT? I don’t have
the information to venture an opinion as to whether the salaries and lab
space allocated to these biologists is commensurate with their performance.
But I can say this: If the guy in the next office had greatly bested
me in publications, influence, and grant money, he could have a bigger
lab and higher salary without me filing a sex-bias complaint. Especially
one explaining that my beef was not discrimination in the usual sense of
the word, but “a pattern of powerful, but unrecognized assumptions that
work systematically against women faculty even in the light of obvious
goodwill.”
And if I were running Feminism, Incorporated, I’d reread the rhetoric
of the MIT report in the context of these results and ask, “Are we embarrassed
yet?”
Patricia Hausman is a consulting behavioral scientist & member of the National Advisory Board of the Independent Women’s Forum.
Repinted from National Review online, February 5, 2001.
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