Women in Science Are Doing All Right A new study challenges the notion that sexism is rampant in the sciences.
The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
“The literature on women in science, both scholarly and popular, portrays academic sexism today as an omnipresent, pervasive force in the daily lives of tenure-track women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields,” write Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell and Shulamit Kahn of Boston University. Yet their review of the evidence from 2000 to 2020 shows that women in scholarly sciences are doing fine.
Tenure-track women are at parity with their male counterparts in grant funding, recommendation letters and having research accepted by journals, the authors say. In hiring, women have an advantage over men: “Women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do.”
Male scientists receive higher pay, the authors say, “although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed,” and the story is complicated. For one thing, “women and men are unevenly represented in fields that are remunerated the highest.”
Another factor could be “women’s work discontinuities for family leave.” Some of the “relatively small remaining pay gap may be due to women’s lower likelihood of negotiating higher salaries or their lower likelihood of pursuing more lucrative job offers.”
The authors did find some evidence of gender bias in teacher evaluations. But they “supplement this conclusion” by quoting Pennsylvania State University’s Angela Linse. Her 2017 paper on gender and student ratings found that while biases “definitely exist,” they “rarely, if ever, fully explain the student ratings results.” She also found that the effects “are neither uniform nor consistent across all disciplines, nor do they apply to all women.”
Executives often decry a shortage of STEM workers, which persists even though such jobs can pay handsomely. Mr. Ceci, Ms. Williams and Ms. Kahn rightly note that there are “costs of believing that sexism in academic science is pervasive when it is not—key among them that women will be discouraged from choosing academic careers in science, and resources will be wasted in combatting nonexistent bias claims.” At some point maybe PR campaigns by the likes of Barbie do more harm than good.
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