Thursday, April 16, 2015

The Heavy Bias in Favor of Women in STEM Field.

 We've all heard the feminist movement claim that women suffer from sexism and misogyny in the STEM field ad nauseam, despite their many articles and news pieces about it, like this one by a feminist in Popular Science:
Institute gender-bias training. 
"Jo Handelsman and Corinne Moss-Racusin of Yale University published a study in 2012 showing that scientists of all ranks and genders were complicit in gender discrimination. It found that a male candidate is more likely to be hired (and paid more) and mentored than a female. A little diversity training couldn't hurt, and, failing that, "we could paint murals of admired female scientists throughout the halls of universities," Handelsman and Moss-Racusin write. Yes."
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/natures-special-issue-proves-sexism-alive-and-well-science

But The National of Sciences published a study where they found that women are shown favoritism in STEM jobs despite more men choosing for completing their PhD's in math-intense field, while women go more for health and people related fields. Here's what an article by the Washington Post on this study reveals:


"Is science finally becoming friendlier to women?

Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci think so. As the co-directors of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, they have spent much of the past six years researching sexism in STEM fields. And according to their latest study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, women are no longer at a disadvantage when applying for tenure-track positions in university science departments. In fact, the bias has now flipped: Female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men."




And if we tackle this study a little further in their original paper, they found that in some cases, women can be favored 4 to 1,and i real-world scenarios, women face no discrimination at all when getting hired:



We can see in the section titled "Are female applicants superior to male applicants?"  the study illustrates how some have tried to explain correlation to better advantages to women being explained by the fact women applicants are of superior skills or talents than their male counterparts in tenure-track or tenured positions, but is this claim true? Let's see what this study found so far:


"Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers."
 So we can clearly see that despite there being equal levels of applicants, employers are heavily biased against men,


This information can be found in: "Women in Academic Science" pages 101-102

As with the gender wage gap explanation, women are centering their career choices based on comfort, flexible hours and careers that allow them to dedicate their lives to their families, as the Pew Research Centre shows, more women are opting to be stay-at-home mothers rather than spending time on the work force diligently. 



1 comment:

  1. Just one thing - you keep mixing academic data with jobs outside of universities in this blog post. If you clear that up and show both sides it'd make a stronger argument!

    ReplyDelete