In at least one area of the STEM job market, it appears women have an upper hand on men, according to new research from Cornell University.

In a nationwide study from the Cornell Institute for Women in Science – published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – professors Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci found tenure-track faculty in engineering, economics, biology and psychology fields generally favored hiring female candidates over otherwise identical male candidates by a 2-to-1 margin. A series of five experiments were conducted on 873 faculty members at 371 colleges and universities from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.



The stark underrepresentation of women in math-intensive STEM fields, the authors suggest, is more a result of obstacles at the front end that prevent women from applying for faculty positions in the first place. Meanwhile, it appears gender diversity has become more valued among college faculty.

"It’s a really, really important question because if sex bias in hiring is limiting women’s participation in math-based fields of academic science, then we’re hobbled right from the starting gate," Williams said in a video explaining the study's results. "If on the other hand sex bias in hiring is a thing of the past, if the society has moved forward and if all the educational programs have worked, then clearly the resources that are being deployed need to be deployed elsewhere to fix the problems that are really limiting women’s academic careers today."

In the first experiment, the researchers presented the faculty decision-makers with two highly qualified candidates who were equal other than their gender, as well as a third, slightly less-qualified male candidate. Overall, 67.3 percent of faculty ranked the female candidate first, which was consistent across varying lifestyles such as being married or single or having or not having young children.

But other variations showed some lifestyle choices may influence how hiring decisions are made.

A second experiment presented male and female candidates with nonmatching lifestyles: a divorced mother with two young children and an absent ex-spouse competing with a married father with two young children and a stay-at-home wife, for example. In that scenario, female faculty strongly preferred divorced mothers over married fathers (71.4 percent compared with 28.6 percent), while male faculty showed the opposite trend, just not as strongly (42.9 percent compared with 57.1 percent).

When focusing on whether candidates took parental leave during graduate school, male faculty members by a 2-1 margin preferred female candidates who took a one-year leave over those who did not. Male and female faculty showed no preference between male candidates who did or did not take leave, but female faculty members tended to prefer female candidates who did not take leave.

"Women's perceptions that an extended maternity leave will cause them to be viewed as less committed to their profession may influence some women to opt out entirely," the study said.

A fourth experiment was conducted to determine whether faculty decision-makers would still rank female candidates higher if they were presented with full CVs, as opposed to narrative summaries with notes from a search committee, and the researchers found similar results. Finally, a fifth experiment presented faculty with one applicant to rate – to see if they would still prefer a female if they couldn't choose among men and women – and found the faculty members still favored female applicants.

"They really seem to want more women on the faculty, and this is just as true of male faculty in our study as female faculty," Ceci said in the video. "Now it’s time to think about other interventions that may more effectively address women’s underrepresentation, since our data and the actuarial data indicate the underrepresentation has nothing to do with sexist hiring practices."

Still, other studies have found evidence of gender bias in STEM related fields.

"When looking at gender bias in science, it’s very important to look at what particular context," says David Miller, a graduate student at Northwestern University who has studied gender representation in STEM. "The fact there was a preference for female candidates is perhaps not that surprising if you consider many of these faculty hiring boards are looking to diversify their group of faculty. There are other contexts that do show gender bias against females."

In 2012, Corinne Moss-Racusin, an assistant professor of psychology at Skidmore College, published research that showed strong gender bias in hiring for a lab manager position. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues asked more than 100 STEM professors to assess fictitious resumes that only differed in the name of the applicant (John vs. Jennifer). Despite being otherwise identical in qualifications, the female applicant was seen as less competent – and the scientists were less willing to mentor the candidate or hire her for the position, and recommended paying her a lower salary.

Williams and Ceci argue in an appendix to their study that Moss-Racusin's research differs from their own because it focuses on biases against female undergraduate students, rather than those who have already earned a doctorate. The results of Moss-Racusin's study likely doesn't explain the underrepresentation of women in academia, Williams and Ceci wrote, because few lab managers go on to tenure-track positions later in their careers.

"This does not minimize the importance of anti-female bias where it exists, but it does caution us not to assume it is responsible for deleterious effect in shaping the academy’s demographics, given that the vast majority of scientists in the academy did not begin as staff lab managers, nor were they ambiguously-competent academically as undergraduates," they wrote. "Rather, evidence for anti-female bias in hiring lab managers should be countered by initiatives directed at such hiring and not generalized to account for the underrepresentation of women among tenure-track faculty."

Another study by Katherine Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania revealed gender bias in a different context. In the experiment, researchers sent professors identical emails from fictional prospective students (who varied by race and gender) seeking research opportunities before applying to a doctoral program. The researchers found the faculty members responded more frequently to white males than other students.