A greater percentage of doctoral degrees are going to women, but they still have fewer faculty positions (Image: Getty)

“Anti-female bias in academic hiring has ended,” declare husband and wife social psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci in an opinion piece on CNN this week. They just published the results of a survey that they claim suggests women applying for US science faculty positions have a 2:1 advantage over equally qualified men, even in male-dominated fields such as engineering.

Yet, while the US National Science Foundation says 40 per cent of doctoral degrees in science and engineering went to women in 2008 – up from 17 per cent in 1976 – their representation in faculty is low: 31 per cent of full-time doctoral science and engineering posts in 2008.

Williams and Ceci put such figures down to women failing to apply for these jobs as often – possibly because of the “omnipresent discouraging messages about sexism in hiring”. They go on to write: “While women may encounter sexism before and during graduate training and after becoming professors, the only sexism they face in the hiring process is bias in their favour.”


If only.

While quantitative studies of these issues are laudable, Williams and Ceci’s data do not support their broad conclusions, and publicising them may make the situation for women in science worse.

The duo focused on a particular point in the science career pipeline: scientists with PhDs applying for tenure-track jobs at colleges or universities. “This point of hiring is just one point, but it is an extremely important one,” Williams told New Scientist.

Conflicting conclusions

Their study involved sending narrative descriptions of three hypothetical candidates – one male, one female, one random – to professors who then ranked them. But hiring a candidate for a faculty job involves more than just reading a biography. Faculty search committees often consider far more than three candidates who face lengthy interviews, site visits, giving talks and meeting potential colleagues – all points at which bias can crop up.

“This study was constructed in such a way as to present people with ‘equally qualified’ dossiers for male and female candidates to judge their hireability – a noble goal, but carried out in a way that does not resemble the academic hiring process whatsoever,” says Lucianne Walkowicz of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. “When you construct an experiment that isn’t a good model of reality, you get results that are also not reflective of reality.”

It is also possible that the polled professors figured out that gender bias was being tested.

“Williams and Ceci do not have data to support how scientists rank potential candidates,” writes sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos. “They have produced data about how scientists respond to a study about gender bias in academia, when they can easily guess that gender bias is being observed.”

It may be difficult to construct an experiment that does reflect reality for academic hiring. Previous attempts looked at earlier points in the career path – applying for a lab manager job or emailing a professor to ask about a doctoral programme – and came to the opposite conclusion: John got more interviews than Jane.

Affirmative action

“This article is an outlier bobbing in a vast body of research that supports the existence of systemic bias against women in science,” Walkowicz says.

Placing this one study above those that outnumber and contradict it could hamper efforts to equalise gender bias. Katie Mack, a postdoctoral fellow at Melbourne University in Australia, points out: “If fellow scientists think that women who are hired are undeserving, it reinforces and multiplies existing unconscious biases.”

There is one way to interpret the results that is both realistic and positive: that affirmative action policies, which say that the under-represented candidate should get the job in cases where two candidate are equal, can work – at least in two-thirds of cases. Williams and Ceci agree with this.

But their assertion that women fail to apply for jobs because they are discouraged by research about sexism is misguided.

“The idea that ‘talking about the presence of sexism scares women away from the field’ is wrong and counterproductive,” Mack says. “Talking about the presence of sexism is the only thing that can help reduce it.”