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Education Math Programming Stats Science

Cornell Study: For STEM Tenure Track, Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men 517

_Sharp'r_ writes In the first "empirical study of sexism in faculty hiring using actual faculty members", Cornell University researchers found that when using identical qualifications, but changing the sex of the applicant, "women candidates are favored 2 to 1 over men for tenure-track positions in the science, technology, engineering and math fields." An anonymous reader links to the study itself.
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Cornell Study: For STEM Tenure Track, Women Twice As Likely To Be Hired As Men

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  • by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @11:25AM (#49471257)

    I've been pushing my daughter in STEM and she's about to transition from HS to college.

    If this keeps up, I can look forward to her not having to move home after college graduation!

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @11:41AM (#49471433)

      Sexism shouldn't be considered great news just because it cuts in a politically correct direction.

      • by GargamelSpaceman ( 992546 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @12:38PM (#49472133) Homepage Journal

        The Tuskeegee Airman scenario where pilots who had been discriminated against had gone through more training before they were allowed to fly and because of this had developed better skill than the average pilot is the reverse of what we see nowadays with Politically Correct discrimination.

        Whereas once when a member of a discriminated-against group attained a position despite the discrimination they tended to stand as an example of why the discrimination was invalid, discrimination FOR groups produces examples that seem to justify negative stereotypes groups may carry.

        Using irrelevant criteria such as sex or race to decide who fills a role, fills those roles with less qualified people than would be normal for those roles, and when statistics are done to determine how those criteria are associated with performance, ironically tend to support the discriminatory views the Politically Correct interference was meant to address.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @12:43PM (#49472175)

        As long as it attacks us young white males, it's always *great news* (hint: sarcasm). The fact is, most equality advocates I've met don't favor equality, they want preferential treatment and don't care if it steps on others, they just board the equality bandwagon to hide their selfishness. I've seen it too many times and I'm tired of it.

        *Disclaimer* I'm all for equality and that's not preferential treatment, it's holding qualifications to the same standards regardless of race, sex, icecream flavor you like (unless the icecream flavor you like is directly a function of your job... somehow).

    • I've been pushing my daughter in STEM and she's about to transition from HS to college.

      If this keeps up, I can look forward to her not having to move home after college graduation!

      Did she actually want to do STEM? You sound like you've decided her career for her.

    • Yup, great news. Because it benefits you personally, and it's not discrimination as long as it is against white males.
  • by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @11:27AM (#49471269)

    You now have a basis to sue. Have at it.

  • I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?

    I have a lot of friends who did engineering and are women, and they all left engineering because their skills were more valuable working elsewhere. Many now regret having done the degree in the first place since they never use

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Women thrive on social skills, it is impossible to encourage them to to have rubbish social skills. It is precisely because science and engineering do not foster social interaction that women find them, frankly, boring. So they eschew these careers.

      Academic is a special case. They will accommodate oddballs more readily than business. You can be terrible socially in the business world, but that doesn't make you an oddball. It doesn't surprise me that academics misread the lack of women in science and enginee

    • I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?

      Meh. I'm 30, I have half a million in the bank and I'm making over $10,000 in a month. As for security, my LinkedIn profile explicitly says not to email me with opportunities, but I still get at least one a week. A little of

  • Not Actual Hirings (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @11:59AM (#49471689)

    Before the comments explode into an orgy of heated and tedious argument (well ok, they already have), it's worth noting that the study didn't use statistics for actual hiring decisions. By the phrase "using actual faculty members," they just mean that they got a bunch of professors to participate in an experiment where they evaluate the suitability of various made-up candidates on paper. Meh. If they had real-world stats for this, I might actually be interested. How many men and how many women applied to different STEM faculty jobs in a given year, and who got hired? Simple - yet we don't have that information.

  • From what I've seen, getting a tenured STEM position is like winning the lottery these days, regardless of who you are or how good you are. Maybe this is just the system balancing itself out? There just aren't enough positions to go around anyway. Also, STEM departments in most places are overwhelmingly male, but correlation != causation.

    This was one of several things that kept me from going on to graduate studies in chemistry. Other than just being burnt out on school by the point I had to decide, the odds

  • Discrimination is not only legal, but encouraged, so long as it's in favour of women and minorities.

    Pathetic.

  • Tenure is rapidly going away, partially as more universities are replacing regular faculty with adjunct faculty and using the availability of the latter as justification for worse treatment of the former. Go look at the closest 4-year school to where you live and see how many tenure-track STEM openings they have. Then look this summer to see how many openings they have for adjuncts.

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