From CNN

Why bias holds women back

By Meg Urry, Special to CNN

updated 5:25 PM EDT, Mon October 1, 2012

 

Editor's note: Meg Urry is the Israel Munson professor of physics and astronomy and chairwoman of the department of physics at Yale University, where she is the director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

(CNN) -- In 2001, I became the first tenured female faculty member ever in Yale's physics department. Throughout my 30 years as a physicist, being the only woman in the room has been the norm. Women fill more than half of the jobs in the U.S. economy but constitute fewer than 12% of working physicists and engineers. For me and for others in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the dearth of women is not news.

What was big news last week was a study, from colleagues in other departments at Yale, explaining why this deficiency of women persists.

Evidence shows that established scientists at top research universities -- those choosing and training the next generation of STEM experts -- unconsciously rate budding female scientists lower than men with identical credentials. They judge women less capable, less worthy of hiring and less deserving of mentoring. And they propose starting salaries that are on average 14% higher for men than for women.

 

The new study is the first to be done on STEM faculty rather than, as is more typical, college undergraduates. Hundreds of earlier studies on undergraduates established that the name on a résumé affects our perceptions. And that women and men both act with unconscious bias to privilege those who already dominate a specific field of work, whether that means preferring a man's résumé for a job in physics or a woman's for a job in nursing.

When I was a young scientist, the dearth of female colleagues bothered me. So did the general lack of concern this raised in the scientific community. Occasionally, a colleague might ask why there weren't more women in physics, but their favorite hypothesis didn't hold water: that family priorities are to blame, because the years raising children often coincide with the crucial years as an assistant professor right before getting tenure.

But if family considerations slowed the advancement of women, why would women without children have similar career trajectories to those with children who remained full-time in the work force? It didn't add up.

I also struggled to understand why I didn't seem to belong in my field -- why I was overlooked for leadership roles, why I was underpaid, why my suggestions were ignored until a male colleague proposed the same idea and why female scientists in general garnered a disproportionately small share of honors and awards.

Then I stumbled on a description about bias in Virginia Valian's eye-opening book, "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women."

It was a classic Eureka moment. My observations of the underappreciation of women in science were suddenly explained by a simple idea: that each of us, having grown up in a society where men and women are not equal and do not populate the peaks of accomplishment equally, has an unconscious expectation that men are leaders.

Consider this riddle I heard as a kid: A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The man dies on the spot, and the son is rushed to the hospital. Upon entering the operating room, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy; he's my son."

I was utterly unable to figure out how the boy's father could both be dead and about to perform surgery. Of course, the answer is that the boy's mother was the surgeon. That possibility never crossed my young mind because, until I was in my 20s, I had never had a female doctor. So it's not surprising that I developed an unconscious expectation that doctors would be men.

 

The social science research made all kinds of sense to me. Our experiences of life are turned into unconscious expectations that affect how we see others. When scholars reviewed a psychology research paper, for example, they scored it higher if the author's name were male than if female. A male applicant for a job as police chief was rated higher than a woman, even though she had important qualifications for the job that he lacked. Similarly, a male applicant for a job as nursing supervisor was rated lower than the female applicant, even when he had the qualifications she lacked.

These experiments, which vary only the name at the top of the résumé, are repeatable. Time after time, the results are the same.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that people who swear they are objective are the most likely to make biased judgments. In several classic experiments, subjects were asked which criteria are most important for a particular job and then shown two résumés: one of the "wrong" gender who had all those qualifications and one of the "right" gender who lacked them. Yet the subjects rated the person with the "right" gender higher, i.e. they ignored the criteria they had earlier said were most important. And this tendency was greatest among those claiming objectivity.

Those who admitted at the outset that they were not objective were the least likely to shift criteria because of gender. It seems like people who are aware of the unconscious biases we all carry are less likely to make judgments influenced by that bias.

You can even check out your own objectivity on a website: implicit.harvard.edu. It's a sobering experience. Mine is probably typical: I so deeply wanted to be unbiased, but while taking the online tests, I felt the impact of gender and race on my reactions. Mahzarin Banaji, the Harvard professor who started the website, says she too showed signs of bias when she took her own test. If she can admit that, perhaps the rest of us can be open to the possibility.

Ridiculous Title to Article - But the Sentiment is Correct

At Phys Org
Stone age man had 'feminine side'
July 31, 2012

Dr. Karina Croucher, who has studied buried remains of people living between 7,500 and 10,000 years ago across the Middle East, says the stereotypical view of how Neolithic men and women lived is wrong. 

Unlike today, she argues, it was normal for men and women to show compassion for each other- and gender was not so clearly defined. The researcher argues male bias in archaeology has distorted our understanding of how ancient peoples lived, in a new book published by Oxford University Press.

Of the 40 people buried in a “death pit” in South Eastern Turkey where she was part of an excavation team, there were equal numbers of men and women. Her theory is also based, in part, by the find of a teenage girl’s skull buried carefully by the pit, called Kim by the team. The girl – between 15 and 17 years old - whose face has been reconstructed by Chris Rynn and Caroline Wilkinson, now at Dundee University with Stuart Campbell from The University of Manchester, was deeply cared for by the men and women who tended the site.

The facial reconstruction creates an emotive picture of the girl who lived 7,500 years ago. Kim was carefully placed next to the death pit. The pit contained the fragmented remains of around 40 people, along with animal remains, pottery, flint, obsidian, and other material culture. It also displays signs of cannibalism.

Though the finds to modern eyes are gruesome, Dr. Croucher says, they show a compassionate side to both Neolithic men and women. She said: “In the Death Pit, a specific choice was made to inter these human remains - including Kim - within its context, and that undoubtedly required care and effort, not only in its construction, but additionally in keeping the area protected and clear of scavengers.

Even the cannibalism was probably seen by these people as a compassionate act. "When human remains from across the region are examined, it becomes apparent that it was difficult for the living to let go of their loved ones. For example, human faces were recreated onto the skulls of the dead using plaster, and they were cared for within houses. This treatment was not dependent on age or gender, but according to relationships and emotive ties.

“This and other evidence shows that it’s clear the relationship between men and women during the Neolithic Period does not conform to the modern age.

“The stereotypical and inaccurate view of male hunters dominating their more submissive female counterparts is an articulation of male bias in archaeology.  It was much less well defined than that: Men and women were treated equally in death and were shown equal compassion, and their tasks were likely to be thought of as equal during life. Our biases in the present were not relevant to our ancestors, and are not natural or inherent behaviours.

“So we should not understand the past in our own terms: it’s more about their relationships with each other; materials and animals."

Dr. Croucher's book was made possible by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Provided by University of Manchester



Indeed, one need only think of the human interments beneath the floors of houses excavated in Catal Hoyuk (also in Turkey).  The misleading and silly title of this article aside, it makes an important point. 

Gender bias in research has long been a problem.  We do tend to filter archaeological findings and historical records through our own modern "filters" -- with all the resultant flaws those filters incorporate.  The classic study that I like to point is from the 1970s dealing with the mating habits of mustangs in the southwest United States.  I've written about it several times.  You can read the article in this May 5, 2007 blog post. 

How You Ask the Question May Determine the Answer

Hola darlings! It's Saturday evening and I've been working on an article about the Nishapur chess pieces most of the day - time to take a break!

When I first read this article in Newsweek Magazine in 1999, I was so struck by it that I saved it. The principles it teaches continue to speak to me today: (1) The socialization associated with being a male or female colors our assumptions; (2) those underlying assumptions color our perceptions; (3) those perceptions govern how we interact with others and function in larger society.

The thing is, assumptions can be changed - and once these are changed, our perceptions change too. These principles are key to re-defining the perceptions that males and females have about each other and how we interact with each other - and also key to how females can release themselves from the "trap" of inferior expectations when it comes to chess (and every other area of life).

Newsweek June 28, 1999
From Both Sides Now
Women do research the same way men do, but the questions they ask nature may be different. Has feminism changed science?
Author: Sharon Begley With Thomas Hayden Edition:
ATLANTIC EDITION
Section: SocietyPage: 64

One story from the annals of science seems destined to become a minor classic among certain biologists, and it is no coincidence that it concerns sex. Out on the Western plains, biologists were studying herds of mustangs, in which the reigning stallion was believed to have the sole right to procreate. Then a researcher got the bright idea of running DNA tests on the horses. As paternity tests often do, these proved embarrassing: fewer than one third of the herd's foals had been sired by the resident stallions. Instead, mares had snuck over to other herds, mating with males there. Blinded by the "harem" metaphor of mustang social structure, researchers had not even looked for such female behavior.

As such examples accumulate, more and more scholars are wondering whether cultural forces such as feminism affect the direction and results of research. In her new book, "Has Feminism Changed Science?" Penn State historian Londa Schiebinger answers with a definite yes.

"Science is not value-neutral," she argues. "Getting the right answers--turning the crank--may be gender-free. But it is often in setting priorities about what will and what will not be known that gender has an impact."

The claim is inflaming the "science wars," with their battles over whether science is as isolated and objective as partisans claim.

That's the key: it is not that men and women do science differently, but that they choose different questions to pursue, says biologist Patricia Adair Gowaty of the University of Georgia. "The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s had a huge effect on me," she recalls. "Ideas I was exposed to I have since erected as testable, scientific hypotheses."

One hypothesis involves asking under what circumstances female bluebirds have... well, extramarital affairs. "This is how feminism has changed science," says Gowaty. "I'm not doing the science any differently, but I'm asking a question that has not been asked before."

Gowaty suspects that a female bluebird risks "extra-pair copulations" if she is healthy and a good forager, which would allow her to support her offspring even if her cuckolded mate left. "By answering this question," says Gowaty, "we'll know more about female biology."

And maybe not only the avian kind. Although most scientists dismiss the idea that there is a female "way of knowing"--holistic, nondominating and cooperative--many recognize that the different experiences men and women bring to the lab lead them to scrutinize different aspects of nature.

Marine biologist Mary Beth Saffo of the University of Arizona was startled when she looked around a 1989 conference on symbiosis--often beneficial relationships between living things, like the little fish that clean parasites off sharks in return for table scraps. "The majority were women," she says. Was it a coincidence? In the '50s and '60s, says Saffo, biologists tried to understand ecosystems "through a framework of antagonism and competition." "There's more interest in and recognition of mutualism now," or cooperative relationships between species.

Although Saffo doesn't go so far as to attribute the shift to feminism, it did coincide with the flood of women into ecology. Something similar happened in the study of humans' primate relatives. From the 1950s to the 1970s primatologists studied savanna baboons. This species is more aggressive, male-dominated and competitive than any other nonhuman primate. "Most of these scientists were men," says primatologist Linda Fedigan of the University of Alberta. The species they chose, she says, reinforced the notion that male dominance and aggression are the norms of primate behavior, including ours, and that it is the males who bring social cohesion to the troop.

When feminism and women entered the field, in the 1970s, they upended the stereotype of the passive, dependent female, and questioned the idea that male aggression and alliances are the most powerful shapers of primate society. Instead, it turns out that elderly female baboons determine where the troop will forage each day, and a male's reproductive success depends less on his place in the dominance hierarchy than it does on his relationships with the troop's females. And when women began studying primates other than baboons, they found that females actively pursue males and have loads of extramarital affairs--apparently to get more males to provide and care for the babies. Now females are no longer considered peripheral to primate evolution.

Feminism has also changed ideas about how humans evolved from quadrupedal apes to toolmakers, thinkers and talkers. In the 1960s the answer was unquestioned: hunting. The story was that men who learned to cooperate, communicate and make weapons in order to hunt stimulated their brains and drove evolution. Women tagged along and pushed out babies every few years. But female anthropologists now have other ideas. In "Lucy's Legacy," to be published in November, Alison Jolly of Princeton University argues that behavior where females excel (language and forming social bonds) or roles that fall to females (forging links between generations) played the key role in human evolution.

But would these insights have come even if feminism never existed? "Because the changes came so quickly after the feminist critique, they must be at least a bit in response," says Linda Fedigan. But have feminists exaggerated their effect? Schiebinger and others claim that it took feminists to overthrow the dogma about active, heroic sperm pursuing the fat, passive egg, and substituting the now standard view that the egg plays an active role in conception by sending out fingerlike microvilli to reel in a sperm.

Biologist Paul Gross isn't buying it. "The argument about feminism focusing attention upon the egg is absurd and dishonest," he says, because the egg's active role was noted in textbooks even in the 1960s. "If that's all 'feminist science' can claim as an achievement, then it's a joke."

But it does make other claims, in fields from mustang matings to human evolution. If it turns out that the questions science poses, and the answers it seeks, are not walled off from society, maybe that's as it should be. Remember - the assumptions underlying the question are just as important as the question itself.