Science Career Bias Against Women Debunked After Study is Repeated
A landmark study that claimed men enjoy an unfair advantage in scientific careers has been debunked after a nearly identical rerun of the experiment finds that the opposite is true: it’s women who have the unfair advantage
The Times has the story.
The results are all the more striking because a leading scientific journal had refused to repeat the original experiment, raising concerns that some researchers are reluctant to scrutinise results that align with their views.
The original study, published in 2012, has been cited 4,600 times — an enormous figure in a field where most papers attract fewer than 20 citations. It involved science professors being sent a fictional CV for a lab manager job.
In half of CVs, the applicant was named “John”, while for the other half the applicant was named “Jennifer”. Everything else, from the candidate’s academic grades to work experience, was identical.
The professors who saw the male name rated him as more competent, more hireable and more deserving of mentoring and a higher salary. The finding is often mentioned in debates about the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers.
The new paper repeated the test on a far larger scale. Whereas the original had asked about 130 academics at six universities, the authors of the new paper — led by Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim of Rutgers University in New Jersey — contacted nearly 1,300 professors from more than 50 American research institutions, using the same application materials and the same measures of perceived competence, hireability, likeability and salary recommendations.
The aim was to see whether the result of the original paper held when the experiment was repeated. It did not. The female applicant was seen as marginally more capable and appealing to work with and the more hireable of the pair. She was also seen as worth a bigger salary — $35,550 versus $34,150 for the man. The differences were small, but consistent. The widely cited bias against women failed to reappear; it now tilted the other way.
Honeycutt said attitudes may have shifted since the first study, but that the failure to replicate could also reflect the small sample size of the original experiment.
According to the authors of the new study, the resistance they encountered when they suggested repeating the experiment may be as telling as the result. Honeycutt said that he and his co-authors were taken aback when they proposed a rerun to Nature Human Behaviour, a leading journal.
When Honeycutt and his colleagues submitted a registered replication report (RRR) — a formal proposal to repeat the study — it was rejected by a panel of peer reviewers acting for the journal.
Worth reading in full.
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