The voice of reason is easy to shout down but hard to vanquish altogether. This week it turned up in an unlikely place: an academic paper about gender bias in the sciences. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a coolly objective paper on the hot, politicized subject of bias against women in academic science.
In “Understanding Current Causes of Women’s Underrepresentation in Science,” Cornell professors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams provide a thorough analysis and discussion of 20 years of data. Their conclusion: When it comes to job interviews, hiring, funding, and publishing, women are treated as well as men and sometimes better. As Williams told Nature, “There are constant and unsupportable allegations that women suffer discrimination in these arenas, and we show conclusively that women do not.” Put another way, the gender-bias empress has no clothes.
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For more than a decade, passionate activists in groups such as the American Association of University Women, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science have insisted that women scientists are victims of pervasive sex discrimination, and they have produced a mountain of advocacy research to prove it.
But many scholars have questioned the cogency of their studies, most recently in a 2009 article entitled “Gender Difference at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty,” sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and in a 2009 collection that I edited, The Science on Women in Science. But the NSF authors and other critics proved no match for the women’s groups, who ignored the evidence and aggressively promoted their own agenda through government lobbying and a mystifying number of conferences, retreats, and summits.
Ceci and Williams’s new article will be impossible to ignore. The featured article in one of science’s premier journals, it is a systematic demolition of most of the studies that sustain the science wing of the gender-bias movement. Celebrated bias research — including a much-vaunted 1997 Swedish study alleging massive discrimination in peer review — is shown to be seriously flawed, marginal, and “superseded by larger, more sophisticated analyses showing no bias, or occasionally, bias in favor of women.”
What is more, Ceci and Williams demonstrate that the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career. This issue, they say, will never be solved by the “misplaced focus on discrimination.”
But a misplaced focus on discrimination is now the law of the land. At the behest of the women’s groups, Congress held several hearings throughout the last decade on the “crisis” of sexism in the sciences. Scholars like Ceci and Williams played no role — only true believers were brought in as expert witnesses. Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), an early convert to the view that American science is saturated with sexism, was successful in bringing the Title IX equity program into the science lab.
“The most common misconception about Title IX is that it applies only to sports,” said Wyden in 2005. “That’s just not true. . . . Title IX should be a guiding principle in hiring, tenure, scholarships, and lab space for all scholars.” By the late 2000s, Wyden’s vision had prevailed: Wide-ranging Title IX investigations were underway.
Members of Congress, from both parties, also gave strong support to a hard-hitting NSF equity program called ADVANCE. ADVANCE has awarded millions of dollars to activist scholars in universities for anti-bias centers, workshops, tutorials, and interactive theater groups. To cite just one example, gender activists at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law were awarded a $300,000 grant to develop Gender Bias Bingo, an online game that raises players’ consciousness about the “four patterns of gender bias.” But if Ceci and Williams are right, the premise behind all of this taxpayer-funded agitation — from games and skits to Title IX investigations — is false.
Congress should hold hearings on the merits of continuing to spend hundreds of millions on Title IX science reviews and the ADVANCE grants. This time skeptics like Ceci and Williams must be included. It is hard to see how the gender-bias empire will stand once reason and truth are given a place at the table.
— Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
"It is hard to see how the gender-bias empire will stand once reason and truth are given a place at the table."
While I applaud Sommers in her ongoing efforts for fairness and honesty in academia, I think that the view encapsulated in this sentence is a bit naive. Pillar after pillar of the left wing temple have been knocked over by facts and logic over the last several decades and still the temple stands. Their arena is not one of logic, but one of religious desperation. They need to have these views, otherwise they have to deal with reality. Furthermore, at this point, too many have their careers based on gender and race equity fearmongering and nonsense who will fight desperately to keep the status quo. I predict that despite hammering home the irrationality of gender bias in science, that nothing will change in policy, at least not for a very long time.
Thank you so much for this column. I was saying the same thing fifteen years ago when I was working as a scientist (before the funding ran out). I could give plenty of anecdotes about women scientists who did just fine in their professions, and a few more anecdotes about how some of them did so while equally gifted and industrious men couldn't get ahead. Don't get me wrong, anybody: I don't blame any of that for the end of my first career -- things were just tough. I'm just saying I was there to see it happen. It's nice to finally see someone put some numbers to what I and others have known to be the case for a long time.
I just hope you are right when you say, "Ceci and Williams’s new article will be impossible to ignore." There's an awful lot of truth that gets ignored in academia.
Congress is not about to admit it made a mistake with Title IX. The only sensible thing to do is repeal Title IX totally since Ceci and Williams' report apparently shows it isn't necessary. Congress would be more likely to change it to something much worse. The whole premise of Title IX is wrong; what possible fix could there be?
You mean Larry Summers has been vindicated? On a related subject I've been seeing PSA's on TV lately about how women make only X% of men. Talk about gender bias (in their statistics) - I work in an industry were we have women CEO's, CFO's - and are just as successful as men. The gender bias industry needs to admit that there will always differences in how to measure women's careers against men. Motherhood is a very important careeer choice also.
This irrationality extends far beyond science. I've encountered it everywhere. In the rush to achieve perfect equality we've ignored the truth that there is no equality of talent, or ability. Individuals, genders and races have significant differences physically and mentally. Furthermore, culture, language and other factors affect the abilities of individuals, nationalities and races. Political correctness tends toward the lowest common denominator in every field, in public and higher education and in the workplace. It will not lead to a better, brighter future, but, in fact, the opposite.
We will continue to decline until we understand, accept and accommodate the aforementioned differences and re-enthrone merit as the paramount factor in determining individual progress.
We will never achieve perfect equality of opportunity, but the marketplace, alone, provides the best avenue there. Government meddling to achieve arbitrary social goals based upon spurious and suspect political agendas begets trouble.
Anyone with scientific traning from an accredicated university has known this for decades but governance (in this case for womens' entitlements) is not a function of knowledge but a function of greed. When the greed becomes too much of an imposition on the host, the host reacts to eliminate the parasite. The host always takes too long to react.
Yes, the gender bias industry, just like the other discrimination industries, will not give up easily. As Howard Jarvis once said, "You can't ask pigs to step away from the trough. You have to kick the trough away."
I am a woman scientist. Got my biology Ph.D. in the 1970s. There was clear bias against women when I entered science, and it is true that things have dramatically improved over the years.
One thing I have noted that seems to have persisted over these decades, is that certain subfields in biology have substantially more women than men. I can't see any logical reason for this, and I wonder if any of these bias studies considered this issue.
Many of us have worked for years to expose the gender bias industry that covers far more ground than the issue of women in science. One report after another has exposed the cold, hard facts. Yet we have seen little change. The gender bias lobby merely moves to new territory.
The issue of combining motherhood with a scientific career is important. We need empirical data on just how some women accomplish it.
As an undergraduate student in physics in the late 1970's, there were 10 male students for every female. By the time we started looking at grad school, the ratio was 25 men for every woman. Believe me, the professors did everything they could to encourage the women, but they dropped out way before tenure, scholarships, or lab space became issues for them. They just had less interest in pursuing a career in the field. Fast forward to 2010, in a global telecommunications firm where I now work, the ratio of men to women electrical and mechanical engineers is still 10 to 1, despite extensive support given to women in promotions, hiring, etc. Interesting, about one-half of the software engineers and programmers are women, though. The issue isn't discrimination: it's disparate interest.
Reason and truth have nothoing to do with it. Playing the Victim Card has everything to do with it because, with the pathetic idiots we have in Washington, it is the sure path to money and power.
I agree with others that this is an interesting study that I'm glad was conducted, especially considering the large amount of money being spent on solving this problem. The issue I have is that this study, and efforts to solve gender disparities, begin at the job search, or perhaps just before that in college departments. I am a woman, a researcher, and a statistician, but considering the bias I experienced prior to college, I'm lucky to have chosen to pursue this career at all. Around junior high, I began having trouble with math. I sought help at my school, only to receive, "Of course you're having trouble. You're a girl. Girls can't do math." This may sound like an exaggeration, but I assure you it is not: My teachers refused to help me, because I was a lost cause. So I gave up on math and pursued fields as "non-mathy" as I could find (theatre, literature, etc.). In college, thanks to some great professors and opportunities, I realized I loved statistics. I'm now about 3 months away from a PhD. While you may say things worked out in the end, based on the data I've viewed and collected on the effect of attitudes and stereotypes on math performance in women, I know that I'm more of the exception than the rule. So this study doesn't get at the real problem, and may even be examining a biased sample - you certainly wouldn't find any differences in hiring if only the best of the best female scientists make it to the degree/job interview/etc. In fact, considering that the women who stick with it are probably more dedicated and perhaps even more competent than the men, I'm not at all surprised that the researchers found in some cases better treatment of women.
I am guessing few of the commentors here actually read the original PNAS article. (External Link)
What the article says is that there is no bias between _equally credentialed_ men and women. It also notes that there are statistically inexplicably fewer equally credentialed women relative to men, especially at the highest levels.
So no, Larry Summers was not vindicated. That point was explicitly explored in the original article, addressed, and found statistically unsupported.
The original article also said that access to resources had the most to do with women becoming equally credentialed with male counterparts.
There was absolutely no effort to understand why there was this disparity between access to resources, other than to say that some women probably chose positions at institutions with fewer resources because of other features of those positions being more amenable to some putative life choices.
To sum up, the article found that _if_ they have equal credentials Jane Smith and John Smith's article or grant application will get equal reception. But it did not do a satisfactory job of addressing why there were so few Janes in the first place.
In engineering college not one member of SWE (Society of Women Engineers) was left off the honor roll. My then girlfriend, now wife told me she felt the skids greased in EE curriculum. I felt it was (as was with minorities) a discount on their accomplishments. In large companies and institutions some women see the game afoot in the sciences and have an easier time advancing (see the current president of RPI). In the end it's still the old white guys that make everything work or fixing up the stuff the pet groups can't, in spite of Title IX.
I find it at least amusing and at the most disgusting that the female approach to science is through their specialty, politics. Anyone with an ounce of sense can perceive that the vast, vast majority of women just don't care about how, why or even if complex systems, theoretical or functional, work. Just so long as they appear to, smell to or are some unreasonable facsimile of those conditions, it is fine with them. You can not say this anymore, without the supporters of feminized science exerting the exact opposite of fact finding (a contradiction to science by the way), to press silence on dissent. No wonder other nations, male dominated by the way, are taking the scientific lead. Our science is contaminated with illogical bias, forced by real world political power. There is a word for this, "Decline".
It seems we have the entire spectrum of people in the comments section - those who will still claim gender bias no matter how the science results tend towards disproving it, to those who claim there never was.
Frankly, after quite a few decades in academia, it seems there are subtleties that aren't really brought out very well. One is that some people (non-gender related) like to do certain things, are interested in certain things, but not others. Any kind of difference, however, has been gleefully grasped by the gender bias Gestapo and distorted out of reality to make their points.
Second, there ARE some things that women, in general, are truly not interested in, and some things that men aren't interested in. This isn't institutional gender bias, but biological bias, and should be recognized and accepted.
One thing other women in academia tend to forget, is that everything isn't logical. So if it doesn't make logical sense, it may be because you're totally ignoring the emotional (or creative) side of your personality. This blind spot is equally apparent in both sexes. Unfortunately, it is taught to be less reliable and valid, whereas it truly is not.
Time to get rid of this awful, despicable victimhood that keeps everyone down, women and men.
Sara,
You say you are a statistician yet extrapolate from a single data point (your experiences). It might make a good story but it is beyond meaningless if you are talking about society at large. Did your instructors teach you that a sample size of 1 has any meaning at all?
And this "In fact, considering that the women who stick with it are probably more dedicated and perhaps even more competent than the men, I'm not at all surprised that the researchers found in some cases better treatment of women." A hypothesis without any data. How exactly did you draw that conclusion? I'd love to see the dataset. Do women have in the sciences have a greater number of publications? Patents? Awards? How could you possibly make this conclusion.
