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Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress i...

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Autores principales: Ceci, Stephen J., Kahn, Shulamit, Williams, Wendy M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10394402/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37098793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/15291006231163179
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author Ceci, Stephen J.
Kahn, Shulamit
Williams, Wendy M.
author_facet Ceci, Stephen J.
Kahn, Shulamit
Williams, Wendy M.
author_sort Ceci, Stephen J.
collection PubMed
description We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists.
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spelling pubmed-103944022023-08-03 Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration Ceci, Stephen J. Kahn, Shulamit Williams, Wendy M. Psychol Sci Public Interest Article We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists. SAGE Publications 2023-04-26 2023-07 /pmc/articles/PMC10394402/ /pubmed/37098793 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/15291006231163179 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Article
Ceci, Stephen J.
Kahn, Shulamit
Williams, Wendy M.
Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title_full Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title_fullStr Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title_full_unstemmed Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title_short Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration
title_sort exploring gender bias in six key domains of academic science: an adversarial collaboration
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10394402/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37098793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/15291006231163179
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