This post was edited by Melanie Will-Cole on Mar, 2020
M. Will-Cole (CNM) post #2 on learning/key finding from task 2 or 3:
I read the articles on gender bias. I especially liked the article “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students” as it presented the details and experimental methods used in their study. The articles focused on an experiment whereby science faculty were asked to evaluate credentials for the hiring for a lab technician position from equally qualified undergraduate male and female student applicants. The results demonstrated that science faculty members rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hirable than the female applicant. The results showed that the selection committee also designated a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant vs. the female applicant. The study determined that the hiring selectivity of the male applicant over the female applicant was not due to a conscious hostility towards women by the hiring committee, but instead due to their implicit bias or cultural stereotypes suggestive of women’s lack of science competence.
I was not surprised that the hiring committee selected the male applicant for the lab manager position, nor was I surprised that they gaged the male applicant to be worth a higher salary and to be a more meritable time investment (i.e. worth their mentorship-time) than the female applicant. You see, during my many years as a senior research scientist in a prominent government research lab I have not only witness such actions but I have experienced them. For example, when I was hired I was offered a lower salary than my equivalent (same education and research experience) male scientist counterparts. Another notable citation occurred when a female post doc, who had worked in my colleague’s lab for several years hence had a proven track record for success in research, was applying for a job in our lab. At that time a recent PhD (a male in the same field as this female post doc, i.e., materials physics) was in the application pool. Although both applicants were offered research positions, the female post doc received a significantly lower salary offer. The hiring committee (all males) did not discuss the reasons for the salary differential, hence I attributed their actions as “blatant unfairness” towards females in the physical sciences and engineering disciplines, after all there were so few of us in the lab.
What I found most interesting when comparing my personal experiences with those of this article’s research study was the composition of the hiring committee. In my experiences the hiring committee's were composed of 5-7 white middle aged males with expertise in physics and electrical engineering while those in the research study were a more diverse set of individuals (i.e. included male and female faculty, across an array of age groups with expertise in a variety of fields to include biology, chemistry and physics). As I stated above, my initial thoughts with respect to my personal experiences were that management-level male physical scientists/electrical engineers simply do not desire women in the physical science/engineering disciplines and I believed them to be consciously unfair/hostile towards women scientists applying for jobs within our lab. After reading the article what I learned is that such situations/outcomes are largely due to implicit bias, hence not expressed by specifics such as gender, age group or scientific expertise, instead the culprit, which is suggestive of women’s lack of science competence, is our cultural stereotypes. After reading the article I reflected on how societal views have been in-grained in us, suggesting that men are clearly better at the physical sciences than women. Whether it be that our culture views women as having less of an aptitude for math and science than men or whether our culture perceives women as preferring the non-science “easier” disciplines really does not matter. What matters is that we need to mitigate these cultural stereotypes.
After reading these articles the question to be raised is: “Are these implicit biases affecting the attraction and retention of women in the physical science and engineering fields?”. If, as shown in this study, that the college faculty participants indeed possessed and acted on their implicit biases then how can we be sure that female students are treated fairly by their instructors in their college-level STEM classes. Unfair treatment usually causes individuals to remove themselves from such biased situations, in this instance, abandoning the STEM disciplines. I fear that until we suppress these stereotypes many women will indeed be treated unfairly throughout their educational science experiences and they will ultimately “opt out” of the STEM fields. Although this treatment is not intentional or mean spirited, the result is still caustic in the sense that the Leakey STEM pipeline will continue to remove women from STEM undergraduate and graduate educational commmunities and ultimately from STEM careers. It is not easy to remove cultural stereotypes, perhaps education is the first step, then comes corrective practice, more corrective practice, more corrective practice…….and then hopefully a positive outcome for women in STEM.
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