All Things Being Equal, John Still Gets The Advantage Over Jennifer
This morning I dropped my daughter off for her university orientation. She’s attending school in Philadelphia – she’s a declared Mechanical Engineering major on scholarship. We are very proud of her accomplishments. So… when a study like this comes out it worries me.
For the study, researchers from Yale University asked more than 100 science faculty members at academic institutions across the country to evaluate one of two student résumés. The résumés were identical except for one small part: The candidate’s name was either John or Jennifer. Despite both candidates having the exact same qualifications and experience, science faculty members were more likely to perceive John as competent and select him for a hypothetical lab manager position.
And it didn’t stop there. Female and male science faculty members alike offered John a higher salary than they did Jennifer and were more willing to offer him mentoring opportunities.
The discrepancy in John and Jennifer’s treatment is important because women are woefully underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and computing. Gender bias contributes to scenarios in which women like “Jennifer” are evaluated as less competent, less hirable, and less valuable than identically qualified male counterparts.
Another study by researchers at Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago found that participants acting as employers systematically underestimated the mathematical performance of women compared with men. The result? The experiment’s employers hired lower-performing men over higher-performing women for mathematical work.
Reread that last sentence: “The experiment’s employers hired lower-performing men over higher-performing women for mathematical work.” You don’t say?
What about… “The résumés were identical except for one small part: The candidate’s name was either John or Jennifer. Despite both candidates having the exact same qualifications and experience, science faculty members were more likely to perceive John as competent and select him for a hypothetical lab manager position.”
This tells me that no matter how good my daughter is, her gender will be a strike against her – unless she works harder, and does way better than a man. If Jennifer has the same résumé as John… too bad, Jennifer. You’ll have to be better than John, but, even then, you still might not get hired since employers seem just fine with hiring lower-performing men over higher-performing women in math.
We are a STEM family (Mr. Pandora is an engineer. Our son is one year away from his Mech Engineering degree. My brother is the head of Immunology for a major pharmaceutical company. My sister-in-law works for MIT.), so this research causes me concern. It tells my daughter that not only does she have to excel at her career path she has to work even harder/do better than her male counterparts – that the bar set for her is higher than for men who sit next to her in the exact same classrooms, and do the same – or worse! – on tests/coursework.
That’s not fair, and it needs to change. Now.
Tags: Women's Issues
In most fields, except maybe the service industry jobs, women are often paid less than men doing the same job, hence the fact that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Until recently, men were first choice for entrance to colleges and universities. Girls have been treated differently in math and science classes in public school. Historically, parents trerated their girls different than their male children when it came to STEM educational expectations.
However, that has changed in most cases, largely due to the faculty in math, science, and computer technology and employers have made a big push to find and educate future women scientists. There is a severe shortage of scientists in the United States and the world.
The Federal and Statre governments have increased funding substanially for educating and training funded programs for women and the industry has created numerous programs that mentor female enginering students. The STEM Industry has mentoring programs for women graduates of colleges and universities, and they also mentor women while in school.
The situation is far from perfect now; however, there are opportunities for women scientists that never existed before. Women, in all career fields, still must work harder and do it better then their men colleagues to reach high levels of success. Women are no stranger to success, creativity, and invention in the broad field of science, math, and computer science careers.
The online National Women’s History Museum has an exhibit on women in STEM careers. It also highlights women STEM pioneers. The museum is free and accessible online to everyone at http://www.nwhm.org. One of their current exhibits is “Breaking In: Science, Technology, Mathematics”. Delaware has had its fair share of women scientist inventors, thanks to the DuPont Company. Check it out.
Your daughter will be inspired and you can find peace of mind.
There is no “peace of mind” here. I’m in a similar situation: twins. Son is a computer science/math major. Daughter is a math/education major. She actually has the higher GPA (damn that French professor with his insistence on pronunciation! that’s how Michael explains the difference).
While there hasn’t been overt discrimination (they attend the same university) and while there are even a number of female role models on the faculty, here’s the really interesting thing: during her freshman year (in which she scored a 4.0 cum) her freshman advisor and two other professors tried to talk her out of a math major because an English major would be “easier” and “more fun.” Nobody tried to talk my son out of his major. I don’t believe this is unrelated to gender.
Steve’s comment triggered events for me. Both my kids are mech engineering majors (My son will be a senior at university, my daughter entering her freshman year). When he was starting college and told people his major everyone said, “Wow. You must be really smart.” When my daughter tells people her major the majority have responded with: “That’s a really hard major. You’re going to have to really hit the books.”
Yes, pandora, it is interesting that both my kids have exactly the same grades on comparable math courses (like Math Thought and Calc 2 Honors), and both will be tutoring upper-level math courses this fall as Sophomores, but only my daughter has been asked if she’ll be able to “handle it” along with the course overload that both are taking. Likewise, my daughter’s best male friend in her English class who is a Physics major wasn’t asked by the professor to switch majors because “I know you wouldn’t consider it.” Why the assumption that a female would automatically bolt a tough major.