Exploring gender bias in six key domains of academic science: an adversarial collaboration
Files
Published version
Date
2023-07
Authors
Kahn, Shulamit
Ceci, Stephen
Williams, Wendy
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
S. Kahn, S. Ceci, W. Williams. 2023. "Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration" Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume 24, Issue 1, pp.15-73. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006231163179
Abstract
Claims of gender bias in academic science have been widely published, including general descriptions of systemic societal factors that limit women—such as their roles as primary parents and caregivers—and more specific statements asserting sexism at key evaluation points of academic careers. We comprehensively reviewed the evidence in published research regarding differential treatment by gender for six key evaluation domains in the tenure-track academy: hiring, grant funding, journal acceptances, teaching ratings, recommendation letters, and salary, over a 20-year period (2000 to 2020). We focused on these specific domains because they are readily operationalizable and they are represented across a vast literature available for quantitative analysis. Contrary to omnipresent claims in top journals and the media, we found that tenure-track women are at parity with men in three domains (U.S. grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters), and women are advantaged over men in the domain of hiring. However, for teaching ratings and salary, we found evidence of bias against women. In the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of bias against women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. We suggest that efforts and resources to combat bias be redirected and focused on domains in which empirically demonstrable bias actually persists.
Description
License
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/15291006231163179 www.psychologicalscience.org/PSPI