Anti-female science bias is ‘debunked’ by contemporary research
A milestone study on bias against women in science has been debunked – after nearly identical research found the opposite is true.
An experiment, first published in 2012, asked 127 science professors to rate fictional CVs which were identical except for the name.
They found the applicant named ‘John’ was rated as more competent, hireable and deserved a higher salary than the applicant called ‘Jennifer’.
But the findings – which have been cited more than 4,600 times – have now been thrown into question after a new group of scientists decided to rerun the study.
Researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey asked nearly 1,300 professors from more than 50 American institutions to rate the same application materials, but again with a different gendered name on the CV.
This time, however, the female applicant was ranked as marginally more capable and appealing to work with – and the more hireable of the pair.
She was also deemed worthy of a higher salary.
The researchers said their findings challenge the longstanding narrative that women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
An experiment which has been rerun has found the female applicant was ranked as marginally more capable and appealing to work with (stock image of a woman in front of a computer)
This, they believe, could be the reason that a leading science journal did not agree to their proposal to rerun the experiment.
Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim, lead authors of the study, said their application was rejected by Nature Human Behaviour.
Dr Honeycutt said he believes they may have experienced pushback because the submission reviewers agreed with the original results.
‘We can’t know for certain but [that is our suspicion] given the nature of their feedback and pushback’, he told The Times.
The scientists took their experiment elsewhere and the results have now been accepted by the journal Meta-Psychology.
The original study, titled ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students’, was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It reads: ‘Analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent.
‘We found that pre-existing subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student.
‘These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.’
Erika Pastrana, vice-president of the Nature Research Journals portfolio, said: ‘Decisions by our editors to accept or reject replication studies are based solely on whether the research meets our editorial criteria, including standards for methodological rigour.
‘Our decisions are not driven by a preferred narrative.’
