I've written a lot of posts about the gender gap in academia, in economics and in other (mostly STEM) disciplines (see the list at the end of this post). However, this 2023 review article by Stephen Ceci (Cornell University), Shulamit Kahn (Boston University), and Wendy Williams (Cornell University), published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest (open access), suggests that the gender gap may not be a substantial as previously believed (including by me). This article is quite credible, having arisen as an 'adversarial collaboration', meaning a collaboration between researchers who previously disagreed on the key conclusions from the literature. As Ceci et al. explain:
This article represents more than 4.5 years of effort by its three authors. By the time readers finish it, some may assume that the authors were in agreement about the nature and prevalence of gender bias from the start. However, this is definitely not the case. Rather, we are collegial adversaries who, during the 4.5 years that we worked on this article, continually challenged each other, modified or deleted text that we disagreed with, and often pushed the article in different directions...
Kahn has a long history of revealing gender inequities in her field of economics, and her work runs counter to Ceci and Williams’s claims of gender fairness.
Ceci et al. focus on seven questions of relevance to understanding the gender gap in academia:
In this article, we comprehensively examine evidence in six key evaluation contexts: (a) Are similarly accomplished women and men treated differently by academic hiring committees? (b) Are grant reviewers biased against female PIs? (c) Are journal reviewers biased against female authors? (d) Are recommendation-letter writers biased against female applicants for tenure-track positions? (e) Are faculty salaries biased against women? And, (f) are student teaching evaluations biased against female instructors? Claims of gender bias are omnipresent in all six of these domains... (We also review the literature in a seventh context, gender differences in publication rates, because publishing productivity can moderate evaluation in most of these six contexts.)
Ceci et al. focus on research published since 2000, which is more likely to represent the 'current' state of academia (although, arguably, they should weight more heavily more recent studies, which they don't). They also distinguish between:
...the most mathematically intensive fields—geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science (GEMP)—and less math-intensive fields—life sciences, psychology, and social sciences (LPS).
It is generally claimed that gender gaps are more prevalent in the GEMP fields than in the LPS fields (and a quick read through the links at the end of this post would suggest that is definitely true of economics, as one example).
The article is very thorough and has a lot of detail related to each of those contexts, so I'm just going to hit the headlines in relation to each of the seven research questions. If you are interested in any particular finding, the article is open access, so you can easily look at their review and unpack the details there. In relation to the first research question (are similarly accomplished women and men treated differently by academic hiring committees?), Ceci et al. conclude that:
The vast majority of findings—from (a) synthetic cohort analysis, (b) institutional hiring records, and (c) experiments—indicate that women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do.
So, the news is both good and bad. On the positive side, there is little evidence of bias. However, where a gender gap in hiring persists, and is not because of bias in hiring, the gender gap must arise from differences in the rates of applying for academic positions between men and women. Indeed, Ceci et al. note that:
...women are more likely than men to give up their initial aspirations to become tenure-track professors while in graduate school, a finding primarily true of women with children or contemplating children. Undoubtedly, broad systemic factors are partly responsible, along with biological factors, for these women not applying for tenure-track positions.
That still suggests that there is further work to do (both in terms of research and in terms of addressing the problem), but this particular article skirts around that issue because it focuses on the gender biases for academics, and not the graduate student experience. In relation to the second research question (are grant reviewers biased against female principal investigators (PIs)?), Ceci et al. conclude that:
...pre-2006 evidence suggests that although some agencies evaluated men and women differently, on average they did not.
Ceci et al. then conduct their own meta-analysis of the literature since 2000 (including 39 studies), and conclude that:
Taken together, both the analytic dissection and our meta-analyses appear not to support the claim that the grant peer-review process has been rigged against women PIs during the past 20 years in the United States. This is particularly true when analyses controlled for PIs’ research productivity...
On the third research question (are journal reviewers biased against female authors?), Ceci et al. conduct both a review and meta-analysis and conclude that:
...overall, our meta-analyses and our dissection of key studies revealed no evidence of systematic bias against female authors, notwithstanding claims to the contrary.
For the fourth research question (are recommendation-letter writers biased against female applicants for tenure-track positions?), Ceci et al. conclude that:
On the basis of our analysis of the nine studies in this domain, we conclude that no persuasive evidence exists for the claim of antifemale bias in academic letters of recommendation.
In relation to the fifth research question (are faculty salaries biased against women?), Ceci et al. conclude that:
...the evidence supports the claim that women are paid less than men in tenure-track academia, although the magnitude of the gap is much smaller (60%–80% smaller) than often claimed in executive summaries and headlines, and in some situations has disappeared.
Ceci et al. also dig a bit deeper on the salary differences, noting that:
Some of the unexplained gender salary gap may be due to implicit bias (although this seems unlikely in biology, where starting salaries are higher for women), and some of it may be due to differences in willingness to negotiate and solicit outside offers... some of the remaining pay gap may be due to women’s work discontinuities for family leave... or to a desire to keep jobs flexible... Finally, some of the relatively small remaining pay gap may be due to women’s lower likelihood of negotiating higher salaries or their lower likelihood of pursuing more lucrative job offers. The lower likelihood of negotiating higher salaries may itself be due to bias... Without specific data on family leaves, past employment, and job pursuit, it is impossible to know how much, if any, of the less than 4% unexplained pay gap is attributable to bias.
The salary gap of 4% is small, but it is not zero. The fact that much of the gap can be explained by the factors outlined above would accord with research by 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin (whose work they cite, among others). However, that leaves open the question of how large the salary gap would be, after accounting for work discontinuities, preferences for flexibility, and negotiation? Again, a research question to be addressed in the future.
On the sixth research question (are student teaching evaluations biased against female instructors?), Ceci et al. conclude that:
...the evidence supports the claim that female instructors are penalized for being women, independent of the content and delivery of their lectures and independent of students’ actual learning. The effect sizes we calculated indicate penalties for women that ranged between small and moderately large (ds = 0.10–0.50). So, unlike the domains in which we were able to unequivocally reject claims of widespread gender bias, in this domain, we conclude that there is gender bias.
This is consistent with many research findings on student evaluations of teaching, including studies I have blogged about before (most recently here, and see the other links at the end of that post for more). Unfortunately, this seems to be a pervasive finding across all teaching contexts, and it doesn't appear to be getting any better.
Finally, in relation to the additional research context (gender differences in research productivity), Ceci et al. conclude that male researchers do have higher research productivity (more publications), and that:
...gender productivity differences are smallest in GEMP fields (with the exception of economics) and are largest (and possibly growing) in biology, psychology, and economics.
The overall takeaway from this work is that there are still gender gaps in academia, but that many of the gaps, or claimed gaps, don't seem to arise from gender bias. At least, that's what we should conclude from the research to date. That is true of all of the domains except salaries and teaching evaluations. None of this means that we should conclude that all is rosy for female academics (unlike the title of this post), and that is certainly not the case across all fields. Indeed, some of the changes in recent years might actually make things worse for female academics before they get better (as noted in yesterday's post). We still have some way to go, especially in the more technical fields, including STEM and economics.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, back in 2023]
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