Aug. 5

Keys to Hiring Women in Science

Campuses are full of both success stories and horror stories about the recruitment of women to positions in science and engineering departments. There are search committee chairs convinced that they know what worked — and would-be professors who never bothered applying for positions because they didn’t feel welcome.

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Two sociologists who want to push the discussion beyond anecdotes and individual preferences think they have found evidence of steps that do make a difference in the recruitment of women for science faculty jobs. Specifically, they urge a focus on efforts to increase the pool of female applicants, and the importance of having a woman serve on the search committee.

The sociologists — Christy M. Glass of Utah State University and Krista Lynn Minnotte of the University of North Dakota, who presented findings this weekend in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association — based their analysis on confidential reviews of all of the science, mathematics and engineering searches at a Western doctoral-granting university over a five-year period. They were able to track what happened to 3,245 applicants for 63 positions — and included all applicants except those whose gender was not clear from name or biographical information.

In some respects, their analysis found a clear willingness to hire women. The university offered jobs to 5.6 percent of female applicants, compared to only 2.9 percent of male applicants. But because 84.8 percent of all applicants were male, and because female applicants who were offered jobs were more likely to turn them down, the authors write that it is key to identify the factors that work for women.

Searches that included advertisements or postings in publications focused on women in science attracted far more female applicants than did comparable searches that did not engage in such recruitment strategies. Men appear to have an “information advantage” in finding out about openings, said Minnotte, so steps that balance that have an impact on attracting female candidates.

Attracting female candidates is important because search committees were much more likely to move women to the finalist stage when there were many women in the pool than when there were just a few.

Another strategy discussed was having at least one woman on a search committee. Here, the research found no relationship between having a woman on a search committee and the number or share of female applicants. However, the study found (in figures very close to statistical significance) that searches with women on the search committee were more likely to have women as semifinalists and to make an offer to a woman.

There are multiple explanations for the positive impact of a woman on a search committee, the paper says. One is that a woman may reduce “tendencies toward homosocial reproduction by granting power over the hiring decision to members outside the dominant status group.” But another is that departments “more committed to integrating their faculty ranks will be more attentive to both the gender composition of search committees as well as the gender composition of their finalist pools.” Either way, the authors write, it’s a step that appears to yield results.

Here are the figures for the searches studied.

Percent of Final Applicant Status by Gender of Applicant

Status	Males	Females
Hired	2.03%	4.28%
Declined offer	0.77%	1.28%
Finalist	4.60%	11.56%
Semifinalist	8.54%	11.99%
Applicant only	84.06%	70.88%

— Scott Jaschik

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Comments

The Essence of Affirmative Action ...

This is indeed encouraging but not news. Ask any experienced equal employment opportunity/affirmative action or diversity officer and he or she will tell you that the essence of an effective affirmative action program is recruitment of qualified candidates and diversifying the pool. This increases the likelihood that a member of a disadvantaged minority group or a woman will be hired where these groups were underutilized before. This is ACTION in the affirmative. Not quotas or preferences. This is also opportunity — giving members of a previously excluded group an opportunity to compete.

SJW, at 7:25 am EDT on August 5, 2008

“In some respects, their analysis found a clear willingness to hire women. The university offered jobs to 5.6 percent of female applicants, compared to only 2.9 percent of male applicants.”

Willingness to discriminate against men is more like it based on those numbers. For the nation this attack on men in science is not a problem as long as we can continue to import top-notch male scientists from other countries, but it is unfair and could be self-defeating if the men of this country feel the game is rigged and decrease their political support for scientific-research funding.

What about fairness?, at 8:40 am EDT on August 5, 2008

Follow-up study?

As a woman who gets tapped for many many serach committees to make my University’s “quota” for committee composition, the piece I see that’s missing here is the retention of these faculty once we hire them. It’s not enough just to get them hired, give them a start-up package, and a lab; the failure seems to be in creating environments in which they can persist and succeed through tenure and through promotion to Full. I’m convinced that part of this is a culture in many science departments that is biased against women to varying degrees, perhaps simply because of the way men and women are still often socialized to communicate. I’ve been writing and blogging about this recently, as some others have: http://americanuniversities.suite...e.cfm/equality_for_female_professors, http://PowerfulMindCoaching.com/blog. This is an ongoing problem that we need to work to solve. Great article and study, but let’s be sure to do the follow-up work to keep the female scientists who do make it through the hiring process.

Dr. MCR, Professor and Associate Dean, at 8:40 am EDT on August 5, 2008

As the chair of a search committee I have been involved in two searches over the past year. In our pool of there were a number of very strong women candidates and approximately 50% of the candidates invited to come to campus were women. Both of our searches were failures in that the candidates to whom we offered the job, the majority of whom were women, turned us down.

The article states that women turned down positions more frequently than do men, but does not state why this is the case. We know that there is a determined effort here and elsewhere to hire women in the scientific disciplines. While there might have been specific local reasons why our searches were unsuccessful, we do know that all the women to whom we made offers accepted academic positions elsewhere. If a woman is offered 5 positions she will of necessity turn down 80% of the offers. It would have been interesting to see a comparision of the number of offers made to men and women candidates who either accepted an academic position or did not. Finally it would have been interesting to see what reasons, other than multiple offers, women (and men) gave for turning down offers

A Chemistry Professor, at 9:45 am EDT on August 5, 2008

Advertising

Based on my own (admittedly very anecdotal) conversations with women in my institution (including women involved in initiatives to hire more women in the sciences), I’m surprised to hear that there was an effect from advertising in publications specific to women in science. The general comment was that all of the women were reading the same jobs ads as the men. Of course, reading the ad and responding to it are different things, but in this competitive market (where an applicant needs to submit dozens of applications and pray for one offer) I’m surprised that female candidates would be less likely to apply to any openings out there.

One possibility is that the women who respond to those ads in female-targeted publications are people who have more than a year left in their postdoc, and they’re applying selectively. I’ve known people (e.g. me) who applied selectively because they had the luxury of time and didn’t want to do a full-scale search. I had my own criteria for the sorts of places that I applied to, and I suppose that women might include in their criteria only applying to places that demonstrate openness by advertising in certain places.

Still, all of this is speculation. I’d like to hear more about why women don’t always respond to ads in the standard disciplinary journals and job sites.

Assistant Professor of Physics, at 12:00 pm EDT on August 5, 2008

preferences

SJW-

Don’t kid yourself, there are definitely strong preferences and effective quotas being used. Once our department did a search, picked our top candidate, and then were ordered by the affirmative action office to make the offer instead to a woman who was third on the list.

Another time I interviewed for a position and it turned out, before I arrived to interview, “my” job had already been offered because the department was under orders to hire a woman. (Several positions were available but at most one hire would be made in my specialty). Only if she turned down the offer might I receive an offer.

http://rightwingprofessor.blogspot.com/

rightwingprofessor, at 1:40 pm EDT on August 5, 2008

Quotas

SJW,

Of course this is reflective of quotas that exist at the vast majority of science-related departments in universities.

Most hiring processes require quotas of a certain number of women/minorities on the short lists as dictated by the diversity office.

ACF, at 2:50 pm EDT on August 5, 2008

numbers not going up

At my university, women make up less than 10% of the faculty in the engineering school, and this fraction has not gone up in the last decade. I don’t think that the white males have much to be afraid of from the current hiring system. For every woman hired through a misguided personel officer’s quota, which isn’t even legal, scads more are not considered because of unconscious bias (just refer to the dozens of resume studies if you doubt this exists). Also, one of the reasons (not the only reason) that more offers are made to women candidates who make it to the interview stage is that they tend to be better qualified.

woman engineering professor, at 3:40 pm EDT on August 5, 2008

“scads more are not considered because of unconscious bias”

Have they got a pill for that? Can they maybe hook me up to some machine to find out if I got it? Maybe an encounter group. Because I think I have it but I’m, you know, not conscious of it.

C’mon guys, yuck it up. The weenies are winning.

E. Moran, at 4:15 pm EDT on August 5, 2008

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