ABOUT US | QUARK PRIZES | DAG-3QD SYMPOSIA | MONDAY MAGAZINE | ARCHIVES | FOLLOW US |

3 Quarks Daily Advertising

 

 

 

 

Please Subscribe to 3QD

Subscription options:

If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below. You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal.

The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem as well as putting out the Monday Magazine and doing all the behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site.

If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above.

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you!

3QD on Facebook

3QD on Twitter

3QD by RSS Feed

3QD by Daily Email

Receive all blogposts at the same time every day.

Enter your Email:


Preview 3QD Email

Recent Comments

Powered by Disqus

Miscellany

Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

The banner images have been provided by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, S. Abbas Raza, Sughra Raza, Margaret Scurlock, Shahzia Sikander, Maria Stockner, and Hartwig Thaler.

« a history of debt | Main | We’re All Bystanders to the Sandberg-Mayer Mommy Wars »

Friday, March 08, 2013

Giving Women in Academia Genuine Equal Opportunities

386px-Frauentag_1914_Heraus_mit_dem_Frauenwahlrecht

For this International Women's Day, Ingrid Robeyns in Crooked Timber (image from Wikimedia Commons):

I want to use this occasion to share some thoughts about how to given women in academia a fair chance. I’m not talking about affirmative action or quota, but rather making both the environment more welcoming to women, the formal practices fairer to women, and the informal practices such that they are less disadvantageous for women. The reason why these things need to be discussed is that I increasingly encounter academics (mostly men, I fear) who think that there are no further issues with the environment/procedures/practices, and who believe that in reality women now get better chances in academia than men. While there may be isolated cases of such favorable treatment of women, my judgement of the situation is that all things considered many women are still in many (subtle and not-so-subtle) ways disadvantaged, and that unfortunately many academics do not understand how the practices in academia are disadvantaging women. So, let us look at some of these factors, and ask what each of us can do to give women an equal chance in academia.

Implicit bias
In many situations the causes of women’s unequal chances are small and not visible to those not trained to diagnose the situation. One cause is the effects of implicit bias, which implies that if a piece of work is being done by women, it will be judged of lower quality than exactly the same piece of work done by me, due to non-conscious associations we hold. Or, a certain skill, capacity or personality trait will be judged positively if we see it in a man, and less positively or even negatively if it’s a trait of a woman. A typical case is being assertive, which is in men seen as a sign of leadership, but in women quickly interpreted as being aggressive. Implicit bias is often at work in how we judge CV’s and publication list: a woman with a strong publication list will be seen as ‘promising’, a man will be seen as ‘excellent’. These differences in evaluation are documented in studies on implicit bias, but many colleagues (from various universities and fields) who know about implicit bias, have seen it work in evaluative situations (like hiring committees) in which the work and capacities of men and women were evaluated.


Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:07 AM | Permalink

comments powered by Disqus