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Gender differences in recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships in geoscience
Abstract
Gender disparities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, including the geosciences, are well documented and widely discussed. In the geosciences, despite receiving 40% of doctoral degrees, women hold less than 10% of full professorial positions. A significant leak in the pipeline occurs during postdoctoral years, so biases embedded in postdoctoral processes, such as biases in recommendation letters, may be deterrents to careers in geoscience for women. Here we present an analysis of an international data set of 1,224 recommendation letters, submitted by recommenders from 54 countries, for postdoctoral fellowships in the geosciences over the period 2007-2012. We examine the relationship between applicant gender and two outcomes of interest: letter length and letter tone. Our results reveal that female applicants are only half as likely to receive excellent letters versus good letters compared to male applicants. We also find no evidence that male and female recommenders differ in their likelihood to write stronger letters for male applicants over female applicants. Our analysis also reveals significant regional differences in letter length, with letters from the Americas being significantly longer than any other region, whereas letter tone appears to be distributed equivalently across all world regions. These results suggest that women are significantly less likely to receive excellent recommendation letters than their male counterparts at a critical juncture in their career. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
... This lack of diversity is not from a complete lack of effort -a number of recommendations, strategies, potential solutions, and discussions already exist to address race and ethnicity issues, yet change has been slow to nonexistent in occurrence (Faria et al., 2019). Many reasons have been proposed for this lack of changes, most fervently being the "leaky pipeline" and an examination and dissection of its many parts and potential loci of leaks (Dutt et al., 2016;Hallar et al., 2010;Holmes, 2015;Huntoon & Lane, 2007;Levine et al., 2007;McEntee, 2019;Williams et al., 2007). When examining the research, there is also a clearer, longer focus on men/women gender parity, failing to use an intersectional approach regarding race and ethnicity and LGBTQIA + identities. ...
... These are underrepresented and minoritized groups because of purposeful exclusionary practices. The practices are wide-ranging, from outright racist and sexist policies excluding minoritized groups, to the "old boys" club that prevents the dominant group from recruiting and mentoring future geoscientists of underrepresented backgrounds, and more (Dutt, 2010;Dutt et al., 2016;Holmes, 2015;Kaplan & Mapes, 2016;Núñez et al., 2020). So, the pipeline itself may be poorly constructed, but the connecting structures deserve examination as well. ...
... Especially at the postdoctoral phase, minoritized groups are found to struggle to find placement in positions of prestige (Dutt, 2010;Holmes, 2015;Vila-Concejo et al., 2018). Between the PhD and seeking a faculty position, a multitude of push and pull factors can also lead to not placing at all in a position, while others may find a position but fail to achieve tenure or full professor status (Dutt et al., 2016;Holmes, 2015). Improving placement is more difficult because of the job evaluation process, but suggestions include actively advocating for more women (and other groups) in higher roles, promoting those who are high-achieving, creating awareness of bias, and having conversations about these biases and structures that support them. ...
This article reviews our shared experience as two minoritized graduate students, encapsulating what the barriers we encountered were, and identifies the impacts of a personal disinterest by geoscientists and institutional disinvestment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues in the geosciences. Specifically, in this article we advance the concept of disinvestment in the academy, and how disinvestment and disinterest reveal themselves in the ways the geosciences as a field interact with service and outreach to impact the abilities of minoritized geoscientists to create and sustain diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Through evaluating the case of our creation of a geosciences camp for problems with disinvestment and disinterest by the academy, we identify barriers we faced and solutions created to address them through the framework of navigating a road, and typologizing them as roadblocks, detours, and alternate routes. The multiple barriers we experienced cumulatively amount to considerable time and effort lost, resulting in harm against us and our careers. We find the disinterest and disinvestment we experienced disincentivizes service and outreach work that is pivotal in improving DEI in geosciences. Our current systems and expectations need modification so we can move away from disinvestment and create engaged support structures.
... Haraway, 1988;Harding, 1986). Dutt et al. (2016), analyzing recommendation letters in postdoctoral recruitment processes, conclude that women geoscientists are only half as likely to receive excellent letters versus good letters of recommendation compared to male applicants. A study on journal referee invitations in geoscience has also shown that authors and editors, especially males, suggest women as reviewers less often and that the women who are asked to contribute reply with a slightly higher decline rate than men (Lerback & Hanson, 2017). ...
... By being well regarded and well connected, our respondents are able to navigate a shifting job market while trying to avoid the gender bias in recruitment processes and effects of homophilous networks (cf. Dutt et al., 2016;Popp et al., 2019). According to the respondents, male geoscientists may receive trust and professional legitimacy based solely on their work title, but women need to prove their worth by both demonstrating their competence and technical skill and attaching these accomplishments to the awareness of their colleagues (cf. ...
Based on the meaning‐making of women geoscientists in their descriptions of work and career experiences, this article explores the gendering of geoscience by analyzing women's hard work as a theoretical concept. Our findings show that the gendered requirements for women in geoscience involve “doing” various forms of hard work , including making one's work visible, asserting one's physical performance, and building social relations. Thus, hard work is found to be gendered in terms of being a perceived requirement shared by female geoscientists. It is a requirement that entails compensating for not being male in masculine organizations and simultaneously prevents women geoscientists from fully engaging in core geoscience work tasks. Hence, by gendering hard work and theoretically defining hard work as the work of the “other”, the study expands the theoretical understanding of the concept by suggesting that women's hard work is gendered and social rather than productive.
... Looking at job applicants in chemistry and biochemistry, ('nice', 'collegial', etc.). This line of research has also uncovered systematic differences in the presence of doubt raisers in geosciences (Dutt et al., 2016), and psychology Madera et al., 2019). ...
... Trix and Psenka, 2003;Madera et al., 2009). However, they obtain less outright praise, which is consistent with the work of Dutt et al. (2016), who find that women in geosciences are less likely to receive 'excellent' letters. ...
Academia, and economics in particular, faces increased scrutiny because of gender imbalance. This paper studies the job market for entry-level faculty positions. We employ machine learning methods to analyze gendered patterns in the text of 12,000 reference letters written in support of over 3,700 candidates. Using both supervised and unsupervised techniques, we document widespread differences in the attributes emphasized. Women are systematically more likely to be described using ‘grindstone’ terms and at times less likely to be praised for their ability. Using information on initial placement we highlight the implications of these gendered descriptors for the quality of academic placement.
... For example, the only study to have found greater letter length in letters written for men was one of the smallest (Trix & Psenka, 2003;N = 300), and other studies found the opposite or, most often, no difference. Dutt et al. (2016) 25 found that male candidates for postdoctoral positions in geoscience at Columbia University were twice as likely as women to receive excellent letters, in the sense of having more standout words. However, they too found that the genders were the same in some other dimensions. ...
... Also, there does not appear to be a linear time trend over the past two decades because the two studies by Schmader et al. (2007) and Madera et al. (2019) found some bias and some lack of bias, whereas in the same 2007 to 2009 period, Messner and Shimamura (2008) found no bias for grindstone words, standout words, et cetera. Dutt et al.'s (2016) study 7 to 9 years later found substantial bias against female applicants for postdoc positions at Columbia University, but Bernstein et al.'s (2022) study, which collected data over the 2011 to 2017 period that overlapped most of Dutt et al.'s data, found no temporal trend in bias. In sum, there may be some suggestion of gender bias in letters prior to 2000 (Trix & Psenka, 2003) but no systematic evidence after 2000. ...
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people's opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women's progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women's advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists.
... They find small but significant differences by gender, though these differences did not appear to lead to differences in outcomes. Dutt et al. (2016) study 1,224 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral fellows in geosciences over the period 2007 to 2012. They find that female applicants are half as likely to receive excellent versus good letters and that the gender of the letter writer does not explain this result. ...
... After removing stop words, the average recommendation letter length is 355 words. We follow the previous literature on analyses of academic recommendation letters (Trix and Psenka (2003), Madera et al. (2009), andDutt et al. (2016)) and use seven topic dictionaries as letter features: standout, ability, research, grindstone, teaching, communal, and agentic. For example, grindstone words denote diligence and work ethic, while communal words capture interpersonal traits and general amicability. ...
... A large literature has investigated gender inequality in peer evaluation across a multitude of settings. Many studies find evidence for inequality: journal peer review scores are lower for women 6-8 , men receive higher scores for their grant proposals 9-11 , teaching evaluations are less favorable for women [12][13][14][15] , and men are more likely to be evaluated positively in academic hiring 16,17 . The literature is not uniform in this finding, with some recent studies, for example, finding no gender inequality in journal peer review 18,19 or academic hiring 20 . ...
Resource allocation in academia is highly skewed, and peer evaluation is the main method used to distribute scarce resources. A large literature documents gender inequality in evaluation, and the explanation for this inequality is homophily: male evaluators give more favorable ratings to male candidates. We investigate this by focusing on cum laude distinctions for PhD students in the Netherlands, a distinction that is only awarded to 5 percent of all dissertations and has as its sole goal to distinguish the top from the rest. Using data from over 5000 PhD recipients of a large Dutch university for the period 2011–2021, we find that female PhD students were almost two times less likely to get a cum laude distinction than their male counterparts, even when they had the same doctoral advisor. This gender gap is largest when dissertations are evaluated by all-male committees and decreases as evaluation committees include more female members.
... An application document which has been identified as a particular source of potential bias is references. For example, Dutt et al. (2016)'s analysis of an international dataset of 1224 recommendation letters for applicants to geoscience postdoctoral fellowships found that female applicants were half as likely as male applicants to receive 'excellent' references versus 'good' references, and that both male and female referees were more likely to write 'excellent' references for male applicants, which highlighted their potential to become a scientific leader, praised ability to conduct novel research, and/or described ways in which the applicants was superior to others. ...
Underrepresentation of minoritised and historically disadvantaged groups is prevalent in PhD recruitment, particularly in environmental sciences. The environmental science focussed ‘Adapting to the Challenges of a Changing Environment’ Doctoral Training Partnership (ACCE DTP) was awarded funding from the Natural Environment Research Council for an EDI-centred project. This project aimed to identify areas of underrepresentation within the ACCE DTP’s recruitment processes, assess the impacts of recent changes to recruitment practices, and explore further changes to be implemented in future recruitment rounds.Analysis of applicant data from ten years of ACCE DTP recruitment (2014-2023) empirically demonstrated that there is good diversity in ACCE recruitment with respect to the gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and nationality of applicants, but highlighted the personal characteristics of ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic background as areas of underrepresentation, and established the prevalence and disproportionate awarding of studentships to applicants from Russell Group and Boliver cluster 2 universities, with a master’s level qualification, and who learnt about the ACCE DTP from an advisor or supervisor (who many benefit more than others from additional support).The project then moved to researching approaches for improving EDI in doctoral recruitment, with focus on those most tailored to the areas of underrepresentation identified and the ACCE DTP. The resulting report provides an extensive range of recommended strategies, policies, and practices designed to reduce discrepancies between candidates from different backgrounds, increase representation of underrepresented groups, and balance the disproportionately different success rates of different groups. Recommendations are divided into three key areas of focus: outreach, recruitment, and retention. These recommendations can be adapted for wider use in doctoral recruitment, and in other areas of higher education.
... If this is the case, measures of competence that do not favor a particular gender may be recommended [26][27][28]. Alternatively, male applications may be supported by better recommendation letters, as is repeatedly shown [29][30][31][32]. Yet, recommendation letters play less important roles in Japanese academia than in Europe or North America [33], making the potential role of recommendation letters obscure. ...
Scientific grant applications are subjected to scholarly peer review. Studies show that the success rates of grant applications are often higher for male than for female applicants, suggesting that gender bias is common in peer review. However, these findings mostly come from studies in Europe, North America and Australia. Here we report the analyses of gender-specific success rates of applications to the fellowships offered by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Because we analyze the observational data (i.e., not experimental), our aim here is to describe the possible gender gaps in the success rates, rather than the examination of gender bias per se. Results show that the success rates are consistently higher for male applicants than for female applicants among five different fellowship categories. The gender gaps in the success rates varied significantly between research fields in some Fellowship categories. Furthermore, in some fellowship categories, the gender gaps were significantly associated with the representation of female applicants (both positive and negative correlations were found). Though the causes of the gender gaps are unknown, unintentional gender bias during the review process is suggested. Pre-application gender gaps may also be contributing to the gender gaps in success rates. At least some of the observed gender gaps were relatively small, which may be partly explicable by the designs of the review process. However, gender gaps or biases acting prior to the application, such as self-selection bias, may have reduced the superficial gender gaps in the success rates. Further investigations that control for the effects of covariates (e.g., scientific merits of each applicant, which were not accessible to us) and those of other funding agencies, especially of non-Western countries, are warranted.
... These bias-related studies used NLP software to assess the linguistic characteristics of the LORs, including those related to emotional content (e.g., sadness, excitement). The majority of these studies focused on graduate medical programs [12][13][14][15], while a few studies considered graduate STEM disciplines [16,17] and one focused on undergraduate admissions [18]. The study on undergraduate admissions [18] for the University of California at Berkeley showed that LORs written for students in underrepresented racial groups were weaker than those for other students. ...
The graduate admissions process is time-consuming, subjective, and complicated by the need to combine information from diverse data sources. Letters of recommendation (LORs) are particularly difficult to evaluate and it is unclear how much impact they have on admissions decisions. This study addresses these concerns by building machine learning models to predict admissions decisions for two STEM graduate programs, with a focus on examining the contribution of LORs in the decision-making process. We train our predictive models leveraging information extracted from structured application forms (e.g., undergraduate GPA, standardized test scores, etc.), applicants’ resumes, and LORs. A particular challenge in our study is the different modalities of application data (i.e., text vs. structured forms). To address this issue, we converted the textual LORs into features using a commercial natural language processing product and a manual rating process that we developed. By analyzing the predictive performance of the models using different subsets of features, we show that LORs alone provide only modest, but useful, predictive signals to admission decisions; the best model for predicting admissions decisions utilized both LOR and non-LOR data and achieved 89% accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate promising results in the utility of automated systems for assisting with graduate admission decisions. The findings confirm the value of LORs and the effectiveness of our feature engineering methods from LOR text. This study also assesses the significance of individual features using the SHAP method, thereby providing insight into key factors affecting graduate admission decisions.
... Gender and cultural biases affect all three levers of change [8][9][10], and present one of several argumentative avenues to explain why and when these levers do have an effect on diversity and equity in academia [11]. Much research focusses on promotion patterns [4,[12][13][14] or promotions and hiring patterns [15]. ...
The gender and ethnicity pay gaps are well publicised for academics. The majority of research relies on observations representing a point in time or uses models to consider a standard academic lifespan. We use a stochastic mathematical model to ask what drives differences in lifetime earnings of university academics and highlight a new question: how best should we quantify a working lifetime? The model observes and accounts for patterns in age when entering and leaving the workforce, and differing salary trajectories during an academic career. It is parameterized with data from a national dataset in Aotearoa New Zealand. We compare the total lifetime earnings of different gender and ethnicity groups with and without accounting for the different lengths of time spent in academia. The lifetime earnings gaps are considerably larger when we account for different hiring and leaving ages. We find that overall, for every ethnicity, women have shorter careers and are more likely to leave academia. All minority ethnic groups—and women—earn considerably less than their male white, European colleagues.
... Gender inequality in (neuro)science Careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including neuroscience, continue to struggle to achieve sex/gender equality (Schrouff et al. 2019). Despite research demonstrating that there are no qualitative differences in scholarly productivity between early career "women" and "men" [1] (van den Besselaar 2016), there is a lower chance of an equally competent woman being recommended for hiring as a postdoctoral researcher compared to a man (Dutt et al. 2016). This likely has a cascade effect on other academic career markers. ...
Gender inequality and diversity in STEM is a challenging field of research. Although the relation between the sex/gender of the researcher and the scientific research practices has been previously examined, less interest has been demonstrated towards the relation between sex/gender of the researcher and the research topic. Here, we examine, from a neurofeminist perspective, both questions: whether sex/gender diversity is related to the examination of sex/gender as a variable and whether sex/gender diversity is related to the topic of study. Using the database of submitted posters to the Organization of Human Brain Mapping 2022 annual conference, we identified abstracts examining a sex/gender-related research question. Among these target abstracts, we identified four analytical categories , varying in their degree of content-related complexity: (1) sex/gender as a covariate , (2) sex/gender as a binary variable for the study of sex/gender differences , (3) sex/gender with additional biological information , and (4) sex/gender with additional social information . Statistical comparisons between sex/gender of researcher and the research topics showed that the proportion of abstracts from Non-binary or Other first authors compared to both Women and Men was lower for all submitted abstracts than for the target abstracts; that more researchers with sex/gender-identity other than Man implemented analytical category 4; and, for instance, that research involving cognitive, affective, and behavioural neuroscience more frequently fit into categories 4. Word cloud analysis confirmed the validity of the four exploratorily identified analytical categories . We conclude by discussing how raising awareness about contemporary neurofeminist approaches, including perspectives from the global south, is critical to neuroscientific and societal progress.
... LIWC offers text analysis tools based upon established LIWC dictionary categories [20] that can be augmented with user-defined dictionaries; Madera et al [5] validated added dictionaries of communal and agentic terms in their study of gendered language in recommendation letters [21]. Additional researchers have also created, although not yet validated, 5 additional user-defined dictionaries, including grindstone traits, ability traits, standout adjectives, research terms, and teaching terms [1,6,[21][22][23]. LIWC usage typically requires a paid license for users, and LIWC offers its dictionaries in more than 15 languages. ...
Letters of recommendation play a significant role in higher education and career progression, particularly for women and underrepresented groups in medicine and science. Already, there is evidence to suggest that written letters of recommendation contain language that expresses implicit biases, or unconscious biases, and that these biases occur for all recommenders regardless of the recommender's sex. Given that all individuals have implicit biases that may influence language use, there may be opportunities to apply contemporary technologies, such as large language models or other forms of generative artificial intelligence (AI), to augment and potentially reduce implicit biases in the written language of letters of recommendation. In this editorial, we provide a brief overview of existing literature on the manifestations of implicit bias in letters of recommendation, with a focus on academia and medical education. We then highlight potential opportunities and drawbacks of applying this emerging technology in augmenting the focused, professional task of writing letters of recommendation. We also offer best practices for integrating their use into the routine writing of letters of recommendation and conclude with our outlook for the future of generative AI applications in supporting this task.
... In discussing postdoc careers it is important to acknowledge the global issue of gender inequality that affects women working in higher education (Mott 2022;. Females are considered more vulnerable to precarity in the postdoctoral career phase (OECD 2021), due to factors that include gender bias (Dutt et al. 2016), academic 'in-breeding' -where recruitment occurs within elite, often male dominated, inner circles of academia (Checchi and Cicero 2022) and the motherhood penalty (Ysseldyk et al. 2019). Females are also less internationally mobile than males (OECD 2021). ...
Against a background of Bologna process goals to improve employment prospects for PhD graduates, and the crisis of precarious employment conditions and prospects afflicting postdoctoral researchers-hitherto postdocs, the OECD (2021) called for research into postdoctoral careers and the precarity phenomenon. This paper responds by giving attention to career breaks as these represent a prevalent but under researched aspect of postdoc precarity in the contemporary academic labour market. Utilizing a substantial international mixed-method dataset with a sample of 950 postdocs, the study examined experiences and perceptions of the professional and personal implications of academic career breaks. Results reveal significant differences between males and females in key areas: maternity was the main reason for females' career breaks, and redundancy/end of contract for males. Females resumed employment more with the same employer and males with a different employer. Support surrounding career breaks was mixed, largely inadequate, but not associated with gender. Perceptions of career breaks differed significantly across groups of postdocs that previously experienced a career break, those on a career break, and postdocs that had never had a career break. The latter two groups perceived negative career outcomes and positive personal outcomes more than postdocs who had previously had a career break, however, significant gender differences indicate females were more negative about the personal implications of career breaks. Discussion of the findings concludes that under neoliberalism postdocs represent a growing lumpen proletariat, leading to recommendations for policy, practice and further research into gender, precarity and postdoctoral careers.
... These doubt-raisers can be as simple as including irrelevant information or hedging qualifiers ("the candidate may make a good colleague") or they can be as overt as focusing on candidate's weaknesses, rather than strengths. [75][76][77] Funding and resources. In a survey led by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), female researchers were significantly less likely to feel that they had access to sufficient resources (both monetary and otherwise) to conduct their work than their male counterparts 50 . ...
... This phenomenon is known as the "scissors effect" (Areas et al., 2020) or "leaky pipeline" (Flaherty, 2018;Pell, 1996) and many studies showed that women mostly leave academia after graduate school at the post-doc level (Areas et al., 2020;Hill et al., 2010). The factors leading women to abandon academia are multiple, including a gendered workplace (Prieto-Rodriguez et al., 2022), lower funding (Van der Lee, Ellemers, 2015; Zandonà 2022), different forms of harassment (Clancy et al., 2014), implicit bias (Dutt et al., 2016;Eaton et al., 2020;Moss-Racusin et al., 2012), and, probably the most important one, motherhood (Machado et al., 2019;Morgan et al., 2021). Explicit and implicit bias against women in science can also be strong drivers causing women to leave academia for feeling or being considered unwelcoming, unfitting or not competent enough (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012). ...
Worldwide, parenthood remains a major driver for the reduced participation of women in the job market, where discrimination stems from people’s biases against mothers, based on stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the vision of motherhood in our society. In academia, parenthood may be perceived as negatively affecting scientists’ commitment and dedication, especially women’s. We conducted a survey amongst Brazilian scientists and found that mothers self-reported a higher prevalence of negative bias in their workplace when compared to fathers. The perception of a negative bias was influenced by gender and career status, but not by race, scientific field or number of children. Regarding intersections, mothers with less than 15 years of hiring reported having suffered a higher rate of negative bias against themselves. We discuss implications of these results and suggest how this negative bias should be addressed in order to promote an equitable environment that does not harm women in science.
... Yet, the current process of requesting and reviewing external letters can invite cognitive and social biases into the evaluation. For example, there have been many studies of letters of recommendation that have shown gender bias (Dutt et al. 2016;Madera et al. 2019;Schmader, Whitehead, and Wysocki 2007;Trix and Psenka 2003;Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999;Stipes 2021). In one study, even in cases where the ultimate recommendation was positive for those candidates perceived to be men and perceived to be women (with identical credentials), women's recommendations were four times more likely to include reservations and doubt raisers (Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999). ...
KerryAnn O'Meara (she/her) is a professor and distinguished scholar-teacher at the University of Maryland (UMD) who has studied issues of equity, faculty careers, and academic reward systems for over 20 years. Her grant-funded research on this topic is published in over 53 peer-reviewed articles and in over 100 book chapters, edited books, policy reports, and essays. She consults regularly with campuses engaging in equity-minded reform of faculty reward systems. As a faculty member herself, O'Meara has the lived experience of moving through the faculty ranks, serving on personnel committees, and being an external reviewer. She also has significant experience as an administrator, having served for 10 years as the director of the UMD ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence and three years as an associate dean for faculty affairs. O'Meara was a 2021-22 ACE Fellow in residence at Towson University. She now serves as an assistant to the provost for strategic initiatives at UMD. Lindsey Templeton (she/her) studies higher education with a specific focus on gender equity in academic leadership. A former coordinator for the ADVANCE Leadership Fellows program at UMD and current staff member at HERS (Higher Education Resource Services) Templeton comes to this work focused on academic leadership and organizational change. She has worked alongside O'Meara as a consultant to campuses on their faculty evaluation policies and procedures and brings a perspective outside of the faculty ranks. Dawn Culpepper (she/her) is a research assistant professor and associate director with the UMD ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence. With ADVANCE, she leads faculty development, education and training, and research efforts aimed at enhancing the recruitment, retention, and professional growth of a diverse academic workforce. Her research examines the strategies, policies, practices, and resources that enhance equity, disrupt bias, and facilitate organizational change within academic institutions, including recent projects on work-life integration, workload, hiring, and the development of allies. In addition to her campus work and research, she consults regularly with higher education organizations on these issues.
... 24,26,44 Those from underrepresented groups in engineering, including women, are less likely to receive awards, participate on boards, be invited to present at conferences, and consequently be promoted to leadership positions. 17,55,72 Attrition from academic science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) careers grows at each passing stage (Fig. 1). 24,25,40 Representation of women falls off dramatically by the full professor rank (Fig. 2) and more women of color are left behind at each stage of the academic ladder. ...
The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) hosted a virtual symposium titled “Diversifying Paths to Academic Leadership” on January 27 and 28, 2022. The symposium sought to educate the community on the opportunities for and impact of leadership by biomedical engineering faculty, to encourage and invite women faculty, especially women of color, to consider and prepare to pursue leadership roles, to educate faculty on the expectations and duties of these roles, and to highlight experiences and paths to leadership of women engineering leaders. Here we review the main outcomes of the symposium to provide perspective on (1) personal visioning and positioning for leadership, (2) negotiating for success in leadership positions, and (3) leadership strategies for success specific to women faculty and where applicable, faculty of color.
... (3) Retire nomination/support letters. These letters are subjective narratives that manifest recognition that others have endowed upon a researcher [50][51][52] . They specifically reflect privilege of access to the old boys' networks, institutional prestige and other circumstantial contexts 3,49 . ...
Scientific awards can shape scientific careers, helping to secure jobs and grants, but can also contribute to the lack of diversity at senior levels and in the elite networks of scientists. To assess the status quo and historical trends, we evaluated ‘best researcher’ awards and ‘best paper’ early- and mid-career awards from broad-scope international journals and societies in ecology and evolution. Specifically, we collated information on eligibility rules, assessment criteria and potential gender bias. Our results reveal that, overall, few awards foster equitable access and assessment. Although many awards now explicitly allow extensions of the eligibility period for substantial career interruptions, there is a general lack of transparency in terms of assessment and consideration of other differences in access to opportunities and resources among junior researchers. Strikingly, open science practices were mentioned and valued in only one award. By highlighting instances of desirable award characteristics, we hope this work will nudge award committees to shift from simple but non-equitable award policies and practices towards strategies enhancing inclusivity and diversity. Such a shift would benefit not only those at the early- and mid-career stages but the whole research community. It is also an untapped opportunity to reward open science practices, promoting transparent and robust science.
... Recent data indicate that the ongoing impact of implicit and explicit bias on women's careers is real and significant [Eaton et al., 2020;Huang et al., 2020] and is even more detrimental for women of color [Dutt, 2016]. That implicit and explicit bias over the length of a woman's career severely limits the candidate pool's diversity for prestigious leadership positions, technical and service awards, publications, distinguished lectures, and technical roles within geologic societies, further causing gender inequality. ...
When professional organizations allow gender inequity to persist, they continually lose talented, valuable individuals who enrich and lead their groups and drive innovation. 2 (GSA). All three of these societies (AAPG, AGU and GSA), whilst based in the USA, have substantial international membership. There is clear evidence of continued gender inequity in these professional geological societies, particularly in the AAPG; details are presented herein. Within the AAPG, there have been notable improvements in reducing the extent of gender inequities over the last decade. However, substantial gender inequities remain in the percentage of women and gender-diverse individuals holding leadership and technical positions, giving distinguished lectures, and receiving technical awards. The AAPG trails behind the GSA and AGU across the membership of women and diversity and inclusion efforts, programs, and frameworks. Because the AAPG is a major international geoscience professional organization, this inequity greatly contributes to the gender disparity that exists in the broader geoscience community. The evaluation of historical AAPG membership data in this study, alongside the review of published literature and actions to improve equity diversity and inclusion in other professional societies, allows for an opportunity to propose a range of improvements for AAPG to implement. We propose that implementing diversity standards in AAPG's most visible and prestigious awards will advance gender equity and give meaningful recognition and power to those present with a reduced opportunity to influence. We note and include reference to literature on this topic, that gender equity issues must be addressed concerning race and ethnicity. Specific actions should be taken to provide support for marginalized women such as women of color and Indigenous women, and gender-diverse people. As geoscientists, it is our moral and ethical obligation to address these issues so professional societies such as AAPG can demonstrate tangible efforts to eliminate the discrimination, bias, and barriers many women and gender-diverse individuals encounter and support them in having equitable opportunities and recognition as professional geoscientists.
... (2022) highlighted that structural racism, sexism, interpersonal attitudes, stereotypes, and bias all contribute to the a lack of opportunity for early and sustained research experiences for women and historically underrepresented groups in space physics. Further, a number of prior studies (e.g., Dutt et al., 2016;Houser and Lemmons, 2018;Madera et al., 2019;Rojek et al., 2019) have demonstrated such bias often appears in recommendation letters, especially those in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) fields. Since recommendation letters, letters of support, etc. are a near universal requirement for awards, promotions, scholarships, acceptance into graduate school, internships, and postdocs, etc. writing a strong recommendation letter, free of bias is critical to recruiting and retaining talented people in space physics, especially those from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups. ...
Bias exists in letters of recommendation, and it is reflected in the language used to describe and evaluate different candidates for countless opportunities in academia. Professional organizations are becoming more aware of this issue, and are pursuing avenues to address it. This paper discusses the type of information, that is, useful to have on hand when writing a recommendation letter, the structure of the letter, a process to follow for proof reading, when to say no, a compilation of additional resources, and tips for people asking for recommendation letters. Specifically, we discuss common grammar mistakes, the purpose of each portion of the letter, and ways conscious and unconscious bias can influence wording and structure. This paper is intended to provide a single place where people can go to learn all of the basics needed to write a strong recommendation letter, as currently available letter writing resources in the space physics community tend to focus on one aspect of letter writing.
... In the Earth sciences (e.g., geology, geophysics, oceanography, hydrology, meteorology, climatology etc.), gender disparity in faculty ranks is also known but scarcely reported and documented especially in Africa. Most previous works discussing gender disparity or the so-called leaky pipeline in the Earth sciences come from the US (Dutt et al., 2016;Holmes et al., 2008;Popp et al., 2019;Stokes et al., 2015). Other studies elsewhere are scanty and mostly focused on understanding the structure of Earth science academia, population or numbers of women Earth Science academic professionals, women's views and choices, academic metrics, productivity/publication puzzle, and women representation in professional organizations (Handley et al., 2020;Henriques and Garcia, 2022;Holmes et al., 2008;Nature Geoscience Editorial, 2016;Piccoli and Guidobaldi, 2021;Pico et al., 2020;Witze, 2016). ...
As in most disciplines of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM), gender disparity is prevalent in the ranking of Earth Sciences faculties at senior and advanced levels. (i.e., Associate and Full Professors). In this study, a robust database was mined, created, and analyzed to assess the faculty compositions of 142 Earth Science departments in 39 countries across Africa. The data were collected from verifiable online resources focusing on ranks and gender ratios within each department. The studied earth science departments cut across Universities in northern, western, central, eastern, and western Africa. Our data revealed that female faculty members are predominantly underrepresented in most of the departments documented and are markedly uncommon in senior positions such as Professors, associate Professors, and senior researchers compared to their male counterparts. On the contrary, female faculty members are predominant in the lower cadres, such as lecturers, teaching, and graduate assistants. The observed male to female ratio is 4:1. At the base of this gender gap is the lower enrolment of female students in Earth Science courses from bachelors to graduate studies. To achieve gender equality in Earth Science faculty composition in Africa, we recommend increasing female students' enrollment, mentoring, awareness, timely promotion of accomplished female researchers, and formulation of enabling government policies. More work-related policies that guarantee work-life balance for female earth science academic professionals should be formulated to attract and retain more women into Earth Sciences careers.
... (3) Retire nomination/support letters. These letters are subjective narratives that manifest recognition that others have endowed upon a researcher [50][51][52] . They specifically reflect privilege of access to the old boys' networks, institutional prestige and other circumstantial contexts 3,49 . ...
Scientific awards can shape scientific careers, helping secure jobs and grants. Awards also have a potential to reinforce the “Matthew Effect” and the quest for “novelty” in science when eligibility and assessment criteria give preference to nominees with traditional careers and to “excellent” research. As such, recognition awards for early and mid-career researchers can contribute to the lack of intersectional diversity at the senior levels and in elite networks of scientists. To assess the status quo and historical trends, we evaluated “best researcher” awards and “best paper” early and mid-career awards from broad-scope international journals and societies in ecology and evolution. Specifically, we collated information on eligibility rules and assessment criteria and quantified historical gender biases in the lists of past winners. Our results reveal that, overall, few awards foster equitable access and assessment. Although many awards now explicitly allow extensions of the eligibility period for significant career interruptions, there is a general lack of transparency in terms of assessment and consideration of other differences in access to opportunities and resources among junior researchers. Strikingly, Open Science practices were valued in only one award. By highlighting instances of desirable award characteristics, we hope this work will nudge award committees to shift from simple but non-equitable award policies and practices towards strategies enhancing inclusivity and diversity. Such shift would benefit not only these at the early and mid-career stages, but the whole research community. It is also an untapped opportunity to reward Open Science practices, promoting transparent and robust science.
... They may reflect long-standing bias in the academic community, which leads women's competence or performance to be assessed on a different scale from men or according to different qualities [34]. Evidence of bias has been found in studies of gender differences in the outcomes of fellowship applications [41], hiring assessments [36], and the content of reference letters [51,52]. Effects of bias may be amplified by constraints and cultural expectations related to family life, particularly childcare, which impact women more than men researchers, especially in early and mid-career stages [14,27,53]. ...
Despite increasing representation in graduate training programs, a disproportionate number of women leave academic research without obtaining an independent position that enables them to train the next generation of academic researchers. To understand factors underlying this trend, we analyzed formal PhD and postdoctoral mentoring relationships in the life sciences during the years 2000 to 2020. Student and mentor gender are both associated with differences in rates of student’s continuation to positions that allow formal academic mentorship. Although trainees of women mentors are less likely to take on positions as academic mentors than trainees of men mentors, this effect is reduced substantially after controlling for several measurements of mentor status. Thus, the effect of mentor gender can be explained at least partially by gender disparities in social and financial resources available to mentors. Because trainees and mentors tend to be of the same gender, this association between mentor gender and academic continuation disproportionately impacts women trainees. On average, gender homophily in graduate training is unrelated to mentor status. A notable exception to this trend is the special case of scientists having been granted an outstanding distinction, evidenced by membership in the National Academy of Sciences, being a grantee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or having been awarded the Nobel Prize. This group of mentors trains men graduate students at higher rates than their most successful colleagues. These results suggest that, in addition to other factors that limit career choices for women trainees, gender inequities in mentors’ access to resources and prestige contribute to women’s attrition from independent research positions.
... Recommendation letters. Letters of recommendation, long a cornerstone of admissions, hiring, and promotion evaluations in academia, can perpetuate a number of systemic biases (38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43). For example, letter writers' implicit biases can be embedded in the language used in recommendation letters, and readers of these letters often have a natural tendency to place a higher value on letters from people they know (or know of) relative to letters from people who are unfamiliar to them, especially if the writers are at institutions that are not considered prestigious by the reader. ...
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) has been successful in producing clinician-scientists, with a majority of graduates pursuing research-related careers. However, there are a number of areas of continuing concern for the program. In particular, women and individuals from certain racial and ethnic backgrounds remain persistently underrepresented in MSTPs relative to the average college-aged U.S. population and to students receiving life sciences bachelor's degrees. The authors, who include leaders of NIGMS, identify a number of challenges and opportunities for enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the MSTPs and suggest strategies for addressing them.
... This phenomenon is known as the "scissors effect" (Areas et al. 2020) or "leaky pipeline" (Pell 1996;Flaherty, 2018) and many studies showed that women mostly leave academia after graduate school at the post-doc level (Hill et al., 2010;Areas et al., 2020). The factors leading women to abandon academia are multiple, including a gendered workplace (Prieto-Rodriguez et al., 2022), lower funding (Lee andEllemers 2015, Zandonà 2022), different forms of harassment (Clancy and Johnson 2014), implicit bias (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012, Dutt et al. 2016, and, probably the most important one, motherhood (Machado et al., 2019;Morgan et al. 2021). Explicit and implicit bias against women in science can also be strong drivers causing women to leave academia for feeling or being considered unwelcoming, un tting or not competent enough (Moss-Racusin et al 2012). ...
Worldwide, parenthood remains a major driver for the reduced participation of women in the job market, where discrimination stems from people's biases against mothers, based on stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the vision of motherhood in our society. In academia, parenthood may be equally perceived as negatively affecting scientists' commitment and dedication, especially for women. Our survey conducted amongst Brazilian scientists found that mothers self-reported a higher prevalence of negative bias in their workplace when compared to fathers. The perception of a negative bias was influenced by gender and career status, but not by race, scientific field or number of children. Regarding intersections, mothers with less than 15 years of hiring reported having suffered a higher rate of negative bias against them. We discuss implications of these results and suggest how this negative bias should be addressed in order to promote an equitable environment that does not harm women in science.
... Moreover, there was no main effect of the gender of the letter writer, nor did letter-writer gender interact with applicant gender. Other researchers find both evidence for (e.g., Dutt, Pfaff, Bernstein, Dillard, & Block, 2016;Schmader, Whitehead, & Wysoki, 2007) and against (e.g., Li et al., 2017;Messner & Shimahara, 2008) gender differences in raising doubts about the quality of women's work in other STEM and biomedical fields so, again, further research is needed to examine when and where such differences occur. ...
Psychology is a popular subject to study, with thousands entering graduate school each year, but unlike med or pre-law, there is limited information available to help students learn about the field, how to successfully apply, and how to thrive while completing doctoral work. The Portable Mentor is a useful, must-have resource for all students interested in psychology. This third edition is updated and expanded, designed to address students' and trainees' need for open dialogue and mentorship. Throughout, it covers some of the common challenges graduates face and features discussions about how to celebrate your identity and find a rewarding, worthwhile career path. It comprises thirty chapters written by more than seventy of the field's top experts, successfully filling a void in professional development advice.
... 46,51,64,65 In particular, committee members should consider carefully how letters of recommendation influence their decisions, given evidence of how schemas can impact such letters. [66][67][68][69][70] When candidates visit, the creation of an environment that elicits the best performance from all candidates is important, including attention to providing helpful information, considering accessibility and other needs, being thoughtful about environmental cues, and facilitating positive interactions. This also includes reconsidering whether a wall of portraits of individuals, all from a single demographic group, seems appropriate. ...
... Cowriting a letter provides you the opportunity to reflect on and assess your skills and abilities, agency to highlight specific examples that address the reviewed criteria, and gain practice in writing compelling and professional letters of recommendation [4] (see [3,[10][11][12] for tips on writing effective reference letters that you can share with your letter writer). Additionally, given the ample research documenting racial/ethnic and gender bias in letters of recommendation [1,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19], which contribute to the many disparities present in academia [20][21][22][23], cowriting your letter is one way to reduce the potential for gendered and/or biased language (see Avoiding Bias for Letters of Recommendation [12] and Ten simple rules for writing compelling recommendation letters [3] for tips on avoiding racial/ethnic and gender bias) or other errors in your letter which could negatively influence the reviewers [3]. ...
... (4) Bias is shared. Letters of recommendation for women vary systematically in tone relative to their male counterparts, and this holds true regardless of whether the letter of support is written by a male or female (Dutt et al. 2016). Action: We all must be aware of implicit bias and avoid verbiage that perpetuates bias in letters of recommendation. ...
... Persistent low diversity in the geosciences [2] maintains existing hierarchies and increases vulnerability of historically excluded groups to social isolation and to both identity-based and more general exclusionary behaviors; these circumstances deny opportunities for career advancement to large groups of people in our society. Promising geoscientists can be driven out of the field both through bias that continues to reward those with majority identities, and hostile behaviors that target individuals early in their careers [3][4][5]. Rampant harassment and discrimination are recognized problems in STEM fields [6,7] and counter efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in the profession [1,8]. Through a qualitative, grounded theory approach we explored the particularities of this phenomenon in the geosciences, and found that persistent dominant stereotypes and power structures, along with a history of ineffective responses to incidents of harassment and abuse perpetuate these behaviors in the discipline. ...
Rampant gender-based harassment and discrimination are recognized problems that negatively impact efforts to diversify science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. We explored the particularities of this phenomenon in the geosciences, via focus groups conducted at STEM professional society meetings, with the goal of informing interventions specific to the discipline. Using grounded theory analysis, two primary drivers for the persistence and perpetuation of gender-based harassment in the geosciences were identified: a particular history of power dynamics and maintenance of dominant stereotypes, and a pattern of ineffective responses to incidents of harassment and discrimination. Informed by intersectional feminist scholarship by women of color that illustrates how efforts to address the underrepresentation of women in STEM without attending to the overlapping impacts of racism, colonialism, ableism, and classism will not succeed, we view harassment and discrimination as structural problems that require collective solutions. Continuing to recruit individuals into a discipline without changing its fundamental nature can tokenize and isolate them or encourage assimilation and acceptance of deep-seated traditions no matter how damaging. It is the responsibility of those in power, and especially those who hold more privileged status due to their social identities, to contribute to the dismantling of current structures that reinforce inequity. By providing explanatory illustrative examples drawn from first-person accounts we aim to humanize the numbers reported in workplace climate surveys, address gaps in knowledge specific to the geosciences, and identify interventions aligned with an intersectional framework that aim to disrupt discriminatory practices endemic to the geosciences and larger STEM community.
... ues. On the basis of the analysis of recommendation letters submitted by researchers from all world regions it has been revealed that female applicants were significantly less likely than their male counterparts to receive from their mentors -both men and women -'excellent' letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in the earth sciences (Dutt et. al. 2016;Skibba 2016). Similar results came from the fields of chemistry, medicine, and psychology (Trix & Psenka 2003;Skibba 2016). Addressing the problem of hidden biases in letters of recommendation -as well as in the review of curricula vitae of applicants to scientific positions -is vital as application to faculty position has been identifie ...
This report documents the findings obtained through a comprehensive literature review, analysis of available data on partner institutions, as well as a widely-scoped cross-sectional selection of Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) implemented across countries and institutions partaking in the GENERA Consortium and beyond. It constitutes the Deliverable 2.2. of the GENERA project (https://genera-project.com/).
The goal of Task 2.2., carried out under the GENERA’s Work Package 2 Status of research intensity advancing GEP activities in Europe’s RPOs and RFOs and led by the Jagiellonian University’s team of GENERA researchers, is to map and identify successful gender equality measures and conditions for improving research cultural environment in the fields linked to physics. Special emphasis in the task is on pinpointing the “best practices” and “best in class” examples of innovative approaches. This is further achieved by a multi-focus approach. First, the research presented in this Report investigates what are the gaps in the current GEPs that are often too generic to capture the specific disciplinary challenges and needs – as in the case of Physics. An in-depth look at GEPs is seen as conducive to completing the goal of highlighting the necessity of transnational approaches to projects that compare research infrastructures and data cross-nationally. Discussions of cultural aspects – i.e. mobility constrains, local scientific cultures, funding bodies – in the current GEPs can further foster formulation of features for new, revised and customized GEPs. Secondly, it attempts to advance the knowledge on particular barriers that make research environments in physics suboptimal for female researchers. Thirdly, the study aims at analysing the emerging subfields of Physics as a broad discipline, seeking to determine whether links to other sciences, interdisciplinary character and novelty of the subfield’s instating process have any impact on gender indicators and results of GEPs. In addition, the goal of the last subtask is to discuss the type of the impact per each examined new field of physics.
Objective
Assess for gender and race patterns in agentic and communal language used in letters of recommendation for Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS) residency applicants.
Study Design
Retrospective content analysis.
Setting
Applications from OHNS applications at a single training institution for the 2019 and 2020 match cycles.
Methods
A total of 2283 letters of recommendation for 611 OHNS applicants were analyzed. Applicant and letter writer gender, applicant race and ethnicity, and applicant characteristics including United States Medical Licensing Examination® Step 1 score, research productivity, and medical school rank were extracted. Agentic and communal word use from the letters of recommendation was compared across applicant and writer characteristics using multilevel negative binomial regression modeling.
Results
Letter writers use a greater rate of agentic terms when describing applicants who self‐identify as Asian (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.16, p < .01) or “Other/not reported” (IRR = 1.23, p < .01) as compared to white applicants. Further, standardized letters of evaluation had significantly more communal language and less agentic language. Although there was an increase in communal language in letters for female applicants compared to male applicants, these gender differences disappeared in the multivariate model.
Conclusion
Multivariate analysis demonstrated no significant gender‐based patterns in the communal or agentic language in letters of recommendation for OHNS residency applicants. However, letters for applicants identifying as Asian or “other/not reported” had more frequent use of agentic terms. Future studies should investigate other components of residency applications to assess how gender and race bias might unfairly influence an applicant's chances at a given program.
A wealth of data has consistently demonstrated that a diverse faculty maximizes productivity and innovation in the research enterprise and increases the persistence and success of groups that are underrepresented in STEM. While the diversity of students in graduate programs has steadily increased, faculty diversity, particularly in the biomedical sciences, continues to remain relatively flat. Several issues contribute to this mismatch between the pipeline and the professoriate including biases in search and hiring practices, lack of equity and equal opportunities for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds, and unwelcoming campus climates that lead to marginalization and isolation in academic life. A comprehensive approach that addresses these challenges is necessary for institutions of higher education to achieve their faculty diversity goals and create a climate where individuals from all groups feel welcomed and succeed. This article focuses on the first step in this approach–diversifying faculty recruitment through adopting search practices that generate an applicant pool that matches national availability, ensures equity in evaluation and hiring practices, and promotes inclusion and belonging in the hiring experience. These strategies have been recently used at the University of California, Irvine's School of Biological Sciences and while the long‐term impact remains unknown, short‐term outcomes in recruitment and hiring have demonstrated significant improvement over previous years.
Studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by climate change since they often rely more on natural resources for their livelihoods and have limited ability to cope with environmental, economic, and social disruptions. These impacts include increased frequency and severity of natural disasters like droughts, floods, landslides, and hurricanes, loss of jobs due to changes in ecosystems and biodiversity, and issues like water scarcity and food insecurity, particularly in developing nations. In addition, most of the world’s poor are women, and many of those women live in rural areas which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The Paris Agreement—the first universal, legally binding global climate change agreement—sets out detailed actions to help achieve the ambitious target of keeping global temperatures rise “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and limiting global warming to 1.5 C by the end of this century. Adopted in 2015 at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21), the Paris Agreement addresses specific needs and enabled the adoption of the Gender Action Plan at COP 23.
This chapter emphasizes the practical impact women can have in addressing climate change. It demonstrates how women can make a significant political and practical impact by actively participating in the creation and implementation of climate policies at the international, regional, national, and local levels. Additionally, women can play a key role at the technical level by implementing projects that support adaptation and mitigation efforts. Furthermore, women in scientific research can develop innovative solutions to combat climate change.
Letters of Recommendation (LORs) are widely utilized for admission to both undergraduate and graduate programs, and are becoming even more important with the decreasing role that standardized tests play in the admissions process. However, LORs are highly subjective and thus can inject recommender bias into the process, leading to an inequitable evaluation of the candidates’ competitiveness and competence. Our study utilizes natural language processing methods and manually determined ratings to investigate gender and cultural differences and biases in LORs written for STEM Master’s program applicants. We generate features to measure important characteristics of the LORs and then compare these characteristics across groups based on recommender gender, applicant gender, and applicant country of origin. One set of features, which measure the underlying sentiment, tone, and emotions associated with each LOR, is automatically generated using IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) service. The second set of features is measured manually by our research team and quantifies the relevance, specificity, and positivity of each LOR. We identify and discuss features that exhibit statistically significant differences across gender and culture study groups. Our analysis is based on approximately 4000 applications for the MS in Data Science and MS in Computer Science programs at Fordham University. To our knowledge, no similar study has been performed on these graduate programs.
Gender inequity is one of the biggest challenges facing the STEM workforce. While there are many studies that look into gender disparities within STEM and academia, the majority of these have been designed and executed by those unfamiliar with research in sociology and gender studies. They adopt a normative view of gender as a binary choice of 'male' or 'female,' leaving individuals whose genders do not fit within that model out of such research entirely. This especially impacts those experiencing multiple axes of marginalization, such as race, disability, and socioeconomic status. For STEM fields to recruit and retain members of historically excluded groups, a new paradigm must be developed. Here, we collate a new dataset of the methods used in 119 past studies of gender equity, and recommend better survey practices and institutional policies based on a more complex and accurate approach to gender. We find that problematic approaches to gender in surveys can be classified into 5 main themes - treating gender as white, observable, discrete, as a statistic, and as inconsequential. We recommend allowing self-reporting of gender and never automating gender assignment within research. This work identifies the key areas of development for studies of gender-based inclusion within STEM, and provides recommended solutions to support the methodological uplift required for this work to be both scientifically sound and fully inclusive.
The geosciences have the lowest racial and ethnic diversity of all STEM fields at all levels of higher education, and atmospheric science is emblematic of this discrepancy. Despite a growing awareness of the problem, Black, Indigenous, people of color, persons with disabilities, women, and LGBTQIA+ persons continue to be largely absent in academic programs and in the geoscience workforce. There is a desire and need for new approaches, new entry points, and higher levels of engagement to foster a diverse community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners in atmospheric science. One challenge among many is that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are often siloed from many aspects of the scientific process, technical training, and scientific community. We have worked towards bridging this gap through the development of a new atmospheric science course designed to break down traditional barriers for entry into diversity, equity, and inclusion engagement by graduate students, so they emerge better prepared to address issues of participation, representation, and inclusion.
This article provides an overview of our new course, focused on social responsibility in atmospheric science. This course was piloted during Fall 2021 with the primary objective to educate and empower graduate students to be “diversity champions” in our field. We describe (1) rationale for a course of this nature within a graduate program, (2) course design and content, (3) service-learning projects, (4) impact of the course on students, and (5) scalability to other atmospheric science graduate programs.
As postdoctoral training has become a requirement in many STEMM fields the influence of postdoc hiring on STEMM labor force inclusion and diversity has increased, yet postdoc hiring processes have received only limited attention from researchers. Drawing on status theory and data for 769 postdoctoral recruitments, we systematically analyze the relationship between gender, race-ethnicity, and postdoctoral hiring. The findings show: (1) differences by gender and race-ethnicity in application rates, and in whether an applicant is seriously considered, interviewed, and offered the postdoc position; (2) hiring disparities correlate with between-group differences in applicants' network connections, referrer prestige, and academic human capital; (3) between-group differences in network connections have the greatest power to account for hiring disparities; and (4) hiring processes may differ by applicant gender or race-ethnicity, the female representation in the STEMM field and the race of the search committee chair. We discuss competing interpretations of the results and highlight directions for future research.
This article investigates how business incubator support affects subsequent firm performance. We build on and extend a recent focus on organisational sponsorship mechanisms, applying the lens to business incubators. We first ask: Is there an overall effect of business incubator sponsorship on subsequent firm performance? Second, we ask: To what extent do the decisions of business incubator managers, in terms of allocating resources to start-up firms, impact the subsequent firm performance? We use a unique dataset consisting of the entire population of business incubators in Sweden and their start-ups from 2005 to 2015. Results indicate that business incubator sponsorship has a positive effect on firm performance, while the effects of various forms of sponsorship vary from large positive to neutral effects. Thus, we confirm earlier research on the positive effects of sponsorship and give input on how business managers can use sponsorship theory to provide more optimal resource allocation over time. It appears that coaching and legitimacy have more positive impact on firm level performance compared to other sponsoring activities. Sponsorship is a complex issue, meriting increased theoretical and managerial understanding of its forms and mechanisms. In this respect, our study of how the sponsorship activities of business incubators affect start-up performance complements and extends previous studies of how the effects of business incubator sponsorship depend on external contingencies..
The processes through which new leaders in systems engineering are nurtured and developed – what are frequently referred to, collectively, as the systems engineering “leadership pipeline” – are integral to supplying the systems engineering community with its members and ensuring the continuing success (and, arguably, existence) of the systems engineering discipline. Given its significance, it is vital that the systems engineering leadership pipeline (much like any system) adheres to its requirements and demonstrates a high level of performance quality in its intended role. However, what has been observed in terms of the pipeline’s operational behaviour is far from ideal. Fewer than 10% of systems engineers and engineering project managers are women, a far cry from the value of around 50% that would be expected with all things being equal. This disparity highlights a fundamental imbalance in how the systems engineering pipeline processes the “inputs” it receives (in terms of students) and suggests that there may be further underlying problems in the systems engineering pipeline that may be affecting its performance and quality.This chapter strives to analyse the issue of the systems engineering gender gap through a quantitative lens, using quality management techniques to characterize current performance, isolate areas of the pipeline that merit further improvement, and describe concrete means by which engineering leadership and other engineering professionals can enact and measure positive change in systems engineering and broader fields under the umbrella of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.KeywordsSystems engineeringLeadership pipelineWomen in STEMDiversityEquityGender equalityGender gapSTEM educationDMAICProfessional developmentSix Sigma
According to 2018 demographic data of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, seismology is among the Geoscience fields with the lowest female representation. To understand whether this reflects seismology more generally, we investigate female authorship of peer-reviewed publications, a key factor in career advancement. Building upon open-source tools for web-scraping, we create a database of bibliographic information for seismological articles published in 14 international journals from 2010 to 2020. We use the probabilities of author names being either male or female-gendered to analyse the representation of female authors in terms of author position and subsequently per journal, year, and publication productivity. The results indicate that: 1) The overall probability of the first (last) author being female is 0.28 (0.19); 2) With the calculated rate of increase from 2010 to 2020, equal probabilities of female and male authorship would be reached towards the end of the century; 3) Compared to the overall probability of male authorship (0.76), single-authored papers in our database are disproportionately published by male authors (with probability 0.83); 4) Female representation decreases among highly productive authors; 5) Rather than being random, the composition of authorship appears to be influenced by gender: Firstly, all-male author teams are more common than what would be expected if teams were composed randomly. Secondly, the probability that first or co-authors are female increases when the last author is female, but first female authors have a low probability of working with female co-authors.
Mentoring is a key component of scientific achievements, contributing to overall measures of career success for mentees and mentors. A common success metric in the scientific enterprise is acquiring a large research group, which is believed to indicate excellent mentorship and high-quality research. However, large, competitive groups might also amplify dropout rates, which are high especially among early career researchers. Here, we collect longitudinal genealogical data on mentor-mentee relations and their publication, and study the effects of a mentor's group on future academic survival and performance of their mentees. We find that mentees trained in large groups generally have better academic performance than mentees from small groups, if they continue working in academia after graduation. However, we also find two surprising results: Academic survival rate is significantly lower for (1) mentees from larger groups, and for (2) mentees with more productive mentors. These findings reveal that success of mentors has a negative effect on the academic survival rate of mentees, raising important questions about the definition of successful mentorship and providing actionable suggestions concerning career development.
In order to advance and to have new perspectives, science needs diversity. However, women are still underrepresented in various scientific areas, including ecology and conservation. A big gender gap still exists in academia, especially at the highest positions. Here, I investigated gender bias in Brazilian post-graduate programs in Ecology at different hierarchical levels, as well as in project funding and scholarship application success. I found evidence of a scissors effect, where women were the majority among students (56%), while men were among Professors (64%). Furthermore, prestigious scholarship applications submitted by women had higher rejection rates. Female ecologists were only awarded 29% of funded projects and, per grant, received almost half the amount of funding than their male peers. Brazil, like other countries, needs to pay more attention to gender disparities at the highest academic positions in science, and urgently apply measures to reduce them. Actions that support scientist mothers should be implemented, such as considering maternity leave during career evaluations. Increasing the visibility of women and celebrating publicly their achievements could stimulate young women to pursue a career in science and reduce the gender gap. Diversity improves our understanding of ecological phenomena and optimize the success of conservation practices.
Throughout the world, women leave their academic careers to a far greater extent than their male colleagues. (1) In Sweden, for example, women are awarded 44 per cent of biomedical PhDs but hold a mere 25 per cent of the postdoctoral positions and only 7 per cent of professorial positions. It used to be thought that once there were enough entry-level female scientists, the male domination of the upper echelons of academic research would automatically diminish. But this has not happened in the biomedical field, where disproportionate numbers of men still hold higher academic positions, despite the significant numbers of women who have entered this research field since the 1970s.
Women's participation and attitudes to talent
Some scientific disciplines have lower percentages of women in academia than others. Leslie et al. hypothesized that general attitudes about the discipline would reflect the representation of women in those fields (see the Perspective by Penner). Surveys revealed that some fields are believed to require attributes such as brilliance and genius, whereas other fields are believed to require more empathy or hard work. In fields where people thought that raw talent was required, academic departments had lower percentages of women.
Science , this issue p. 262 ; see also p. 234
Significance
Does discrimination contribute to the low percentage of women in mathematics and science careers? We designed an experiment to isolate discrimination’s potential effect. Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women. If ability is self-reported, women still are discriminated against, because employers do not fully account for men’s tendency to boast about performance. Providing full information about candidates’ past performance reduces discrimination but does not eliminate it. We show that implicit stereotypes (as measured by the Implicit Association Test) predict not only the initial bias in beliefs but also the suboptimal updating of gender-related expectations when performance-related information comes from the subjects themselves.
Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research
has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty
exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized
double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly
assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as
significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher
starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect
responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses
indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty
participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against
women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student,
but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias
might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.
In 2 studies that draw from the social role theory of sex differences (A. H. Eagly, W. Wood, & A. B. Diekman, 2000), the authors investigated differences in agentic and communal characteristics in letters of recommendation for men and women for academic positions and whether such differences influenced selection decisions in academia. The results supported the hypotheses, indicating (a) that women were described as more communal and less agentic than men (Study 1) and (b) that communal characteristics have a negative relationship with hiring decisions in academia that are based on letters of recommendation (Study 2). Such results are particularly important because letters of recommendation continue to be heavily weighted and commonly used selection tools (R. D. Arvey & T. E. Campion, 1982; R. M. Guion, 1998), particularly in academia (E. P. Sheehan, T. M. McDevitt, & H. C. Ross, 1998).
Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how recommenders describe female compared to male applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either a chemistry or biochemistry faculty position at a large U.S. research university. Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers' evaluations of female candidates.
The United States economy relies on the productivity, entrepreneurship, and creativity of its people. To maintain its scientific and engineering leadership amid increasing economic and educational globalization, the United States must aggressively pursue the innovative capacity of all its people-women and men. However, women face barriers to success in every field of science and engineering; obstacles that deprive the country of an important source of talent. Without a transformation of academic institutions to tackle such barriers, the future vitality of the U.S. research base and economy are in jeopardy. Beyond Bias and Barriers explains that eliminating gender bias in academia requires immediate overarching reform, including decisive action by university administrators, professional societies, federal funding agencies and foundations, government agencies, and Congress. If implemented and coordinated across public, private, and government sectors, the recommended actions will help to improve workplace environments for all employees while strengthening the foundations of America's competitiveness. © 2007 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
The geoscience workforce has a lower proportion of women compared to the general population of the United States and compared to many other STEM fields. This volume explores issues pertaining to gender parity in the geosciences, and sheds light on some of the best practices that increase participation by women and promote parity.
Volume highlights include:
• Lessons learned from NSF-ADVANCE
• Data on gender composition of faculty at top earth science institutions in the US
• Implicit bias and gender as a social structure
• Strategies for institutional change
• Dual career couples
• Family friendly policies
• Role of mentoring
• Career advancement for women
• Recruiting diverse faculty
• Models of institutional transformation
Women in the Geosciences is a valuable contribution to the existing literature on gender issues in STEM disciplines. It focuses specifically on the geosciences, with a goal to spreading awareness on the best practices for gender parity in academic geoscience departments. Geoscientists, policymakers, educators and administrators could all greatly benefit from the contents of this volume.
This research uses the network-analytic concepts of homophily, tie strength, and range to explore gender differences in characteristics of middle managers' information and career support networks. When the effects of position and potential for future advancement were held constant, women's netwotks were less homophilous than men's. Women high in advancement potential, however, relied to a greater extent than both high-potential men and less high-potential women on close ties and relationships outside their subunits. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that different types of networks may provide alternative routes to similar career resources for men and for women.
Significance
Despite decades of progress, men still greatly outnumber women among biology faculty in the United States. Here, we show that high-achieving faculty members who are male train 10–40% fewer women in their laboratories relative to the number of women trained by other investigators. These skewed employment patterns may result from self-selection among female scientists or they may result from conscious or unconscious bias on the part of some faculty members. The dearth of women who are trained in these laboratories likely limits the number of female candidates who are most competitive for faculty job searches.
Despite the widespread use of letters of recommendation (LORs) in selection systems, research has largely failed to consider the potential emergence of bias in interpretations of LORs. The present study fills this void by examining both race and gender bias in evaluations of LORs and assessing the efficacy of elaboration as a strategy for reducing such bias. Undergraduate students (n = 423) rated four LORs that varied with regard to applicant race and gender. Results suggest that bias does exist in evaluations of LORs, but that requiring raters to expand on their evaluations (i.e., elaborate) reduces this bias. Implications include elaboration as a strategy organizations can implement to reduce bias from emerging when relying on LORs as a selection tool.
Analyzing Media Messages is a primer for learning the technique of systematic, quantitative analysis of communication content. Rich with examples of recent and classic applications, it provides solutions to problems encountered in conducting content analysis, and it is written so that students can readily understand and apply the techniques.
Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in modeling the multilevel nature of organizational data. Although most organizational researchers have chosen to investigate these models using traditional Ordinary Least Squares approaches, hierarchical linear models (i.e., random coefficient models) recently have been receiving increased attention. One of the key questions in using hierarchical linear models is how a researcher chooses to scale the Level-1 independent variables (e.g., raw metric, grand mean centering, group mean centering), because it directly influences the interpretation of both the level-1 and level-2 parameters. Several scaling options are reviewed and discussed in light of four paradigms of multilevel/cross-level research in organizational science: incremental (i.e., group variables add incremental prediction to individual level outcomes over and above individual level predictors), mediational (i.e., the influence of group level variables on individual outcomes are mediated by individual perceptions), moderational (i.e., the relationship between two individual level variables is moderated by a group level variable), and separate (i.e., separate within group and between group models). The paper concludes with modeling recommendations for each of these paradigms and discusses the importance of matching the paradigm under which one is operating to the appropriate modeling strategy.
Results of an experimental study varying the sex of the employee and the gender-type of the job demonstrated that men, as well as women, are penalized when they are successful in areas that imply that they have violated gender norms. But the nature of these penalties differed. When depicted as being successful at a female gender-typed job, men were characterized as more ineffectual and afforded less respect than women successful at the same job or than men successful in a gender-consistent position. Women, in contrast, were more interpersonally derogated and disliked when said to be successful at a male gender-typed job. Regardless of these differing characterizations, both men and women successful in gender-inconsistent jobs were reported to be less preferable as bosses than their more normatively consistent counterparts. These results suggest that success, when it violates gender norms, can be disadvantageous for both men and women, but in different ways.
As a method specifically intended for the study of messages, content analysis is fundamental to mass communication research. Intercoder reliability, more specifically termed intercoder agreement, is a measure of the extent to which independent judges make the same coding decisions in evaluating the characteristics of messages, and is at the heart of this method. Yet there are few standard and accessible guidelines available regarding the appropriate procedures to use to assess and report intercoder reliability, or software tools to calculate it. As a result, it seems likely that there is little consistency in how this critical element of content analysis is assessed and reported in published mass communication studies. Following a review of relevant concepts, indices, and tools, a content analysis of 200 studies utilizing content analysis published in the communication literature between 1994 and 1998 is used to characterize practices in the field. The results demonstrate that mass communication researchers often fail to assess (or at least report) intercoder reliability and often rely on percent agreement, an overly liberal index. Based on the review and these results, concrete guidelines are offered regarding procedures for assessment and reporting of this important aspect of content analysis.
The National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program has been awarding five-year grants to colleges and universities since 2001 to address a common problem: how to improve the work environment for women faculty in science and engineering. Drawing on the expertise of scientists, engineers, social scientists, specialists in organizational behavior, and university administrators, this collection is the first to describe the variety of innovative efforts academic institutions around the country have undertaken. Focusing on a wide range of topics, the contributors discuss both the theoretical and empirical aspects of these initiatives, with emphasison the practical issues involved in creating the approaches. The cases represented in this collection depict the many issues women faculty in science and engineering face. The essays in Transforming Science and Engineering illustrate that creating work environments that sustain and advance women scientists and engineers benefits women, men, and underrepresented minorities. Abigail J. Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Janet E. Malley is a psychologist and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Danielle LaVaque-Manty, former Research Associate at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, teaches composition at U-M's Sweetland Writing Center.
This study examines over 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty at a large American medical school in the mid-1990s, using methods from corpus and discourse analysis, with the theoretical perspective of gender schema from cognitive psychology. Letters written for female applicants were found to differ systematically from those written for male applicants in the extremes of length, in the percentages lacking in basic features, in the percentages with doubt raisers (an extended category of negative language, often associated with apparent commendation), and in frequency of mention of status terms. Further, the most common semantically grouped possessive phrases referring to female and male applicants (`her teaching,' `his research') reinforce gender schema that tend to portray women as teachers and students, and men as researchers and professionals.
This paper presents a general statistical methodology for the analysis of multivariate categorical data arising from observer reliability studies. The procedure essentially involves the construction of functions of the observed proportions which are directed at the extent to which the observers agree among themselves and the construction of test statistics for hypotheses involving these functions. Tests for interobserver bias are presented in terms of first-order marginal homogeneity and measures of interobserver agreement are developed as generalized kappa-type statistics. These procedures are illustrated with a clinical diagnosis example from the epidemiological literature.
The present study attempted to determine the relationship between affective disposition and the favorability of letters of reference. We hypothesized that individuals with positive dispositions would write more favorable letters than would individuals with less positive or neutral dispositions. In addition, we also hypothesized that length of letter would partly mediate the relationship between affective disposition and letter favorability. To test these hypotheses, two studies were conducted. In order to present letter writers with a controlled stimulus, Study 1 entailed having 110 undergraduate students write letters of reference for two hypothetical job candidates in a laboratory setting. In order to test the generalizability of the laboratory study, Study 2 involved 95 faculty members who submitted three recent letters of reference they had written. Results showed that affective disposition was related to the favorability of letters of reference in both studies. Results also revealed that length of letter partly mediated the relationship between affective disposition and letter favorability.
Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences
- M Goulden
- K Frasch
- M A Mason
Goulden, M., Frasch, K. & Mason, M. A. Staying Competitive: Patching
America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences (University of California at Berkeley;
Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security; and the Center for
American Progress, 2009).
American Association of University Women
- C. Hill
- C. Corbett
- A. St. Rose
Phase II: Final Applications and Initial O ers of Admission. Findings from the 2014 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey (Council of Graduate Schools
- J Allum
Allum, J. Phase II: Final Applications and Initial O ers of Admission. Findings
from the 2014 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey (Council of
Graduate Schools, 2014).
American Association of University Women. Why So Few? Women in Science
- C Hill
- C Corbett
- St
- A Rose
Hill, C., Corbett, C. & St. Rose, A. American Association of University Women.
Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
(AAUW, 2010).
Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
- Women
Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
(National Science Foundation, 2015);
- M A Holmes
- S O'connell
- K Dutt
Holmes, M. A., O'Connell, S. & Dutt, K. Women in the Geosciences: Practical,
Positive Practices Towards Parity (AGU Special Publication Series, Wiley, 2015).