Little Gender Bias in Academic Science

Katherine Knott at Inside Higher Ed:

Claims of widespread gender bias in tenure-track hiring, grant funding and journal acceptances in the academic sciences are not supported by the data, a new study finds.

The paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest looked at two decades of research regarding biases that tenure-track women have faced since 2000. In the end, the authors determined tenure-track women in science, technology, engineering or math were at parity with men in tenure-track positions in the same fields when it comes to grant funding, journal acceptances and recommendation letters.

Women did have an advantage in the hiring process for the tenure-track jobs, though the evidence did show a bias against women in teaching evaluations and salaries. The salary gap, according to the report, was concerning but smaller than the oft-quoted statistic that women in STEM fields make 82 cents for every dollar that men earn. On average, the gap was 9 cents on the dollar.

“We’re getting really close to an equitable landscape,” said Wendy Williams, a professor in the department of human development at Cornell University and an author of the paper. “We’ve come 90 percent of the way, and so what stands between us and that is not an insurmountable task anymore. It’s really important for young women in college who are considering going to grad school and women in grad school who are considering becoming professors.”

Williams said the discourse about sexism in higher education can discourage some women from choosing a career in the academy.

Williams co-wrote the paper with Stephen Ceci, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell, and Shulamit Kahn, an associate professor of economics at Boston University. The paper was “an adversarial collaboration,” bringing together researchers with different viewpoints. Williams and Ceci have written often to rebut frequent talking points on gender bias in STEM, while Kahn has a history of revealing gender inequities in her field.

Beats and Journalist Demographics

 Many posts have dealt with news media

Emily Tomasik and Jeffrey Gottfried at Pew:

Journalists’ beats also vary by their employment status – that is, whether they are freelance or self-employed journalists, or full- or part-time journalists at a news organization.

College Gender Gap

Douglas Belkin at WSJ:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

...

 The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.

ERA Deadline Issues

From the Congressional Research Service:

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ERA) declares that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex….” The ERA was approved by Congress for ratification by the states in 1972; the amendment included a customary, but not constitutionally mandated, seven-year deadline for ratification. Between 1972 and 1977, 35 state legislatures, of the 38 required by the Constitution, voted to ratify the ERA. Despite a congressional extension of the deadline from 1979 to 1982, no additional states approved the amendment during the extended period, at which time the amendment was widely considered to have expired.

After 23 years in which no additional state voted to ratify the ERA, the situation changed when Nevada and Illinois approved the amendment, in March 2017 and May 2018, respectively. In addition, a change in party control of the Virginia legislature in the 2019 elections raised hopes among ERA supporters that this state might also vote to ratify, which would bring the number of approvals to 38, the requirement set by Article V for validation of a proposed amendment as part of the Constitution.

In the context of these developments, ERA proponents have renewed efforts to restart the ratification process. These actions center on the assertion that because the amendment did not include a ratification deadline within the amendment text, it remains potentially viable and eligible for ratification indefinitely. This proposal was originally known as the “Three State Solution,” for the number of state ratifications then necessary to reach the constitutional requirement that it be approved by three-fourths of the states. Supporters of this approach maintain that Congress has the authority both to repeal the original 1979 ratification deadline and its 1982 extension, and to restart the ratification clock at the current 37-state level—including the Nevada and Illinois ratifications—with or without a future ratification deadline. They assert that the broad authority over the amendment process provided to Congress by Article V of the Constitution includes this right. They further claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Coleman v. Miller favors their position. They also note the precedent of the Twenty-Seventh “Madison” Amendment, which was ratified in 1992, 203 years after Congress proposed it to the states.

Opponents of reopening the amendment process may argue that attempting to revive the ERA would be politically divisive, and contrary to the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of Article V and Congress’s earlier intentions. They might also reject the example of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which, unlike the proposed ERA, never had a ratification time limit. Further, they might claim that efforts to revive the ERA ignore the possibility that state ratifications may have expired with the 1982 deadline, and that ERA proponents fail to consider the issue of state withdrawals from the amendment, known as rescissions, a question that has not been specifically decided in any U.S. court.

Unmarried America

From the Census:

The Buckeye Singles Council started “National Singles Week” in Ohio in the 1980s to celebrate single life and recognize singles and their contributions to society. The week is now widely observed during the third full week of September (Sept. 18-24 in 2016) as “Unmarried and Single Americans Week,” an acknowledgment that many unmarried Americans do not identify with the word “single” because they are parents, have partners or are widowed. In this edition of Facts for Features, unmarried people include those who were never married, widowed or divorced, unless otherwise noted.

Single Life

109 million  The number of unmarried people in America 18 and older in 2015. This group made up 45 percent of all U.S. residents 18 and older.

Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1

 53% The percentage of unmarried U.S. residents 18 and older who were women in 2015; 47 percent were men.

Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1

63% The percentage of unmarried U.S. residents 18 and older in 2015 who had never been married. Another 24 percent were divorced and 13 percent were widowed.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1

19 million The number of unmarried U.S. residents 65 and older in 2015. These seniors made up 18 percent of all unmarried people 18 and older.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1

88
The number of unmarried men 18 and older for every 100 unmarried women in the United States in 2015.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1
59 million
The number of households maintained by unmarried men and women in 2015. These households comprised 47 percent of households nationwide.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table A1

35 million The number of people who lived alone in 2015. They comprised 28 percent of all households, up from 17 percent in 1970.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table H-1, America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 1960 to Present, Table HH-4

Parenting

36% The percentage of women age 15 to 50 with a birth in the last 12 months, as of 2014, who were widowed, divorced or never married.
Source:
2014 American Community Survey, Table B13002

39% The percentage of opposite-sex, unmarried-partner couples in 2015 that lived with at least one biological child of either partner.
Source:
America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2015, Table UC3

788,730 The number of unmarried grandparents who were responsible for most of the basic care of a co-resident grandchild in 2014; 30 percent of coresident grandparents responsible for their grandchildren were unmarried.
Source:
2014 American Community Survey, Table B10057

Unmarried Couples

7 million The number of unmarried-partner households in 2014. Of this number, 448,271 were same-sex households.
Source:
2014 American Community Survey Table, B11009

Voters

39% The percentage of voters in the 2012 presidential election who were unmarried, compared with 24 percent of voters in the 1972 presidential election.
Source:
Voting and Registration in the Election of 2012, Table 9 Characteristics of New Voters: 1972

35% The percentage of voters in the 2014 November congressional election who were unmarried.
Source:
Voting and Registration in the Election of 2014, Table 9

Education

87% The percentage of unmarried people 25 and older in 2015 who had completed high school or more education
Source:
Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015, Table 2

27% The percentage of unmarried people 25 and older in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree or more education.
Source:
Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015, Table 2

International Perspectives: Gender Equality

A new international poll by Pew Global asked about views on gender equality. American views are similar to those of other industrial countries, but different from those of developing countries. One example: