The simulation was conducted by Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci of Cornell University. The simulation was based on a hypothetical hiring situation. Here faculty members in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) were found to be twice as likely to give a job to a female applicant than to a male one, all else being equal.
In the study, the researchers asked nearly 900 STEM faculty members to review applications from invented scientists. In only one discipline — economics — male reviewers preferred male applicants; otherwise, female applicants won out.
Commenting on the outcome, Wendy Williams told Inside Higher Ed about her surprise with the results: “At one point we turned to each other while we were coding email responses from faculty across the U.S. and said we hoped that the large preference for women applicants over identically qualified men applicants would slow down because it seemed too large to be believed! It never did slow down, and the final tally was roughly a 2 to 1 preference.”
The Williams-Ceci study has been published in the journal PNAS (“National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track.”)
The findings run counter to other studies. For example, in a survey of 1,820 academics across 30 different fields of study, the findings revealed that attitudes about the importance of intelligence, as opposed to hard work, could contribute to the gender gaps that continue to occur across academia. Here Princeton philosopher Sarah-Jane Leslie and psychologist Andrei Cimpian found low representation of women in the sciences.
Coming out somewhere in the middle, a further study looking into the loss of promising female scientists found that women exiting science is no longer outpacing that of bright young male researchers. However, a long period of time would be needed to redress the loss of women over the past few decades.
