I think you are bordering on cherry picking here. The meta-analysis studied 6 areas of bias, and found parity in 3, advantage for women in 1, and advantage for men in 2. It also makes no sense to link a particular study when you just linked a meta-analysis: presumably I could dig through and selectively find studies supporting the opposite position.
There is also no mention of the key issue of sexual harassment, which has been the source of most of the gender based complaints in EA, and is compounded in situations of large gender imbalance, just from the pure maths of potential predators vs potential targets.
I agree on the sexual harassment problem and have written about that at length on here.
I don’t think I am cherry picking. The commenter’s claim that I challenged was that women are excluded from male-dominated (eg STEM) environments. With respect to the main post, the question is whether women are excluded from computer science jobs in particular. The paper found that with respect to hiring, biases are in favour of women in a range of STEM disciplines. In computer science in particular, there is evidence either of equal treatment or of a large bias in favour of women.
In computer science, Way et al. (2016) found that more highly ranked departments hired women and men at comparable rates, holding constant publications, department prestige, geography, and postdoc experience.
The Computer Research Association commissioned a national audit of U.S. and Canadian computer-science hiring (Stankovic & Aspray, 2003). They found that new women recipients of PhDs applied for far fewer academic jobs than men: Women with PhDs applied for six positions, whereas men applied for 25 positions. However, female PhDs were offered twice as many interviews per application (0.77), whereas men received only 0.37. Further, women received 0.55 job offers per application, whereas men received only 0.19: “Obviously women were much more selective in where they applied, and also much more successful in the application process” (Stankovic & Aspray, 2003, p. 31).
The same is true for other STEM disciplines. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the evidence suggests that men are on balance excluded from jobs in male-dominated STEM disciplines, in academia at least. I haven’t seen anything about hiring in STEM-related companies.
This is from the author’s own analysis:
If men and women were treated equally in STEM in academia, we would expect the blue and orange line to be overlapping, but the blue line consistently tracks above the orange line, indicating a bias to hiring women.
In their systematic review, the authors cite a range of studies finding similar results in hiring in STEM
Kessel and Nelson (2011) reported that female PhDs had similar or higher probabilities than men of entering assistant professorships in 100 top “highly quantitative” departments but not in other STEM fields. Ceci et al. (2014) compared the percentage of female PhDs with the percentage of female assistant professors 5 to 6 years later in GEMP fields and found similar results. And in philosophy—the humanities field most like GEMP in gender composition and quantitative emphasis—among 2008 to 2019 PhDs, women had a 10% to 17% greater likelihood than men of entering permanent academic placements (Allen-Hermanson, 2017; Kallens et al., 2022).
Among political scientists, Schröder et al. (2021) found that female political scientists had a 20% greater likelihood of obtaining a tenured position than comparably accomplished males in the same cohort after controlling for personal characteristics and accomplishments (publications, grants, children, etc.). Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments
Data from the National Research Council shows that the fraction of women hired in STEM subjects in academia is higher than the number of female applicants across the board.
Data from individual universities confirms this picture:
At the University of Western Ontario, across departments in 1992 to 1999, women constituted 23.2% of applicants, 30.4% of interviewees, and 36.2% of hires for tenuretrack jobs (The University of Western Ontario, Office of the Provost and Vice-President [Academic], 2001). At Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia in 2001, of 4,525 applicants, women were more likely than men to be one of the 105 hired, comprising 38.9% of applicants but 41.0% of those hired (Kimura, 2002).
An analysis by Moratti (2020) of hiring for the decade from 2007 to 2017 at Norway’s largest university revealed no gender bias in hiring: Seventy-seven searches generated 1,009 applicants for new associate professorships, with women slightly more likely than men to be hired, leading Moratti to conclude that
I think you are bordering on cherry picking here. The meta-analysis studied 6 areas of bias, and found parity in 3, advantage for women in 1, and advantage for men in 2. It also makes no sense to link a particular study when you just linked a meta-analysis: presumably I could dig through and selectively find studies supporting the opposite position.
There is also no mention of the key issue of sexual harassment, which has been the source of most of the gender based complaints in EA, and is compounded in situations of large gender imbalance, just from the pure maths of potential predators vs potential targets.
I agree on the sexual harassment problem and have written about that at length on here.
I don’t think I am cherry picking. The commenter’s claim that I challenged was that women are excluded from male-dominated (eg STEM) environments. With respect to the main post, the question is whether women are excluded from computer science jobs in particular. The paper found that with respect to hiring, biases are in favour of women in a range of STEM disciplines. In computer science in particular, there is evidence either of equal treatment or of a large bias in favour of women.
The same is true for other STEM disciplines. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the evidence suggests that men are on balance excluded from jobs in male-dominated STEM disciplines, in academia at least. I haven’t seen anything about hiring in STEM-related companies.
This is from the author’s own analysis:
If men and women were treated equally in STEM in academia, we would expect the blue and orange line to be overlapping, but the blue line consistently tracks above the orange line, indicating a bias to hiring women.
In their systematic review, the authors cite a range of studies finding similar results in hiring in STEM
Data from the National Research Council shows that the fraction of women hired in STEM subjects in academia is higher than the number of female applicants across the board.
Data from individual universities confirms this picture: