By KATHLEEN BITTER

While the conventional wisdom for decades has been that women have a harder time being recognized and hired in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, a new study from Cornell’s College of Human Ecology has found that across biology, engineering, economics and psychology, female candidates  are preferred two to one for faculty positions by current faculty members.

“For a long time, two seemingly inconsistent phenomena sat side-by-side and no one seemed to notice or care,” said Prof. Wendy Williams, human development, the lead author of the study.

On one hand, Williams said, there are commonly-reported experiments showing the sexist hiring practices that result in the devaluation of the accomplishments and credentials of female applicants when compared to male applicants. On the other hand, there are real-world hiring studies that look at statistics on who is applying and who is being hired for positions in academia, and these studies are finding that, while fewer women apply from academic jobs, they are more likely to be hired.

To complete the study, Williams and Prof. Stephen Ceci, developmental psychology, surveyed 873 tenure-track and tenured faculty members across all 50 states and the District of Columbia about their hiring preferences.

In the main experiment, 363 faculty members were given narratives of male and female applicants for faculty positions where the applicant had a similar lifestyle to the faculty member completing the survey — that is, married faculty with no children were evaluating married candidates with no children, or single parents were evaluating single parents. The survey found that both genders preferred female applicants two to one across fields, with the sole exception of male economics faculty, who had no gender preference.

Ceci and Williams also looked at gender preferences in senior faculty versus younger faculty members and found no difference between the age groups. Additionally, they said they expected more pro-women attitudes at smaller liberal arts colleges, but large schools showed the same female preference as smaller colleges.

In subsequent surveys, faculty were asked to evaluate applicants with different lifestyles, to evaluate female candidates who had or had not taken maternity leave in graduate school, and to rank CVs instead of evaluating narratives.

To understand the rationale behind the methodology, one has to understand the faculty hiring process. According to Ceci, faculty in most universities are eligible to be on a hiring committee “from the day you’re hired as an assistant professor.”

Williams used the Department of Human Development to describe the usual faculty hiring process.

“There are many different subfields in our department,” she said. “So for instance there’s neuroscience … I wouldn’t be able to evaluate a full CV of a neuroscientist. I wouldn’t know what to look for. And so what we do is we have a search committee, and those are experts in the subfield of the discipline. They evaluate the actual CVs that get sent in.”

The search committee will then create a shortlist of the better applicants — as many as 300 applications may come in for a single position — and explain who is better qualified based on their accomplishments and publications to the greater faculty, according to Williams.

“What we tried to do with the narratives was to develop materials that would work across fields in our study, and in a way that would hold constant certain aspects of quality while allowing individual faculty to fill in for themselves which journals the person was publishing in,” Williams said. “Because you could never use a single CV for hiring across different fields, and different types of institutions. What we did captured a portion of the hiring process.”

The narratives allowed faculty members within different fields or at differently-sized institutions to interpret the same level of competence of a candidate without Williams and Ceci having to specify journals, institutions, and experience in CVs for each individual field and institution.

Williams and Ceci’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also emphasizes that surveys of actual hires have shown that there has been a preference for women in academia since the 1980s. 

“We reviewed eight large-scale, real-world studies, and they almost always showed that fewer women typically apply for the jobs, but if they apply, a higher percentage of them actually get the jobs.” – Prof. Stephen Ceci

“We reviewed eight large-scale, real-world studies, and they almost always showed that fewer women typically apply for the jobs, but if they apply, a higher percentage of them actually get the jobs,” Ceci said.

According to Ceci, the assumption has been repeatedly made that while fewer women were applying to faculty jobs, the “super women” were applying. So a female applicant would be on average more qualified for a position than a male applicant and therefore more likely to be hired.

“That’s why we did the experiment,” Ceci said. “Not to see how real hiring committees would do, cause that’s been done. It’s been done all over the country and we described that in the online supplement that accompanied our article. But to say, is it really the case more women are hired because they’re stronger? Or is it because faculty value gender diversity?”

The narratives allowed Williams and Ceci to hold competence at a constant level to find out if there was a pro-female bias that was solely based on gender.

“If [people] knew that these large scale audit-type studies of hiring [have] already showed for years and years women have had an advantage, it makes it easier for them to see the importance of our study in the context of addressing whether the advantage is due to the fact that they’re just superb women [rather than] that women are just preferred,” Williams said.

Williams and Ceci used the lifestyle similarities and differences to test another common belief about prejudices within gender.

“There is a lot of literature that suggests there is prejudice against divorced mothers,” Williams said. “And that there are advantages to married men with kids and a stay at home wife.”

The study found that women actually show preference for a divorced mother of two over an equally-qualified married father of two about 70 percent of the time, while men prefer to hire the married father of two. The worst-case scenario for hiring preference, according to Ceci, was to be a divorced father.

Another difference between the genders was found when evaluating female applicants who took a one-year maternity leave in graduate school.

“Male faculty really preferred women who, if they had a baby, took a leave,” Williams said. “And the women didn’t. We think that men say, ‘Well, when I have kids I want my wife to take a leave.’ And I think women say, ‘Well you know what? I didn’t take any one year leave when I had my kids.’”

According to Williams and Ceci, female faculty members tend to worry about hurting their careers by taking maternity leave, even if encouraged by college administration. Williams herself did not take the maternity leave offered when she had children, although she said she believes the environment is improving and more women are feeling comfortable with taking a leave.

Williams compared the evolution of feelings towards hiring women in academia to the shift in general attitudes about gay marriage over the last 30 years. In both cases there has been a large change in the way people feel, but no one is talking about the more positive hiring environment for women in academia. 

“We’re not saying there’s no sexism — there is sexism still — but not in the hiring process for tenure-track professors.” – Prof. Wendy Williams

“The evolution of values about women seems to be harder for some people to acknowledge,” she said. “And we’re not saying there’s no sexism — there is sexism still — but not in the hiring process for tenure-track professors. We feel like it’s good to acknowledge where we’ve made progress so that we can tell women [they] may have an advantage right now, and we want to focus on where there are still problems, and solve them.”

Williams and Ceci said they are planning more studies in the future about gender dynamics in academia, including how graduate students think about faculty hiring decisions and how different advice is given to males and females trying to achieve tenure.