I mentioned this recent study in lab meeting today and decided to collect a few details here. I saw the NY Times report cited/linked in a couple of other places and it is a good start (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/science/bias-persists-against-women-of-science-a-study-says.html?ref=science&_r=0).
Key paragraphs:
To avoid such complications, the Yale researchers sought to design the simplest study possible. They contacted professors in the biology, chemistry and physics departments at six major research universities — three private and three public, unnamed in the study — and asked them to evaluate, as part of a study, an application from a recent graduate seeking a position as a laboratory manager.
All of the professors received the same one-page summary, which portrayed the applicant as promising but not stellar. But in half of the descriptions, the mythical applicant was named John and in half the applicant was named Jennifer.
About 30 percent of the professors, 127 in all, responded. (They were asked not to discuss the study with colleagues, limiting the chance that they would compare notes and realize its purpose.)
On a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being highest, professors gave John an average score of 4 for competence and Jennifer 3.3. John was also seen more favorably as someone they might hire for their laboratories or would be willing to mentor.
The average starting salary offered to Jennifer was $26,508. To John it was $30,328.
The bias had no relation to the professors’ age, sex, teaching field or tenure status. “There’s not even a hint of a difference there,” said Corinne Moss-Racusin, a postdoctoral social psychology researcher who was the lead author of the paper.
The original study was published in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.full.pdf+html) if the link doesn’t work. The Times summary appears to accurately capture the main findings.
The connection to our work is the conjecture that the sampled professors in the natural sciences have spent more time around men in these fields (even the women) and have come to expect men to fit more naturally in the field due to the statistics of their prior experience. This isn’t “sexism” in the normal use of the word, it is an implicit bias that I strongly suspect the professors do not even realize they have acquired during the regular activities of daily science life. They have implicitly learned to expect men to be better lab managers and do not even realize the bias is operating.
I put this out as a kind of “dark side” to implicit learning. If your brain is automatically extracting the statistics of the world around you, it is going to naturally reinforce existing stereotypes and make it hard to change if those stereotypes are unjust. An analogy can be made to another kind of dark side, the ability to learn a bad habit through practice as easily as a good habit and the equal difficulty of breaking either kind.
I have thought that framing this kind of bias as implicit and outside awareness would make it easier to address by making the expression of bias seen as less of a personal fault. In my limited experience, however, this is completely not true. People seem to find the idea that they might be influenced by implicit bias quite upsetting in practice. Apparently that is not going to stop me from bringing it up here anyway, though.