Half of you won't click on a linked article (I won't even try to replicate Ben's gag). The other half are innumerate idiots. So here's a linked article that's guaranteed to piss everyone off. My confidence interval on that is off the fucking charts.
Many of us are in fields where citation frequency is used as a measure for pay increases and promotion. This generates a fair amount of disagreement as to whether or not that's a fair metric. Here's an interesting analysis of citation frequency by gender in the notoriously sexist discipline of philosophy. How do you think your discipline would hold up under a similar analysis?
Please to enjoy le flayvah as they say in France:
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/02/25/gender-and-citation-in-four-general-interest-philosophy-journals-1993-2013/
This article makes me really glad I didn't get an advanced degree in Philosophy (though I hang on to my BA cum laude).
ReplyDeleteAnecdotally, the most brilliant person in my undergrad philosophy program was admitted immediately to Penn State's PhD in philosophy. She dropped out after a year, and when I asked her why, she said, "I cannot fight these people every single day of my life. They are awful, and they talk over me when I speak." And let me tell you, she was not a quitter.
Flayvah. Gotta be an accent somewhere, right? Link? Too Long / Didn't Click.
ReplyDeleteInteresting article. I can't say much in defense of my own discipline. We're probably just as bad. I'm sure the state of our citation distribution is about the same.
ReplyDeleteWell, you are in the sciences, and the problems with gender in the sciences are pretty well known, if perhaps not entirely well understood.
DeleteWhat I found interesting is that Philosophy is a humanistic discipline. But my guess is that if you did similar scatter plots and curves for every discipline, the ones Philosophy would probably most resemble are economics and poll sic (just an educated guess).
For someone in my field the interesting question is how the hell did that happen? What's the history of the field that produced this situation?
From a more practical stance the question becomes how do we address the problem in disciplines that look like this?
fucking blogger's fucking spellcheck. Poli Sci. Poli Sci. Although Poll Sic does kind of capture something.
DeleteReactions: the data plotting is very cool, and well and thoughtfully explained in the text. On that level, I really like it. (And of course it reminds me a bit of the less-sophisticated study of gender patterns in the way that students refer to teachers on The Site That Shall Not Be Named, which we discussed earlier this month.
ReplyDeleteThe patterns revealed, however, are depressing. Very, very depressing. I can think of at least one contemporary in another humanities discipline who had an experience very similar to the one BC describes, at a nearby Ivy. She took a year off and returned, and, last I heard, is well-published, and tenured. But I haven't checked her citation stats. I'd also note that the "name" scholars in my own little female-heavy subfield of English are mostly not, despite impressive scholarship/publication records, at the sort of universities that make such work (relatively) easy to accomplish. Nevertheless, they soldier on, and I try to follow their example.
And then there's this: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/final-note/among-ceos-women-are-outnumbered-men-named-john .
DeleteSometimes you've got to laugh to keep from crying.
You bring up a different issue from Ben, but an equally interesting one, I think. In the humanistic disciplines that have achieved gender parity, most of the prestige departments are still sausage-heavy, so to speak. I've been a tenure-stream faculty member in three North American departments, plus a brief stint in the UK, in my career. What I notice is that women are hired in a totally different way from men. In the wannabe-ivy department we hired women at the mid-career or senior level, based on their impressive CVs. But when it came to junior appointments that had to be made on potential, the men were clearly favored. There were moments when there wasn't a single male assistant proffie in the department. I used to really love pointing that out in meetings. But you couldn't get anyone to admit that it had anything to do with how we viewed potential in male versus female candidates.
DeleteI think the effects on career trajectories were pernicious. Men started with an advantage because their first jobs were so often the cushiest ones. Women started in worse jobs and had to work their way up to the cushy ones.
The good news, I suppose, is that I see some change in recent years. I have a lot of grad students, and most of them are women. It is getting harder and harder for the prestige jobs to lock women out at the junior level in my field. So I think we've reached some kind of tipping point (at least I hope we have). Hopefully our scatter plots and curves would look better than philosophy's right now. I'm pretty confident that they'll look even better in a decade.
Change takes time. You just have to keep pushing.
Damin it "not a single female assistant professor" How do I turn this fencing auto correct feature off?
DeleteI wondered about that. I thought maybe I just wasn't following.
DeleteEspecially with that correction, what you say makes sense. If you add in the fact that women are probably still less likely, for a variety of reasons (many of them having to do with the needs, or perceived needs, of spouses and/or other family members) to move mid-career, you begin to have some explanations for larger patterns that have little to do with actual ability (or even quality of scholarship, especially over a lifetime).
Yeah I wasn;t even thinking about the mid-career mobility issues. Those are important too. I think the big issue is that the cushier jobs provide huge advantages that have longterm consequences for an individual's career trajectory. Even if a discipline has gender parity, if the jobs that provide bigger salaries, more research money, less teaching (and less grading because the grads do the scut work), guaranteed junior leave and a sexier letterhead for when you write to press editors about your first book, then the deck remains pretty stacked. Career trajectories are often determined (in book-based disciplines) by how that first book turns out and is received. And in keeping with the data in the linked piece above, that in turn likely affects citation frequency and therefore people's perception of where a particular person stands in a field.
DeleteSo to my mind the place to attack this in the humanistic disciplines and probably the social sciences too is at the level of junior hiring and retention. That's where the structural inequalities take root. For the sciences I think they still have to work at the level of the undergraduate majors and recruitment into top PhD programs.
But we are waaaaaay down thread on the main page at this point, so probably nobody is listening to me rant anymore.
ReplyDelete