Science Career Bias Against Women Debunked After Study is Repeated
A landmark study that claimed men enjoy an unfair advantage in scientific careers has been debunked after a nearly identical rerun of the experiment finds that the opposite is true: it’s women who have the unfair advantage. The Times has the story.
The results are all the more striking because a leading scientific journal had refused to repeat the original experiment, raising concerns that some researchers are reluctant to scrutinise results that align with their views.
The original study, published in 2012, has been cited 4,600 times — an enormous figure in a field where most papers attract fewer than 20 citations. It involved science professors being sent a fictional CV for a lab manager job.
In half of CVs, the applicant was named “John”, while for the other half the applicant was named “Jennifer”. Everything else, from the candidate’s academic grades to work experience, was identical.
The professors who saw the male name rated him as more competent, more hireable and more deserving of mentoring and a higher salary. The finding is often mentioned in debates about the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers.
The new paper repeated the test on a far larger scale. Whereas the original had asked about 130 academics at six universities, the authors of the new paper — led by Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim of Rutgers University in New Jersey — contacted nearly 1,300 professors from more than 50 American research institutions, using the same application materials and the same measures of perceived competence, hireability, likeability and salary recommendations.
The aim was to see whether the result of the original paper held when the experiment was repeated. It did not. The female applicant was seen as marginally more capable and appealing to work with and the more hireable of the pair. She was also seen as worth a bigger salary — $35,550 versus $34,150 for the man. The differences were small, but consistent. The widely cited bias against women failed to reappear; it now tilted the other way.
Honeycutt said attitudes may have shifted since the first study, but that the failure to replicate could also reflect the small sample size of the original experiment.
According to the authors of the new study, the resistance they encountered when they suggested repeating the experiment may be as telling as the result. Honeycutt said that he and his co-authors were taken aback when they proposed a rerun to Nature Human Behaviour, a leading journal.
When Honeycutt and his colleagues submitted a registered replication report (RRR) — a formal proposal to repeat the study — it was rejected by a panel of peer reviewers acting for the journal.
Worth reading in full.
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So, we now have statistics about two different collections of anecdotes about different people doing different things at different times. Scientific pork-cress, for sure!
[This is ‘classic’ junk science in both cases.]
”Research” these days revolves around observing an outcome which has multiple variable influences, then deciding which one is critical or fashionable – sex, race, etc discrimination – to the outcome, work backwards, do a “study”, construct a computer model and by strange coincidence it proves the very thing you believe to be the major causal agent.
Write it up, get it “peer reviewed” by likeminded reviewers, get it published – the on to the next “research”.
So-called “social science” isn’t science at all because it’s impossible to design repeatable “social science” experiments as there’s no way to get the same group of people together twice (they’ve changed by making more experience in the meantime) and there’s also nothing like “generalized people.” 130 professors are exactly as representable for “people” as 1300 professors, namely, not at all. They’re a vanishingly small number of different individuals.
Yes, I quite agree. Always good to debunk a poorly done study thats led to false conclusions but what earth shattering revelations have we learnt here? Even the authors had to concede the difference was “marginal” in terms of favouring women. Occams razor also has to be acknowledged when necessary because maybe this is an area that naturally attracts less women and has nothing to do with discrimination at all. Similar to how nursing has always and will always be female dominated, but it’s not because of discriminating against men. Human nature has to be a consideration somewhere along the line. I mean, can you imagine if the construction industry adopted the DEI garbage and had to employ 40-50% females? The ‘housing crisis’ would be a million times worse than what it currently is, put it that way.🤭 Also, discrimination would have to actually be proven before anyone can make that claim. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a white man might get rejected for a role due to somebody non-white ( and possibly not male ) genuinely being the better candidate in that scenario. That is meritocracy in action, after all. Not everybody can be pointed at… Read more »
There was never anything to “debunk” in this so-called “study”. Someone collected 130 anecdotes about an entirely fictional situation (a job application which didn’t even get to an interview because there was no real applicant but just something somebody fabricated he believed to look like a real applicant) and did a statistical analysis of that supposed to support a preexisting political postulate. Someone else collected ten times as much anecdotes about a fictional job application he believed to be similar to the original fiction and did a statistical analysis of that to support another preexisting political postulate. That’s “social science as usual”, everybody always finds exactly what he’s looking for, or, in the words of Shakespeare, who, as Kurt Tucholsky once claimed, correctly predicted everything: Much ado about nothing.
It costs more to employ a woman than a man.
Why? Women are frequently in and out of the labour market due to having children, child-raising. This increases recruitment and training costs for their replacement, and/or additional costs of hiring temps to cover temporary absences.
Workers who are not continuously in the work place do not gain experience bad build skills.
Anyone living in the real world can see that in 2025, in the so called “developed” western world, there is positive discrimination in favour of women, non-whites and non-heterosexuals.
It’s not up for debate. It’s explicit policy, called DEI. Every major corporation, every organisation, every institution, openly champions it and boasts about it. Furthermore, any organisation that doesn’t explicitly go along with it is vulnerable to being attacked.
Those are just facts that everyone knows and no one in their sane mind denies.
So we shouldn’t act surprised or pretend the opposite is true, even if we are browbeaten into it.
Great photo. Well done for not showing a white middle aged male.