Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, compared with their male counterparts. Christopher Intagliata reports.
As in many other fields, gender bias is widespread in the sciences. Men score higher in starting salaries, have more mentoring (指导), and have better odds of being hired. Studies show they’re also perceived as more competent than women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. And new research reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, too.
“Say, you know, this is the best student I’ve ever had,” says Kuheli Dutt, a social scientist and delivery officer at Columbia University’s Lamont campus. “Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: ‘The candidate was productive, or intelligent, or a solid scientist or something that’s clearly solid praise,’ but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one if a kind.”
Dutt and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in geoscience. They were all edited for gender and other identifying information, so Dutt and her team could assign them a score without knowing the gender of the student. They found that female applicants were only half as likely to get outstanding letters, compared with their male counterparts. That includes letters of recommendation from all over the world, and written by, yes, men and women. The findings are in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Dutt says they were not able to evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of the applicants using the data in the files. But she says the results still suggests women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their career starting with those less than outstanding letters of recommendation.
“We’re not trying to assign blames or criticize anyone or call anyone consciously sexist. Rather, the point is to use the result of this study to open up meaningful dialogues on implicit gender bias, be it a departmental level or an institutional level or even a discipline level, which may led to some recommendation for the letter writers themselves.”
