Are the biased letters of recommendation, a reason why women are still seriously underrepresented in experimental particle physics, in a single 15 percent of the Field Faculty? A new study does not suggest.
The new document, published in open access format, includes some other interesting findings that challenge the literature existing in the language of gender in letters of recommendation.
"When we analyze the cards of the female authorship versus the letters authorized by men written on the exact candidates, we have not found evidence of biases against women," said co-author Wendy M. Williams, professor of Psychology at Cornell University. "Surprisingly, we discovered that women were really described as" bright "three times more often than men were."
more popular
In contrast to these findings, many previous studies have found that women in academic science are half probable that men receive excellent letters of recommendation, and that the recommenders use significantly more. "Agentico" (powerful) and adjectives "outstanding" (exceptional) to describe men, while women are more often described in "communal" (community-oriented) and "grindstone" (workers).
By this new study, the researchers analyzed more than 2,200 letters of recommendation for work candidates from attending professors in the physics of experimental particles, mental psychology and sociology are developed. The physics of experimental particles is a corner especially dominated by men of physics discipline traditionally dominated by men. The psychology of development and sociology have much higher actions of the members of the female faculty. Therefore, Williams and the co-authors of it could analyze letters of recommendation in physics by the recommended candidate and gender and compare them with letters from different fields. (The physics data set included 963 letters for 206 male candidates and 198 letters for 39 candidates presented to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois between 2011 and 2017. The Social Science Data Set included 40 letters for 163 men and 605 letters For 222 women. Subject to Cornell.)
Letters differ in some forms of gender, but, for the most part, not in the patterns that were predictable or punitive for women. For example, it was found that male physicists used more words of murmur when writing about candidate women, but, regardless of the discipline or gender of writers, men, are not more commonly represented as agents or as highlights, nor women They are represented as more communal. googleg.cmd.push (function () googleg.display ("dfp-ad-article_in_article"););
In the social sciences, the writers of female letters used communal words more often than male writers, but they did it equally for male and female candidates. Physicists used more terms of letters, communal and agents than social development scientists, but female and male writers in physics were equally likely to use these terms.
With respect to the length of the letter, the researchers found a great, significant effect: the letters for the candidates in social sciences were 65 longer words than the letters for men throughout the 6 by One hundred more, somewhere between several sentences and a paragraph. However, in physics, the length of the letter does not vary significantly by the candidate genre.
In all disciplines, recommended women wrote longest letters than men, a difference of 63 words.
Related stories
