I ran a piece recently on a study done by Cornell researchers led by Dr. Stephen Ceci comparing men and women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathmatics) area of academia.  It found essentially the same things that two other recent studies into MBA graduates of the University of Chicago and University of Michigan law graduates.  All three studies found that there's no discernible discrimination against women in the fields studied and that the reason women fall behind men over time is that they tend to drop out or take significant time off to give birth to and care for children.  Differences in pay and promotions are due to that salient fact.

Now there's a new and even larger study done at the mandate of Congress into the STEM area of academia, and it unsurprisingly finds that there is really no discrimination against women among those disciplines.  The authors summarize,

"Our survey findings do indicate that, at many critical transition points in their academic careers (e.g., hiring for tenure-track and tenure positions and promotions) women appear to have fared as well as or better than men..."

The study found that hiring was equal between men and women and that male and female assistant and associate professors were paid the same.  Among full professors there was an 8% difference in pay, but the researchers attributed that to the men's greater seniority.

Interestingly, the committee that did the research and wrote the report didn't reach a conclusion about why women with Ph.Ds in the STEM area tend not to pursue careers in that field.  Maybe they should have read the Ceci study that answered that question very nicely.  According to Ceci and his co-authors, math-proficient women tend to go into other fields like biology or medicine. 

Also, men make up the large majority at both ends of the math aptitude spectrum.  In math, the great majority of the very talented, and the very untalented, are male.  The former is the pool from which academia draws its STEM talent, with the result that women are somewhat underrepresented in those fields.

Read Christina Hoff Sommers on the new study here (The American, 6/10/09).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Men, Women and Work. You can trackback from your own site.