Unless there's more interest, this may be the last one of these. I will continue to open comments on selected other threads, of course.
Sorry, in the *20* years since it was published.
41 responses to “Open thread on issues in the profession for the week of April 20, 2015”
-
Does anyone (the APA, perhaps?) have a rough idea of how many philosophy PhDs are produced each year, and how many of them don't end up with any academic teaching jobs whatsoever?
-
The Appointments pages on PhilJobs from Jan 1 to today, searching only for junior/TT jobs, shows that 33 hires are women, and 44 are men. So about 42% of new TT hires are women this year.
-
The Appointments pages on PhilJobs are embarrassingly empty, with many reports (e.g. at Philosophy Smoker) that people are afraid of posting their own hires for fear of getting trolled. Does this actually happen?
-
anon–I don't think you can infer anything about what has actually happened with hiring this year from the appointments page. Most people have not posted their appointments, I think. Especially since grad students were attacked/ridiculed/raked over the coals in the blogosphere when their appointments were publicized. I highly doubt that it is a reasonable representative sample.
BL COMMENT: I was not aware of this. Did this mostly happen at Philosophy Smoker (which in the past was an abyss of stupidity and resentment)? The job market is terrible, and one can have little doubt that what's going on is hugely painful for many extremely able candidates. But are successful job seekers really being attacked?
-
@4: agreed; the percentage is probably higher, as women are far more likely to be raked over the coals in the blogosphere.
-
Could we start a discussion on what philosophers have found to be the most surprising positives and surprising negatives of becoming a professional philosopher (or PhD grad)? It may help me, and perhaps others, with my decision to apply to PhD programs or not. If there is a similar thread with many comments, a link would suffice. (I'm aware of the poor job market, so hopefully there are other comments.)
-
anon–speculation is just speculation. Speculate however you'd like.
BL: the place where I saw this happen was on the (I think now defunct) metametametablog (or whatever iteration we are at). It was extremely unpleasant. I am not sure whether it also happened in other places, though I suspect that was the only place where individuals were actually named (and shamed), for getting jobs that they supposedly did not deserve for one reason or another (hint: the reason was that they were "debutante" women with no publications).
-
The observation by anon @2 above indicates that women are now being hired at a significantly higher rate than their level of representation in PhD programs.
So affirmative action favoring women over men in junior philosophy hiring has apparently moved beyond the levels observed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings and anonymous refinements of her study, where the hiring was close to the PhD ratios but women had on average fewer publications than men:
genderandprestige.blogspot.com
Compare the recently discussed Ceci and Williams on STEM hiring.
-
BL COMMENT: I was not aware of this. Did this mostly happen at Philosophy Smoker (which in the past was an abyss of stupidity and resentment)?
There are, or have been until recently, other abysses of stupidity and resentment where candidates might reasonably have feared considerably worse treatment than anything I've seen at the Smoker.(One thing to bear in mind is that whatever one thinks about comment moderation in general tends to take some pof the edge off objectionable comments of the sort being considered here.)
-
Just so that we don't add to the number of irresponsible, misguided and false comments that keep giving women the incorrect impression that they are under attack in philosophy (and hence leave the profession):
There were isolated cases of people anonymously raising doubts that two – yes, two – philosophers had been hired on merit. These doubts all seem to have been raised by the same person. The person who raised these doubts faced very strong denunciations on the metablog, right where the comments were made, and rightly so. And the doubts were not raised about random women: they were raised about people with no publications that the anonymous commenter felt had benefited unduly from being close to a very powerful and influential group of politically active philosophers.
I'm not defending the suspicions raised about those two philosophers. Far from it. But one lone nut raising questions about two well-connected junior women in the profession who got hired with no publications, and then being chewed out for it by everyone else, does not constitute a climate in which women in general should or would be terrified of posting their appointments for fear of being 'raked over the coals' and hence ruined.
It's really time to stop this tired and harmful practice of racing to the ludicrous extreme in ignorantly and falsely characterizing the profession as terrible, terrible, terrible for women no matter what the evidence shows and then scratching our heads and wondering why even more women aren't lining up to become professors. People who endlessly recycle this dreck are at least as much to blame for the fear and discomfort that some women are beginning to feel than the idiot who speculated on the metametablog about those two women.
We've already got Rebecca Schumann to irresponsibly and ignorantly whip up fear of women and hatred of philosophy for being sexist, sexist, sexist. We don't need anyone else on the job.
BL COMMENT: These are useful points, let's all keep them in mind please.
-
I'd like to paint a different picture than the one that 8:33 am remembers, and to raise a separate point:
First, there were more than two philosophers singled out (and not all were women). I would link to the threads corresponding to each of these people if the blog in question hadn't been taken down and if it wouldn't cause new harms to those named. That's enough to instill fears in junior candidates *regardless* of gender.
Second, it was not at all obvious that these threads came from "one lone nut." Perhaps you know more than me (were you the moderator?), but it was not at all obvious to those who read it.
Third, the posters were not "raising questions" about the job candidates. A representative post said, roughly: "Phd from X. 0 publications. Someone got a MARKET BOOST!"
Fourth, I don't recall a single thread where "strong denunciations" were made "right when the comments were made." People often raised objections to the thread, and the thread would eventually die down, but not after several new pot shots were made.Finally (and this is the most important thing):
The worry is not *just* about the naming and shaming of specific job candidates. As a poster above noted, the label of "debutante" was assigned to women of a certain profile: those from a highly ranked PhD program with no publications. There were many threads, far beyond the number of threads devoted to specific individuals, endlessly decrying "debutantes" and the unfair advantage of women on the job market. In that sort of environment (which it seems fair to label 'hostile' without too much hyperbole), it is totally understandable why people would be hesitant to post their information.
-
Hi, Anon Grad.
Awhile back on the Leiter Report, the moderator of the latest incarnation of the metametametametablog announced that (s)he was closing it down. (S)he said that there were repeated posts from someone who kept saying the same thing, day and night — and that all the posts came from the same IP address. That's why it seems to be a lone nut.
It's difficult to know how to sort out the rights and wrongs of affirmative action. On the one hand, it seems to work. On the other hand, it leaves some people with an at least somewhat justified impression that particular people they see are getting an unfair advantage. While one has to admit that someone getting hired on to a good TT job in today's climate with no publications is suspicious, I think we should all know that it isn't fair to single someone out and call him or her by name. Among other reasons, there might have been a merit-based reason for the hire that we just can't see. But again, the person writing this seems to have been a lone nut.
-
I also posted this at Daily Nous, and thought it might be good to post it here too. I think it is worthy of it's own thread, but obviously that's just my take as a current graduate student who went through the application process last year.
It costs easily over $1,000 to apply to graduate school in philosophy. Any serious applicant needs to apply to 10+ schools. Most application fees seem to hover around $80, and while some dip as low as $65 (and MAs more like $50), some programs cost over $100 dollars to apply. Plus, applicants have to pay something like $20 per school to send their GRE score report (this was when I applied out; it may have gone up since then), and most applicants have to pay additional fees to submit their transcripts.
If we as a discipline really care at all about diversity in philosophy, this (inadvertent?) practice of pricing underrepresented groups out of applying has to stop. Very few recent college graduates (philosophy majors too, mind you) have over $1,000 dollars sitting around to blow on application fees. Certainly members of underrepresented groups are even less likely to have that much cash to blow. But even if we set concerns about underrepresented groups aside, it seems preposterous that we are asking 22 year old kids (for the most part) to front that kind of money.
So what can be done? I have some ideas:
Do not require an official GRE score report unless an applicant is being seriously considered. There is no reason to ask every applicant to pay the fee since the vast majority will be rejected. Wait until a smaller batch of serious contenders is established, and then request official score reports to confirm self reported scores. Make clear to applicants that any discrepancies between self reported scores and the official score report may result in automatic rejection. The same might be done for academic transcripts, with the same threat of automatic termination of the application should any falsified self reporting be revealed by the official reports later on.
Make application fees lower, or else do more to offer fee waivers to disadvantaged students. It may be that some departments use high application fees to dissuade some applicants from applying. This seems to disadvantage poor applicants, and is not even the most effective way to cull the stack, as it were. I think that programs need to be more forthcoming about the fact that given the immensely competitive nature of philosophy admissions, especially at the "top", students are incredibly unlikely to be admitted unless they have a strong philosophy background from a well regarded school, or an MA from a top MA program. Many of us know students from state schools and SLACs that were not aware of how competitive it is, paid their pound of flesh, and were universally rejected. More can be done to keep them from applying in the first place, and direct such students towards MAs.
Finally, schools can do more to get back with applicants earlier. No doubt about that. It makes the process easier on everyone, since so many folks are on wait lists and waitlisted for fellowships and the like. If an applicant has no chance of admission, they ought to be rejected as promptly as possible so that they can make the best decisions for their careers, academic or otherwise.
-
Feminist philosophers have been telling us endlessly that the low representation of women in professional philosophy is due to discrimination, such as from implicit bias. We have been told that women need "market boost" mentoring programs to help them deal with the special issues they face on the junior job market. However, the studies that have been conducted of the recent job markets have failed to find evidence of discrimination against women.
Instead, what has been discovered is that the special issues facing women on the market are that they are more likely than men to be unpublished when hired in their first job, and that women with high pedigree PhDs have half the mean publications of their male peers and only a third the mean publications of low pedigree male hires.
Despite this evidence, there is no popular cry in the mainstream blogs (apart from anonymous comments) for the feminists to stop claiming that women are being treated unfairly on the market. Instead, the uproar is against the antifeminists claiming that men are being treated unfairly by being subjected to higher standards than women.
-
This explains a lot:
Abstract: "As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world,
questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet
for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their
own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for
information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have
more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional
MRI (fMRI) images" -
@14 Because coming out against the feminists seems unwise for me at this point, and I'm sure it does for others as well. There's strength in numbers, but your numbers will usually abandon you at the first sign of trouble.
Anyway, I came here to say that the proposed Iowan legislation looks like they want to start up Professor Survivor. "And with the final vote cast, Tim has been voted out of Iowa. Bring your torch over, Tim." Though to be honest, I can think of worse things than getting voted out of Iowa.
I wonder what people think about student evaluations in general. When I was younger, I assumed no one cared what I had to say. Now the students apparently wield power, at least for TAs/adjuncts. That seems like an odd power to give to those being graded, and from conversations I've had with the evaluated, only leads to more grade inflation. There are far too many 3.8+ GPAs out there.
-
"While one has to admit that someone getting hired on to a good TT job in today's climate with no publications is suspicious…"
If there were a single seat open at each of two dinner tables, and one table held five first-year TT professors with no publications, and the other held five first-year TT professors with many publications; and if I had to choose my seat based on the likely quality of the philosophical conversation at dinner; and if the gender breakdown, average job prestige, etc. were the same at each table… I would choose the no-publication table every single time.
BL COMMENT: I have to agree, the supposition–that being hired without publications–is idiotic and ignorant.
-
I have to say I have no idea why that would be. Maybe it's a secret you learn when you finish the phd?
-
I didn't mean to be cryptic. Anything can get published, and most publications are not very good–though journal quality is *sometimes* a good proxy. But anyone who has done hiring knows that there are candidats with no publications whose written work is excellent, whose recommendations are consistent, and whose teaching is very good. Having a publication doesn't necessarily track any of this.
-
Can I just register that the constant hand-wringing in cyber-space about whether or not female philosophers are getting undue advantages is really bizarre to this female graduate student? Why is this the same issue that gets brought up over and over and over again, in any kind of "open thread" or "metablog" situation? There are SO MANY issues in this profession, and it's THIS ONE that people keep obsessing over? Forgive me my lack of charity, but I am starting to suspect that initiatives to help young women have become the scapegoat for an overall crappy job market.
-
Yes, sorry, I wasn't trying to be belligerent. I just found it odd that the commenter in #17 seemed so confident. I guess it's my lack of experience, but given that description I wouldn't have a reason to choose one over the other.
-
S,
Amen.
-
"While one has to admit that someone getting hired on to a good TT job in today's climate with no publications is suspicious…"
In fact, most male candidates hired for their first job had at least one publication, while most female candidates did not, in Carolyn Dicey Jenning's data for 2012-13:
genderandprestige.blogspot.com
As has been previously pointed out by Philippe Lemoine and others, the statistically significant bias favoring women on publication counts is evidence of discrimination on the job market even though there are other factors in hiring.
The gender bias becomes stronger focusing on the top 15 journals: 27% of hired men had published in them while only 11% of women had. Even though journal rankings are not a perfect proxy for quality of publications, there is only a 0.1% chance of the observed data occurring if there is no gender bias in hiring.
-
Every time I see "genderandprestige.blogspot.com" on here, it feels like seeing Viagra spam in my inbox.
-
S and Fritzmc76,
It's not 'people' who keep talking about it: it's one single person. It's the very same person who's been posting this everywhere. We know from the former moderator of the metametametametametametametablog that it's one individual who keeps posting day and night: it was the same IP address every time. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that it's also the same person who runs the genderandprestige.blogspot.com website.
The information this person keeps providing is worthy of careful consideration without our dismissing it with psychological ad hominems or speculation about what's really motivating him (or her). But let's not build this into some picture of a whole bunch of obsessed, single-mminded people in the blogosphere. There is absolutely no evidence that that's what's going on, and good evidence that it isn't.
-
Gender and prestige biases were identified as two of the most important issues in the profession in a recent poll of readers of this blog. The genderandprestige blog refines the analysis of those biases in the recent job market as discovered by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, a female from a "beta" prestige PhD program. Especially, by restricting the analysis to the hires from no prior position in her data (previously made available by her online), it responds to her conjecture that the biases she discovered were due to publications in pre-TT employment. That response has been confirmed as correct in open threads here by David Wallace, a male from an "alpha" prestige graduate program.
-
It is not one single person. I am nonidentical with both (if they are distinct) the genderandprestige person the fanatic 'outed' at the latest metametablog. And I have had a handful of conversations with at least one person who did not strike me as the fanatic, both there and at previous iterations of the metablogs. I've also seen conversations between other people who did not strike me as the fanatic either. It's too bad the last metametablog owner lied about not tracking IP addresses, but it is false that only one person has been critical of feminism.
And to S: let's remember that the context of this "hand-wringing" is a multi-year period where we have been told that there is discrimination against women in philosophy. Now there's evidence, along multiple metrics, that instead there is discrimination in favor of women. If you don't appreciate why that's worth talking about in a context where we're still regularly sold a narrative about discrimination against women perhaps you should 'check your privilege' as the kids are wont to say. And until people start to talk about it, I for one am glad that others continue to bring it to our attention. Consider what the response would be if this data instead showed that there was systemic bias against hiring women in philosophy – and ask yourself what the difference is.
-
The hiring bias toward women is having a ripple effect. Recently I asked a friend at a non-top-10 department how their placement was doing. He replied, "women 100%, men very bad." He added that because they'd seen that they could place only women, they were now biasing doctoral admissions heavily toward women.
I'd be interested to hear whether other departments are doing the same. -
The narrative of discrimination against women is so strong that Carolyn Dicey Jennings attempted to invoke it to explain away her finding of job market bias in favor of women (by arguing that men are more likely to get postdocs allowing them to publish more before getting other jobs). Lemoine, Wallace and the genderandprestige blogger have responded to this using her own spreadsheet, filtering out the candidates hired without a prior position, which others could check themselves if it were still publicly available.
For comparison, think of the reception of Healy's study of citations from the top four journals, where no gender bias was found except in the top 1% of articles. This was not treated as showing overall gender equity in the profession, but rather an insidious glass ceiling holding women back from being leaders. By contrast, the publication bias in hiring favoring women has been treated as non-discriminatory, even though it is robust across different levels of pedigree and trumps the bias for PhD prestige.
-
BL, I hope you do close these! They seem to be little more than a forum for that dude who ruined the metablogs etc. I like the idea of having focused discussions (like the one going on now) — perhaps a better way to facilitate this would be to invite emailed topics for discussion (all relating to issues in the profession?), and host a discussion thread once a month on a topic of your choosing?
I like reading open discussions with philosophers, but as a lady philosopher, I hate reading these things because it makes me feel like I receive special treatment, my job was handed to me, etc OR that things are terrible and I'm a victim of this oppressive profession. I would prefer to think of myself as a philosopher, not as someone who receives special treatment (whether positive or negative) because of my gender. I think the worst part is that other people also think of my accomplishments this way, because these things are discussed ad nauseam in the blogosphere. I'd prefer to be impressive or unimpressive (as the case may be), rather than coddled and unduly rewarded or mistreated and underappreciated. And so open forums are (because of Mr. Genderandpresitge and his buddy #27?) counterproductive to the goal of everyone just thinking of each other as people-philosophers rather than under categories of gender, race, etc. /endrant.
BL COMMENT: I'm inclined to agree with you, thanks.
-
I think I agree, too, though it would be sad to see these discussions go in other ways. They've had some great comments.
The genderandprestige person actually makes points I think are quite interesting and important for us to consider. But they're repeated over and over again to the point where it's not helpful anymore. I think commenter 30 is completely right that this is also the person who ruined the metablogs, which were also really great on the whole.
I also love the fact that commenter 30 wants to be seen as a philosopher, not as a woman, and doesn't want to be "coddled and unduly rewarded or mistreated and underappreciated." Amen to that! I hope we can all just throw all this identity politics in the garbage where it belongs and go back to doing actual philosophy.
Final point: I've heard some people say on some pathetic blogs that the online discussions are full of "men who blame women for taking away their jobs." While I dislike the way this genderandprestige person carries on, and while I think it's very wrong for anyone to single out a particular woman for suspicion of not being hired because of affirmative action rather than merit (come on, it won't be that easy to tell), this accusation is also a low blow. The same standards that would allow us to speculatively dismiss the genderandprestige person's facts and arguments as motivated by his(?) having lost out on the job market would also allow us to speculatively dismiss the opposing arguments as motivated by a greedy desire of women to take away men's jobs and by a wish of men in the profession to curry favor with them. These are all crude, speculative caricatures that do nothing to resolve the genuine moral question of how to bring about gender equality in the profession. Shame on all those who've reduced it to an opportunity to employ crass, speculative ad hominems rather than ignoring or addressing the facts and arguments. Let's be philosophers about this, whether or not we decide to discuss it in these threads.
-
The ad hominem attacks on the metablogger responsible for genderandprestige.blogspot.com are doubly misguided, since it was Carolyn Dicey Jennings who discovered a publication bias in hiring favoring women that was even stronger than the bias favoring high prestige PhDs. The genderandprestige blogger showed that her initial discovery was robust under various analyses of the same data, a finding agreed upon by some signed comments here such as by David Wallace who also examined her spreadsheet.
For those who would rather think of themselves as philosophers rather than beneficiaries of special treatment in identity politics, why critize the metabloggers rather than the feminists who have been urging the affirmative action policies favoring women whose effects are now seen in the hiring data?
-
#32: If you read my post again (30), you'll see a subtle criticism of both.
-
A person crafts a detailed argument based upon statistical data that there is a gender bias in philosophy that is opposite to the one approved by orthodox thinkers. The best response to this is to
a. Address the content of the analysis directly, highlighting possible mistakes and crafting logical counterpoints.
b. Speculatively accuse the arguer of being the same legendary individual whose persistence was rumored to have ruined some unmoderated blogs.
c. Complain that this point has been made before and that everyone is tired of hearing it.
d. Suggest that Brian should cease providing a space for such arguments because it makes you sad."For those who would rather think of themselves as philosophers", the answer is (a).
BL COMMENT: I suppose the worry is that it's obvious that the statistical analysis of the data, such as it is, doesn't really show very much, given the many other variables involved in hiring decisions–an issue that has some up on the thread about publishing while an MA student.
-
"doesn't really show very much, given the many other variables " – BL
In a gender neutral hiring process you'd expect the other variables, e.g. good letters, job talk, etc to favor males as often as females over a significant sample, thus to cancel out. No?
BL COMMENT: Only if they were distributed evenly between the genders of the candidates in the sample, but why think that?
-
"why think that?" – BL comment, post 35.
Because I subscribe to the hypothesis, at least provisionally, that men are no better or worse at philosophy than women. So though I wouldn't expect the distribution of great letters, writing samples etc to be perfectly even, I would expect it to approach equality as the sample size increases.
BL COMMENT: The sample size is small, and it could be that women who survive in the profession are stronger on average than the men. But the real issue is we don't know about the distribution of other variables, like program quality, areas, and so on.
-
Brian, your comment on candidates without publications baffled me. Surely such candidates exist and just as surely nearly no hiring committee reads the writings, letters, and teaching portfolios for every applicant. Hiring, in my experience always starts with an initial culling based on cvs. None of the compensating factors you mention will be visible on a cv, unless you think teaching awards are highly probative. In contrast, publications will be prominent on each cv. So how do your unpublished but excellent candidates survive the cv cull, when what makes them excellent is as yet unseen? Dollars to donuts it's the prestige of the school and the committee, which feeds right into the whole debutante narrative that is repeated over and over again in the open threads.
BL COMMENT: You're certainly correct about the culling, but slightly mistaken about how it works. The CV reveals where the candidate earned the PhD, and reveals what they're working on and who wrote letters for them. Culling almost always involves reading letters, unless the PhD program is a poor program or the candidate worked with no one serious. (One point of the PGR was to let students in on the secrets about programs and their reputations that matter for culling purposes.)
-
I have a question about the 'prestige bias' problem. It seems to me that people are confusing statistical bias with bias in the sense of being unfair. If graduate admissions were entirely randomized, we would expect talented students to be equally distributed across schools, and in that case it would be evidence of unfairness if students from a certain kind of school were more likely to get jobs (especially if all schools had staff that were equally talented teachers and mentors). But graduate admissions are not randomized, they're selective. Obviously its a noisy process, and so not a perfect meritocracy by any stretch, but it's not random. So given this selectivity wouldn't we expect that more talented philosophers would tend to cluster at higher ranked schools? And if this is true, we would expect school rank to be positively correlated with job market success. So my question to those who worry about prestige bias is this: on what grounds do you think that the statistical bias is evidence of bias in the sense of unfairness?
-
Brian's hosting the open comments threads has in fact further developed the discussion of bias in hiring, as some of the details in the genderandprestige analyses were apparently made in response to queries here about statistical significance of those results and about quality of publications, in response to earlier analyses posted on the metablogs.
Since Carolyn Dicey Jennings first announced her discovery of bias for high prestige PhDs and even stronger bias for women, there have been various speculations about what might explain away the statistical gender bias with respect to publication counts. However, those hypotheses that could be tested given the available have all failed to disconfirm CDJ's initial finding, indeed the bias for women has turned out to be even stronger.
First, CDJ suggested that the publication differences were due to pre-TT employment. This turned out to be wrong by simply re-sorting the data in her spreadsheet which contained a field indicating whether candidates had prior employment. This same spreadsheet, apparently no longer publicly available, was also checked by David Wallace who agreed with the overall conclusion of the metablogger.
Then it was suggested on the metablogs that the gender bias might just be tracking the known prestige bias, if the succesful women were mostly coming from stronger programs. But breaking the data down by PhD prestige bands revealed that the gender bias occured within prestige classes and even across them. As high prestige females had the lowest mean publication counts, and even low prestige women had lower average publications than high prestige men, the job market was characterized as a "debutante ball".
It was also suggested that publication counts failed to take into account publication quality. So the genderandprestige blogger went through the publications in only the top journals, and found that women hires published in these at still lower rates than men when compared to the overall publication rates. There is only one tenth of a percent chance of this pattern of publications in top journals being observed on the hypothesis of no gender bias in hiring.
In spite of the statistical significance of the gender bias over publications, and its robustness over various categoriations of the data, we are still to believe that there is no pattern of gender discrimination against men on the recent junior job market? Instead, we are still to believe that the job market discriminates against women in favor of men, even though the announcements so far indicate that this year women are being hired well above the gender ratio in PhD programs?
-
The prestige bias for publication counts was first observed by a graduate student from a program at the bottom of the PGR ranking. The genderandprestige blogger acknowledges that PhD prestige is a proxy for philosophical talent, whereas gender is not, although they seem to think the market puts too much weight on it at the expense of publications. Compare the recent studies of various academic fields, discussed on certain philosophy blogs, showing that hiring comes predominantly from an elite tier of PhD programs. In any case, the PGR is vindicated as providing useful information for prospective graduate students whose aim is academic employment.
Feminists have claimed that implicit biases lead philosophers to ignore women's objective accomplishments, such as publications, in favor of perceptions of male genius. In reality, the reverse occurs: men's accomplishments are discounted in favor of the "new consensus" of "improving the profession". Despite the fact that the current gender bias favors women, we are still told that women need a further "market boost" and that we should not discuss that the discrimination really goes the other way.
-
Just to say, on purely hypothetical terms, I don't think a bias towards hiring women is particularly surprising in a profession where there are lots of men involved in the hiring and, ex hypothesi, lots of those men view women applicants and colleagues as potential sexual partners.
It seems plausible that many nightclub bouncers are biased towards female nightclub punters – both regarding admission and in their treatment of them – for a variety of reasons. It hardly follows that the climate for women in nightclubs is not hostile, either from many of the male punters or many of the nightclub bouncers.
Leave a Reply