NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/soc/women/19888

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-18 | 5.8 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Julie Wright)
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men
Subject: Re: Entry level salaries (was: Re: Elle MacPherson causes rape?)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 19 Nov 92 00:09:43 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
    <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Julie Wright)
Organization: Columbia U Chem Dept
Lines: 90
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Wed, 18 Nov 1992 00:32:03 GMT

[e-mail] (Seth Breidbart) writes:

>[e-mail] (David S. Auer) writes:

>>Another possible skewing perhaps overlooked in those figures, and to my eyes
>>a more relevant one is the figures for number of men and women graduating
>>this year with Ph. D.'s in math.

>>Perhaps, women's higher wages, (the implication by Leonard being that the
>>difference is small), may be fully explained in that women math Ph.D.'s are
>>more of a commodity than men math Ph.D.'s [...]

>Why should someone who is looking to hire a new Ph.D. in math care
>about the sex of the person being hired?  (I know that they often do
>care; I'm asking why they _should_.)

I can think of a few possible reasons.  Whether and how to codify them
into a hiring policy is another question.

First, if one sex is significantly more likely than the other to face
widespread discrimination in attaining the necessary qualifications, then
statistically, a member of that sex who has attained the same status
as a member of the other sex is likely to have worked harder or shown
more natural talent or both.  (And yes, _I_ would tend to give a young father
more credit for adept child care than a young mother.  I hope this
attitude is outdated before too long.)  As for math Ph.D.'s specifically,
I'm not an expert on the statistics, but in science and engineering there's
a "pipeline effect" in which women consistently have a higher attrition
rate than men at many levels as they move toward Ph.D.'s in science
and engineering.  (Interestingly, the major drops for women seem to come
with career choice on entering college, and during graduate school.  Of
the men and women who intend to major in science or engineering in college,
there are fewer women, but a higher percentage of these women actually
finish their college degrees in these fields; women and men also enter
graduate school in proportion to the number of male and female B.S.'s,
but as I said, at that point the men are much more likely to get Ph.D.'s.)
Of course, it is _possible_ that such attrition is _not_ due to
discrimination in any form.  However, if you as an employer thought that
a woman was much more likely to have faced certain hardships than a man
in attaining the qualifications you were looking for, you might be inclined
to give her more credit.  In practice, I've never seen this happen, but
I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear SOMEONE has such attitudes.  (In
fact, though, in practice, many chemists seem more inclined to feel that women
have more breaks (though these are never demonstrated), and therefore
never deserve much credit for what they _do_ accomplish.  From the point
of view of one whose close female friends have frequently been part of
the aforementioned attrition, this is rather embittering.)

The other reason I can think of offhand is that a female math Ph.D. might
be more effective at some jobs than a male math Ph.D., for the very reason
that women are rare in the field.  For example, if talented female math
majors are turning down a grad school because there are no female math
professors and they suspect sexism, the university may be losing out on
some of their best applicants.  (Don't think this doesn't happen!)  In
that case, a female applicant would do more good for the university than
a male applicant with similar on-paper qualifications.  As another example,
if there are several tenured professors generally known to be sexist,
other professors in the department might consider it particularly important
to have female role models in the department.  The same arguments could
go for attracting future female applicants at the professor level (and this
applies to nonacademic jobs too, actually): many women might be unwilling
to be the only female in a department, so they'd go somewhere where they
felt the atmosphere was more what they wanted.  Therefore, an employer
might consider it worth something to avoid the appearance of discrimination.

I've never personally heard a good reason to hire a male math Ph.D. over
a female one, but I've heard good reasons to hire male elementary school
teachers, for example, and they were similar to the reasons I gave above.

Again, I want to repeat that it isn't at all clear to me whether and
how these things should be considered in a hiring policy.  I'm just
trying to describe why it might sometimes be reasonable for an employer's
decision to be affected by the sex of the applicant.

>>Granted there is an implied causal link in there which may not
>>exist, yet I am unfrightened by that possibility.)

Sigh.

While I'm at it, I just want to say that unless things have gone seriously
downhill, not all Swarthmore students express themselves this way.  I feel
like I've been watching Dave singlehandedly drive down the value of my
bachelor's degree for weeks...

---Julie

(oh, and the pipeline stuff is from Science, vol. 241, p.1740.  The
date is Sept. 1988, so the numbers may have changed slightly, but most
statistics like this in science have stayed pretty stable for years,
from what I've read, so I doubt there's been any major change.)