STRIDE Recommended Readings

Many academic institutions have looked at various ways to make their faculty a more diverse and inclusive group of people that better reflect the demographic swath of their current and future student bodies. This is even more so important in chemistry departments, where there has long been a discussion on the “leaky pipeline” for women and underrepresented groups. The work presented here examines programs and policies at various departments aimed at increasing the diversity of their faculty applicant pool, and compares them against the reception of the general scientific community by way of applicant demographics and the use of a survey instrument designed to ascertain the advertisement language that lends to a more diverse applicant pool. The combination of these results is then used to generate a list of best practices that administrations and academic search committees can use to improve their ability to attract diverse talent.

The authors investigate potential discrimination against people with disabilities through a field experiment that sent job applications to 6,016 accounting positions for which the applicants’ disabilities are unlikely to affect productivity. One-third of the cover letters disclosed that the applicant had a spinal cord injury, one-third disclosed the presence of Asperger’s syndrome, and one-third did not mention disability. The disability applications received 26% fewer expressions of employer interest. This gap was concentrated among experienced applicants and small private companies that are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Tests suggest possible positive effects of the ADA, but not of state laws, in reducing the disability gap. Results indicate there may be substantial room for employer and policy initiatives to improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

During career advancement and funding allocation decisions in biomedicine, reviewers have traditionally depended on journal-level measures of scientific influence like the impact factor. Prestigious journals are thought to pursue a reputation of exclusivity by rejecting large quantities of papers, many of which may be meritorious. It is possible that this process could create a system whereby some influential articles are prospectively identified and recognized by journal brands but most influential articles are overlooked. Here, we measure the degree to which journal prestige hierarchies capture or overlook influential science. We quantify the fraction of scientists’ articles that would receive recognition because (a) they are published in journals above a chosen impact factor threshold, or (b) they are at least as well-cited as articles appearing in such journals. We find that the number of papers cited as frequently as those published in high impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers these prestigious journals publish. At the investigator level, this phenomenon extends across gender, racial, and career stage groupings of scientists. We also find that approximately half of researchers never publish in a venue with an impact factor above 15, which under journal-level evaluation regimes may exclude them from consideration for opportunities. Many of these researchers publish equally influential work, however, raising the possibility that the traditionally chosen journal-level measures that are routinely considered under decision-making norms, policy, or law, may recognize as little as 10-20% of the work that warrants recognition.

This article focuses on the use of theatre as a mode of creative scholarship, from the research involved in sketch creation to the presentation of that research to academic audiences. We particularly focus on a specific sketch developed by the CRLT Players—one that explores the consequences of subtle discrimination faced by women scientists in research laboratory settings—to illustrate the ways in which theatre can engage audiences with research results. The article explains how participation in such performances promotes a more active exploration of scholarship than simply reading or hearing a presentation. Interactive theatre directs and focuses an audience’s attention in ways unique to the stage; the embodiment of research in 3 dimensional characters allows spectators to explore multiple perspectives on research results; and the process of critical reflection and facilitated discussion that follows the performance leads viewers to consider changes, both personal and institutional, that can address the issues depicted in the sketch.

In 2007 and 2012, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, in partnership with 1790 Analytics, published prior reports on gendered patterns in IT patenting, analyzing records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The original report examined women’s patenting rates in IT and how these rates evolved over the prior 25 years. It also identified how these rates differ across IT industry sub-categories and across specific organizations. This new edition updates those findings, examining U.S. patent data from 1980-2020. It updates the following questions from the earlier report:

• What are the overall rates of IT patenting for men, women, and mixed-gender collaborations?
• How have these rates changed during the past five years and how does this compare to the findings from the previous report?
• How do patenting rates differ across IT industry subcategories? (e.g. Communications and Telecommunications, Computer Hardware, Computer Software, Semiconductors)
• How do patenting rates differ across specific companies, organizations, and sectors (e.g., government, academic, industry)?

In addressing these questions, this report also looks at how some of the trends over the past five years are similar to or different from the previous study. While a wealth of evidence documents the underrepresentation of women in computing and information technology (IT), most of this evidence currently takes the form of “headcount” metrics — that is, metrics that identify the number or percentage of women in technical occupations or their retention, promotion, and attrition rates. But simply paying attention to how many women are in these occupations tells us very little about what they are actually doing and to what extent they are able to meaningfully contribute to technical innovation. And in fact, we know that even when companies diversify their workforces, members of historically marginalized groups often still face disproportionate difficulty accessing core, creative, technical roles — the place where innovation so often happens.

The authors offer six recommendations that their committee identified as the most critical steps the American Physical Society could take to ensure that LGBT individuals pursuing physics can enter a level playing field.

This study is one of many showing (1) that people vary in the degree to which they hold certain stereotypes and schemas; (2) that having those schemas influences their evaluations of other people; and (3) that it is possible to reduce the impact of commonly held stereotypes or schemas by relatively simple means. In this study college students with particularly negative stereotypes about women as college professors were more likely to rate accounts of specific incidents of college classroom teaching behavior negatively, if they were described as performed by a female. In the second phase of the study students’ reliance on their stereotypes was successfully reduced by providing them with time and instructions to recall the specific teaching behaviors of the instructors in detail. Thus, focusing attention on specific evidence of an individual’s performance eliminated the previously demonstrated effect of gender schemas on performance ratings.

We pursue the idea that racial stereotypes are not only descriptive, reflecting beliefs about how racial groups actually differ, but are prescriptive as well, reflecting beliefs about how racial groups should differ. Drawing on an analysis of the historic and current status of East Asians in North America, we study descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes of East Asians along the dimensions of competence, warmth, and dominance and examine workplace consequences of violating these stereotypes. Study 1 shows that East Asians are descriptively stereotyped as more competent, less warm, and less dominant than Whites. Study 2 shows that only the descriptive stereotype of East Asians as less dominant than Whites is also a prescriptive stereotype. Study 3 reveals that people dislike a dominant East Asian coworker compared to a nondominant East Asian or a dominant or a nondominant White coworker. Study 4 shows that East Asians who are dominant or warm are racially harassed at work more than nondominant East Asians and than dominant and nondominant employees of other racial identities. Implications for research and theory are discussed.

Empirical study demonstrating impact of implicit discrimination by race, and not attributable to class.

Reflective discussion of how and where implicit discrimination operates. Includes useful review of the literature, and fairly extended discussion of research needed.

Stereotypes may influence judgment via assimilation, such that individual group members are evaluated consistently with stereotypes, or via contrast, such that targets are displaced from the overall group expectation. Two models of judgment—the shifting standards model and status characteristics theory—provide some insight into predicting and interpreting these apparently contradictory effects. In two studies involving a simulated applicant-evaluation setting, we predicted and found that participants set lower minimum-competency standards, but higher ability standards, for female than for male and for Black than for White applicants. Thus, although it may be easier for low- than high-status group members to meet (low) standards, these same people must work harder to prove that their performance is ability-based.

Research has documented the presence of bias against women in hiring, including in academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Hiring rubrics (also called criterion checklists, decision support tools, and evaluation tools) are widely recommended as a precise, cost-effective remedy to counteract hiring bias, despite a paucity of evidence that they actually work (see table S8). Our in-depth case study of rubric usage in faculty hiring in an academic engineering department in a very research-active university found that the rate of hiring women increased after the department deployed rubrics and used them to guide holistic discussions. Yet we also found evidence of substantial gender bias persisting in some rubric scoring categories and evaluators’ written comments. We do not recommend abandoning rubrics. Instead, we recommend a strategic and sociologically astute use of rubrics as a department self-study tool within the context of a holistic evaluation of semifinalist candidates.

We use a case study of job talks in five engineering departments to analyze the under-studied area of gendered barriers to finalists for faculty positions. We focus on one segment of the interview day of short-listed candidates invited to campus: the “job talk”, when candidates present their original research to the academic department. We analyze video recordings of 119 job talks across five engineering departments at two Research 1 universities. Specifically, we analyze whether there are differences by gender or by years of post-Ph.D. experience in the number of interruptions, follow-up questions, and total questions that job candidates receive. We find that, compared to men, women receive more follow-up questions and more total questions. Moreover, a higher proportion of women’s talk time is taken up by the audience asking questions. Further, the number of questions is correlated with the job candidate’s statements and actions that reveal he or she is rushing to present their slides and complete the talk. We argue that women candidates face more interruptions and often have less time to bring their talk to a compelling conclusion, which is connected to the phenomenon of “stricter standards” of competence demanded by evaluators of short-listed women applying for a masculine-typed job. We conclude with policy recommendations.

Studies of racial attitudes in the U.S. present a difficult puzzle. On the one hand, several recent studies point to the steadily improving racial attitudes of whites toward African Americans (Steeh and Schuman 1992; Firebaugh and Davis 1988). These attitudinal trends are reinforced by many more tangible indicators, most notably the size, relative security, and potentially growing influence of the black middle class (Dawson 1994; Landry 1987). On the other hand, a number of social policies put forward to improve the status of African Americans and other minorities, such as affirmative action, are often contested if not ubiquitously unpopular (Bobo and Smith 1994; Kluegel and Smith 1986). Again, signs of negative racial attitudes are borne out by a number of tangible indicators such as the burgeoning evidence of racial discrimination experienced by blacks almost irrespective of social class background (Bobo and Suh 1995; Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Feagin and Sikes 1994; Braddock and McPartland 1986; Waldinger and Bailey 1991; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1991).

Implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is an ongoing process that poses benefits and potential risks. One of the major challenges organizations face in implementing DEI initiatives is backfire, which occurs when well-intended initiatives result in unintended negative outcomes (e.g., discrimination against and decreased performance of members of underrepresented groups). Many leaders need an understanding of how and why DEI practices may backfire. As such, we provide five evidence-based recommendations to help organizations successfully implement DEI practices while preventing and minimizing backfire. We recommend they (1) broaden engagement in targeted recruitment, (2) adopt a context-conscious perspective on diversity training, (3) create DEI accountability structures, (4) align DEI with communication and culture, and (5) use a multilevel approach to monitor and evaluate DEI practices.

Many institutions of higher education have implemented workshops for hiring committee members to familiarize them with the pernicious effects of implicit bias and how to counteract them. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for implicit bias trainings is not matched by the evidence for their effectiveness. Recognizing the difficulty of removing entrenched biases and the potential for trainings to backfire, we introduced the role of equity advocate (EA) at one institution. EAs are trained volunteer faculty and staff members who serve on search committees outside their home departments to identify behaviors and judgments that might have a disparate racial effect in hiring. We conducted focus groups to document the perspectives of both EAs and non-EA search committee members who completed a cycle of academic hiring. Search committee members credited EAs with helping to mitigate bias by questioning their assumptions and introducing standardized tools for evaluating candidates. By contrast, EAs reported a more contentious relationship with the rest of the search committee and expressed less confidence that the process was free from bias. Both groups agreed that the EAs added valuable race-conscious equitable practices, and untrained committee members identified ways they could apply the lessons of bias reduction in other parts of their professional roles. Our study provides evidence for how to engage all faculty and staff members in sustainable, equity-minded efforts.

Conferences are vital forums for academic researchers. At these meetings, scientists communicate new discoveries, form research collaborations, make contacts with funding agencies, and attract new members to our labs and programs. Even with new technological advances that allow remote communication, resource sharing, and networking, face-to-face interactions are a crucial component for one’s career advancement and ongoing education. Early-stage researchers, who benefit significantly from these events, face some notable barriers to attendance. One major challenge is what we call the childcare–conference conundrum: Parent–researchers face a conundrum as they struggle to attend key conferences and further their careers while finding care for the children. Conferences face a conundrum as they assess how to better accommodate mothers and families.

Why aren’t there more women in science? Female college students are currently 37 percent less likely than males to obtain a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and comprise only 25 percent of the STEM workforce. This paper begins to shed light on this issue by exploiting a unique dataset of college students who have been randomly assigned to professors over a wide variety of mandatory standardized courses. We focus on the role of professor gender. Our results suggest that while professor gender has little impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students’ performance in math and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree. The estimates are largest for female students with very strong math skills, who are arguably the students who are most suited to careers in science. Indeed, the gender gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when high performing female students’ introductory math and science classes are taught by female professors. In contrast, the gender of humanities professors has only minimal impact on student outcomes. We believe that these results are indicative of important environmental influences at work.

We investigated the hypothesis that the gender of conveners at scientific meetings influenced the gender distribution of invited speakers. Analysis of 460 symposia involving 1,845 speakers in two large meetings sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology revealed that having at least one woman member of the convening team correlated with a significantly higher proportion of invited female speakers and reduced the likelihood of an all-male symposium roster. Our results suggest that inclusion of more women as conveners may increase the proportion of women among invited speakers at scientific meetings.