As you might have seen in the main Ada Lovelace Day newsletter, I am currently working on a report about the barriers people face when trying to enact gender equality policies in business. I’m doing a lot of background research at the moment, so I thought that I would share some of the papers and reports I’m reading.
This work is sponsored by Digital Science. If you’d also like to become a sponsor, to get early access to the report and a briefing on how its findings affect your company, email me for details.
This week’s paper: Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?
In a stark refutation of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, the answer to this question is a very emphatic yes, and not in a good way.
Manuel Bagues, Mauro Sylos-Labini and Natalia Zinovyeva (2017) analysed data from 100,000 applications for promotion to associate and full professorships in Italy and Spain, and looked at whether the gender split of the evaluation committee had an impact on the probability of success for men and women.
They found that “male evaluators become less favorable toward female candidates as soon as a female evaluator joins the committee”.
And although “in mixed gender committees, female evaluators rate female applicants higher than their male colleagues, […] the difference is small and statistically nonsignificant”. Thus having “a larger number of women in evaluation committees does not increase either the quantity or the quality of female candidates who qualify.”
In short, women do their jobs fairly whilst men become more biased against female applicants when a woman joins the team.
Of the academic promotion committees that Bagues et al studied, only 8 percent had a female majority in Italy, and just 6 percent had a female majority in Spain. The paper includes no data on what happened with female-majority committees, which is a shame. It would have been good to know if female-majority committees were fairer, or if female candidates are always going to get the sharp end of the stick regardless of who is evaluating them.
Bagues et all suggest three possible mechanisms that might explain what’s going on here:
- Backlash: “The presence of women in the committee might unleash a backlash against female candidates, particularly in fields that have been historically dominated by men.”
- Licensing effect: “In all-male committees, evaluators may feel that they have a moral obligation to worry about sexism and seek to overcome it by expressing more positive (and perhaps less discriminatory) views about female candidates. When there are women on a committee, men may feel licensed to express more honest opinions about female candidates.”
- Male identity priming: “female evaluators might strengthen male identities within committees and hence weaken their support for female candidates.”
The team were unable to test these hypotheses.
I wonder whether there might be a fourth mechanism, which isn’t explicitly examined in the paper:
- Perception bias: Men may be seeing a woman on their evaluation committee as evidence that there are enough women in senior positions, so therefore there is no need to promote anymore. Perception biases exist in groups where women’s presence is overestimated, and in speech where women’s contributions to a conversation are overestimated. It would be logical if there was a perception bias around the number of women in senior roles that is triggered by having a woman as a peer.
Although this study is focused on academia, it holds that simply having more women involved in promotion processes in business won’t yield more female senior leaders. This is bad news for organisations who thought that increasing the number of women involved in promotion decisions would be an easy fix. It turns out that creating a fair evaluation process is more complicated than that.
More to the point, there aren’t enough women in male-dominated industries to take on this additional work anyway. Making women do more recruitment would take up proportionally more of their time, reducing opportunities to do work that would progress their career. This kind of pastoral work is rarely rewarded, neither in academia nor industry, and women already do too much of it.
Is the solution to keep assessment panels all-male? Would emphasising men’s moral obligation to be fair to applicants improve outcomes for women? Or is there another solution?
Reference
Bagues, M., Sylos-Labini, M., & Zinovyeva, N. (2017). Does the gender composition of scientific committees matter?. American Economic Review, 107(4), 1207-1238.