Academic science isn’t sexist

Steve and WendyUntil recently, universities deserved their reputations as bastions of male privilege and outright sexism say Cornell professors Steve Ceci and Wendy Williams in their recent New York Times op-ed piece. But times have changed. Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. They found that when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a given field on a specific outcome. Read more