One of the worst fates to befall an idea is that it becomes an ideal. We argue against this when the ideal is a deity; ever notice how defenders of religion like to fall back on the argument that they’re helping people, that they inspire high sentiments, that they’ve supported arts and music, etc.? I agree with all that. My problem is when they bring in their invisible, unquestionable god as an authority (who must be addressed through the medium of his priests, of course), and suddenly we’re dealing with an idol who is, by definition, perfect, and all argument is shut down by fiat. Yeah, maybe the church is a bit exploitive, but JESUS LOVES YOU, so sit down, shut up, here’s the donation plate, and you’re going to Hell if you don’t love him back.
And by “love him back”, I mean support child-raping priests, preach the prosperity gospel, and burn that witch over there.
We are constantly asked to pretend that sordid realities don’t exist, in the name of the Lord. The servants of the church may be subject to human frailties, but keep your eyes on the perfection of the ideal, on paradise and the imagined flawless reification of the gods. It’s an old game, but it works. Humans are often quite ready to overlook overwhelmingly horrid situations if it’s done in the name of a beautiful concept — we’re used to suppressing our decency out of loyalty to a beautiful higher cause. Concentration camp guards enisted to serve the dream of Volk and Vaterland; brutal abuse of people who weren’t part of the dream were a small price to pay. Crusaders murdered and raped their way across the Holy Land in the cause of liberating Jesus’ home for Christendom. Americans vote to deregulate coal and oil extraction so they can work in dirty, dangerous jobs because Capitalism has taught them that jobs are important, and that tax breaks to plutocrats are a small price to pay to keep the dehumanizing machinery running.
And some people will allow people to suffer a lifetime of untreated syphilis in the name of the sacred Scientific Method. Some have their idealized vision of a future rational world where the variables are all flattened out, the control group cheerfully meets their fate, and the experimentals regard the electrode, the poison, the deprivation, the hallucinations, the sterilizations, the radiation burns, as a small price to pay for Progress.
Yeah, Science gets deified, too.
Science is universal, international, inclusive, nonpartisan, a-political, a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological. Don't inject identity politics.
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) March 23, 2017
None of that is true. Not one word.
Science is universal…if you are wealthy enough to get the education you need to understand it.
Science is international…except for those cases where competition is whipped up to drive investment (space race, anyone?), or we are driven to keep technology out of the hands of countries we don’t like.
Science is inclusive…except that it isn’t. It’s expensive and difficult and access is restricted.
Science is nonpartisan and apolitical…hah. Lamar Smith. Scott Pruitt. Donald Trump. How out of touch can you be?
Science is a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological…the only people I’ve ever heard claim that are the kinds of people who complain about “identity politics” with a straight face. Identitatarianism is an alt-right, racist affliction.
Shermer is now trying to defend his fantasy by claiming that I was tweeting about an ideal we should strive for
. That’s nice. If we haven’t met that ideal, shouldn’t we be addressing our shortcomings? And what definition of “strive” are you using that says we ought to be silent about disparities and failings and not march to oppose them?
An ideal is not a reality, and swiftly swapping in a nonexistent ideal when confronted with real problems does not make the problems go away.
And then there’s this appalling piece of theater:
Yesterday I hosted the theoretical physicist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss for our Science Salon series and we were asked our thoughts on the March for Science by an audience member who had been following the Twitter-Storm over my tweet. Given that Krauss has worked in academia his entire career, including being involved in the hiring process of physicists, I asked him why people seem to think that science still excludes women and minorities (and others) when, in fact, it is peopled by professors who are almost entirely liberals who fully embrace the principles of inclusion (and the laws regarding affirmative action). Are we to believe that all these liberal academics, when behind closed doors, privately believe that women and minorities can’t cut it in science and so they continue to mostly hire only white men?
Krauss was unequivocal in his response. Absolutely not. There has never been a better time to be a woman in science, he explained, elaborating that at his university, Arizona State University, not only does the student body perfectly reflect the demographics of the state of Arizona, the President of ASU has mandated that if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job. Full stop.
Holy crap! Two white men have declared that the problems of sexism and racism have disappeared from the academy! High five!
What? No high five? I’m sure these guys will give that demonstration a standing ovation.
It’s made exceptionally ironic because these two men have…unfortunate…histories. Shermer, as is well known, has an unsavory reputation at conferences, and even tried to sue me for exposing his behavior. Krauss seems to think there’s nothing wrong with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender; Krauss has even bizarrely used science to defend him.
“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”
Oh god. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of person I want defending the ideals of science. It’s all right! He’s buying young women, but they’re not that young!
I have to explain that while academics are largely liberal, they are also people, and mostly white people at that, and often mostly men. People, it turns out, are flawed. We can have ideals (that word again!), but we rarely live up them, and we have to struggle to compensate by imposing policies to consciously compel us to meet those ideals. Since Krauss has been on hiring committees, he knows that there are constraints placed on his impulses — we get training from human resources on our policies — every time! I’ve been on many hiring committees, and every time we get the same rules recited at us in the same lectures. Why all the repetition? Why all the rules? Because even liberal professors can be implicitly sexist and racist, and it takes hard work to correct your biases.
These policies do work to correct historical injustices — most universities are working hard at social justice to create a fair balance of women and minorities. As Krauss points out, correctly, Arizona has seen excellent steady progress in improving representation in their student body, which is impressive for a state that elected Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio.
But the triumphal attitude is inappropriate. It may be true that there “has never been a better time to be a woman in science”, but that does not mean the problems have gone away — it only means that in recent history the treatment of women in science has been abysmal. I suggest that Dr Krauss read Paige Brown Jarreau, or perhaps this summary of top issues for women faculty in science and engineering. He’s sufficiently liberal that he’d probably agree with all of those concerns, while simultaneously suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be so loud about bringing them up.
I would also point out that while it’s very nice to point out the great strides that the University of Arizona is making, I also took a look at the University of Arizona Physics faculty page. It’s very impressive. 31 faculty listed.
Two of them are women. I know I’m only a biologist so maybe my math skills aren’t up to snuff, but I think that’s about 6.5%. I rather doubt that that accurately reflects the demographics of Arizona.
That is not to criticize the faculty! They may be entirely enlightened and eager to improve faculty representation, but are simply the recipients of a long history of privilege and unfair investment in education. It’s OK. I would not be at all surprised if a majority were active in bringing attention to the inequities present in science, and think we ought to be bringing these problems to the attention of the public, and funding agencies, and political entities.
Some, obviously, don’t.
By the way, I laughed aloud at that declaration from the university president that “if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job.” It sounds good. It’s completely cosmetic, though. There has never in the history of science been two candidates competing for a science position who are equally qualified. Never. There are so many skills involved in these occupations that people can’t possibly be equal in all things, and some of the reasons one might offer a tenure position to someone are subjective. Taking a look at the literature on implicit bias would be a good idea.
“Most people intend to be fair,” Handelsman insisted. “If you ask them, ‘When you do this evaluation, are you planning to be fair?’ they will 100 percent say yes. But most of us carry these unconscious, implicit prejudices and biases that warp our evaluation of people or the work that they do.” The biases Handelsman is referring to are most readily measured in hiring studies, where hiring managers are asked to evaluate potential candidates for a job or a promotion. With astonishing reliability, the evaluators will assign higher scores to the exact same application if the name on the application is male versus female. These studies are “absolutely canonical” in the social psychology literature, and their results have remained shockingly consistent over the past four decades despite all of the social progress that this country has made.
Most universities have initiatives to attempt to correct, or at least make us aware, of theses biases; mine certainly does, and here’s Northwestern’s list of resources for faculty hiring.
For anyone to tout an administrator’s declaration as if it definitively ends the problem is embarrassingly naïve. Or a conscious attempt to diminish a serious issue.
interjecting a phrase that came to mind recently and looking for a way to use it relevantly. might as well try it here.
the euphemistic phrase : lip service
meaning: where someone keeps saying the right things while acting completely different.
Shermer notes they are all liberal and it is “the best time to be a women [nb]…”
They keep saying they are giving preference to equally qualified women for open positions, while continually inventing reasons the male is More qualified, based on some tiny little inconsequential detail.
Also, doesn’t seem to realize that preferring one sex over another, even trying it as a form of recompense, is still sexism. If two candidates are equally qualified, flip a coin (or equivalent) don’t simply pick the female preferentially.
—sheesh, sorry to assert my approach, maybe not the best, just my first attempt, open to discussion…
I do ideal science. I’m a mathematician.
Sorry, Michael Shermer, but science is not apolitical. Science involves selling your ideas to other people, so as to make it a community effort. And that’s inherently political.
I checked out my local university, Stanford, where one group, WISE, has compiled some figures https://wise.stanford.edu/research-resources/stem-demographics/faculty-members. WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) has been around for years at Stanford.
By my own count 9 out of the 48 physics faculty are women which comes out to 18%. One of those women is now the university provost. However Stanford does not consider itself appropriately diverse though I believe its methods for improvement are earlier in the pipeline than final hire decision).
Part of the problem is the belief (!) that we can define job qualifications and requirements in such a way that we can say that two candidates are “equally qualified.” Any claim that we do is dubious. It’s my experience that there is no rigor in job hiring process. Job qualification requirements are usually vague enough that any decision about someone meeting those requirements is subjective. In that case, it’s easy for the “right” person to qualify and difficult for the “wrong” person, and still delude yourself that you are trying to do better. This is true in the computer industry and I suspect other professional arenas as well.
Identity politics is about making things universal. If science is being sexist, ableist, or racist, then identity politics is needed to fix that.
The fact that Lamar Smith, Scott Pruitt, and Donald Trump (none of them scientists) can be partisan and political about science they find inconvenient is not evidence that science is, in itself, partisan or political. Hitler thought there was “Aryan science” and “Jewish science”. He was wrong.
In my opinion, Science is neutral.
Like Nature, with all her laws and animals, galaxies and atoms.
Read post, then comment, kthxbai?
Krauss’s ‘no better time to be a lady scientist’ comments remind of ‘Flight of the conchords’ episode where Jermaine says his dad is a women’s rights activist, but wouldn’t stand for Jermaine’s mum to be one
You looked at the wrong University, but it doesn’t change the conclusion. At Arizona State University in Tempe, there are 44 on the Physics faculty, 5 of whom are women for 11.4%, not quite double that at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It sort of pokes holes in the liberal/conservative argument, since Tucson is the most liberal city in Arizona, while Tempe is considerably more conservative.
Robo#4
Amen.
The last job search I was involved in (from the hiring end before I retired), we had and interviewed 4 candidates who met the published qualifications for the job. So the hiring decision came down to other criteria. We were (and it still is) a small company. One candidate should have been interviewing for the top R&D job at our company (2 levels above me), not a lowly Sr. Scientist where he would have to get his hands dirty with laboratory work. He would go elsewhere ASAP. Another came across during the interviews as someone who would be hard to work with. The one we finally hired hired involved a long relocation, but since he was moving closer to his elderly parents, it sounded like he would stay in the area, and with the company.
When I was in the Dah YooPee, we had similar problems. Getting someone to come willingly to the Lake Superior Snow Belt and plan on perhaps sticking around is a problem. PZ has recruitment problems with being rural, but he is closer to “civilization” (Minneapolis/St. Paul) than where I was in Dah YooPee.
The discrimination against woman in science goes back a very long time. Such discrimination existed even well into the 70’s (and or course well before then) when I personally witnessed it happening. The second in command male of the group that I was in did not want any woman in the group so with the approval of the department head he paid a woman friend of his $50 to apply for a position to fulfill a government requirement that we try to hire more women. After an “interview” she very publically turned down and loudly denounced the “shit job” in an office with lots of people so that there would be a lot of witnesses that a woman had turned down the offer. That same male professional flake bragged about the above event and later falsified a “scientific” report about work that was done for the ONR (Office of Naval Research). This caused my manager and I to separately leave that crooked organization. I happened to see that decades later he had become the head of that same “scientific” organization at the university. There is definitely even open fraud in some academic organizations.
Indeed. It’s absurd to begin with some free-floating notion of “science.” It’s a human practice, and therefore inescapably political. As with all other practices and institutions, the end of science should be human (and other animal) flourishing. (True, this isn’t entirely straightforward, but it’s more straightforward than many believe.)
Then we can ask the pertinent questions: In order to achieve this goal, how should research be organized? Who should do it? How should it be funded? How should priorities be decided? How should results be shared? How can research “subjects” be protected? How can pseudoscience be thwarted? How can we prevent the use of pseudoscience for oppressive ends? How can the benefits of technology be controlled and spread and its harms contained?…
The answers to these questions come together to form the ideal. Only in terms of this grounded ideal can we then evaluate existing scientific practices and institutions and see how they promote or fall short of the ideal and can be improved upon or need to be radically altered. A disembodied concept of an “a-political, a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological” science is worth than useless.
Test of whether politics are involved: do two or more people have to come to a joint decision?
If so, politics are involved.
worth than useless
*worse*
The silly fucker has the example of himself on climate change. Of course, that would require he admit to himself that he was an AGW denier for so long because it suited his politics.
Science shows that, whatever liberal academics might believe, they do “mostly hire only white men [sic].” So right here is another example of Shermer undercutting his own ideal.
Lysenko was wrong no matter how good his politics were. Objective reality doesn’t change due to who’s studying it. It’s important not to let valid critiques cloud that basic fact.
I recently discovered Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s blog, she talks a lot about these issues from a black woman’s perspective. Here’s one post I liked:
https://medium.com/space-anthropology/decolonizing-science-by-reconstructing-observers-d62168fca19f
Is that a response to anyone or anything here in particular, or just a straw man? (If the former, being more specific in your comment would have been helpful.)
By the way, the scientists featured in these books were wrong no matter how “good” their politics were. It’s a general problem.
It would be interesting to compare the ratio of women to men hired vs the ratio of women to men applying.
Cheap shot. Krauss did not say the faculty numbers reflected the demographics of Arizona. In fact his favorable comment about ASU’s affirmative action implied that he understands that the faculty is not diverse enough.
You keep making the same dumbass mistake of looking at the faculty makeup. I guess you just have a story and by-god you’ll stick to it even though it is wrong. I wonder if you have the capability of a nuanced look at anything.
Virtually all of us who hire stem (in my case physics and computer science) faculty will tell you the same story: we would not only give the edge to women and minorities in light of the fuzzy “equally qualified” caveat–we would give an outright boost to any underrepresented population.
The problem, to first order, is simple supply and fucking demand. The demand is very, very high for women and minorities (Krauss is right, at least in physics, hard as it is for you to accept that a white man can ever be right) but the supply is incredibly fucking low. I can look up the numbers but going from memory there are something like 1000 physics PhDs awarded in the US to pale folk and something like 20 to AA.
It is so fucking obvious that the actual problem is way before we get to the faculty hiring process. It is all the social problems of which we all are aware, starting but not limited to severely underfunded urban public education.
If we were awarding PhDs with the same demographic breakdown (or even close) as the population and the stem faculties were still dominated by whites, then you’d have a compelling argument. But we don’t, and you don’t.
But you just love the story that it is white men stacking the deck to keep stem faculties white and male. Even though (as the primary explanation) it’s bullshit. It’s a numbers game.
And when this came up once before you completely dodged answering the question as to why your university is so stem-white when you participate in faculty hiring. Is it all the other whities on the committee who are bigots, and you are a lone-wolf fighting the good fight but losing all the committee votes?
Bill Buckner #22
You forgot to include the link.
chigau #23
As you wish.
Read the paragraph starting “I have to explain that while academics are largely liberal…”. Try reading it for comprehension.
I’d also recommend that you talk to your university’s HR department. Ask them about implicit bias. They’ll explain to you that it’s real and it’s present everywhere.
They’ll also tell you that your indignant insistence that we faculty are not part of the problem is also bullshit. Probably more nicely than that.
I never said that we are not part of the problem. Speaking of reading comprehension, you do, I suppose, know what “primary” means, I suppose? As in the primary problem is a lack of supply.
Now let’s discuss the fact that your chem-bio, bio, physics, and math departments are all white (at least as far as the available pictures indicate). Why would that be? There are at least two reasons, probably more:
1) The supply of AA in these fields is low, and the competition for AA PhDs is fierce, and UMM cannot compete with bigger names for this short supply (that has been our problem.)
2) The search committees at UMM are majority racist
I don’t deny overt and implicit bias. Now if there was ever explicit bias on a committee –if someone said something racist or sexist, I would personally move to have them removed (as a full-prof I pretty much have the power to make that happen. The closest I’ve seen to this happening was way back when I was an assistant prof and someone on the committee said he was reluctant to hire a woman because they get married and follow their husband and so we lose them after a couple years. The committee chair went ballistic. And this was at least 20 years ago.) It is not that implicit bias doesn’t exist, I don’t deny that. However you more or less steadfastly refuse to accept the demonstrable fact that the major problem is that we are not producing enough minority PhDs. That explanation just doesn’t fit your preferred story line.
Now who can say whether or not members of a committee have hidden implicit bias? Maybe we all do, even if we think we do not. But the group dynamic of a committee where everyone is trying to do the right thing, perhaps (though it doesn’t seem like it) dragging one another along at times, is clear from the evidence. We make offers to minority candidates (if we have any) all the time. Our provost makes the hard sell. And more often than not we get turned down because for them it’s (as it should be, for now) a buyer’s market.
Jesus. Nothing like a guy who insists on denying all responsibility. The answer is, of course, 1) and 2). Let’s add 3): faculty who go ballistic at the suggestion that they could possibly play a role in the problem.
You push this bullshit that I have a “preferred story line”. You have no idea. My last funded grant was to address the pipeline from beginning to end: community outreach, public school teacher education, as well as more training for college students. There are problems all up and down that line. Your “preferred story line” is to simply deny the existence of any bias at our level, which is palpably absurd — so white Americans suddenly achieve enlightenment the instant they get a Ph.D.? Nonsense.
You also have no conception of the struggles I’ve experienced at places I’ve worked, and I’m not going to spill the beans here. This is about bias within science in general, not what I’ve tried to do to oppose it, and to deny its existence is simply whitewashing.
But go ahead, just keep blaming women and minority applicants and perpetuate the problem.
You are un-fucking-believable. I said the primary problem is the fact that we are not producing enough minority Ph.D.s. And, farther upstream, a cause for that undesirable effect is a lack of well-funded quality public education. How the fuck is that “blaming women and minority applicants”? In what universe?
Holy shit you can be a real dumb ass.
And there you go again, ignoring everything I wrote. I agree that there is a problem with public education, and with admissions to grad schools, and with the steep drop off of minority applicants — I’d even agree that that is the primary problem.
And yes, turning the problem around, giving up, and saying it’s mainly because minorities aren’t applying is placing responsibility elsewhere, other than on your own playground. We can play an endless game of pushing the problem down the chain.
It’s also irrelevant to the point of this post, which is that science is not apolitical and not free of bias. It’s everywhere.
Now fuck off. Your “preferred story line” is getting old and tired.
I’d like to see someone try and develop a blinded candidate selection process. Committee members get resumes with any identifying information removed. Judged solely on the content below the biographical section.
Blinded interviews would be difficult but not impossible. Candidates and committee separated physically with the voice of the candidate made gender neutral electronically.
Heck, I’d like to at least see a study done with conditions such as these to see what the actual selection outcome is.
Drksky#30
Blind auditions have been used by major orchestras for years with good effects. Link1.
Another article. Link2.
The pipeline can be a problem with minority musicians. Link3.
The idea of an “ideal” science is less an ideology than simply sloppy thinking. Science is a-political in the sense that the outcome of an experiment does not (or should not) depend on the political ideas of the researcher. That doesn’t mean that science can’t serve a political goal, or that scientists can’t be politically active, or that they can’t try to convince politicians of the importance of science and the need for funding, or try to tell them that some of their ideas are just plain wrong.
I did provide a link showing research on bias at all levels. These two in particular would directly affect which women even get interviews:
1. Recent analyses demonstrate that at the NIH there are gender differences in
funding even after controlling for background variables such as age, degree, and
institution. There are no significant gender differences in funding at the NSF and USDA.
Across all three agencies, women comprise a small proportion of researchers who apply
for grants, especially at the NIH. See:
Hosek, S.D., Cox, A.G., Ghosh-Dastidar, B., Kofner, A,, Ramphal, N., Scott, J.,
and Berry, S.H. (2005). Gender Differences in Major Federal External Grant
Programs. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR307/
2. Peer reviewers of postdoctoral fellowship applications hold women to higher
standards of publication than they do men. In one study of postdoctoral fellowship
applications in Sweden, being female and not having personal connections to someone on
the peer review committee placed women at a significant disadvantage in the peer review
system despite controls for productivity. See:
Wenneras, C., and Wold, A. (1997). Nepotism and Sexism in Peer Review.
Nature, 387, 341-343.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6631/index.html
That means it’s a joke to claim that women and minorities will get preference over equally qualified white men — they come into the process with their qualifications under-rated!
Drksky:
Seems like that’s making it more difficult than it would need to be. In the case of auditioning musicians, to follow through on Nerd’s comment above, their playing (or singing*) needs to be heard by the panel. But is there a good reason why a person’s voice needs to play any role at all in the selection of other generic candidates? Why exactly would you need to hear them say anything (disguised or not) or have any sort of interaction like that with them (including of course seeing them)?
It might seem convenient to be able to do that, or maybe that makes you as a hiring-committee member feel more comfortable about your decisions somehow… or who cares what, those aren’t good reasons. If the job in question is professor of biology (e.g.), then I take it that hearing them say things to you — answering your questions live or saying whatever you want to hear in a recording or however that might go — is not actually a critical part of evaluating how well they can do that kind of job.
They obviously need communication skills, but for one thing, you can still read written submissions from them, which if done properly can tell you a lot more than a few minutes of talking. Secondly, your Expert Comm Skillz as a big important professor-with-a-job might be great and all, but they are certainly not that great, such that some minutes of talking will give you anything like reliable, general, concrete, unbiased knowledge about how well they perform. Besides, even if you were some kind of grandmaster at diagnosing that sort of stuff, talking to a group of potential colleagues in a job interview won’t tell you much of anything about how effectively they’ll communicate to their students in a classroom and elsewhere, which is the actual type of situation you want to know about.
There are numerous ways to evaluate them when they’re actually doing the job — including more formal processes like reviewing student evaluations every semester, as well as more informal ones like their daily interactions with students, other professors, administrators, etc. A verbal job interview is simply no substitute for anything like that, so I really don’t see a good reason why you can’t remove that altogether from the hiring process, since it’s clearly a source of bias which doesn’t seem to be doing much good for anybody.
*So obviously, if it’s a vocal audition, and if you need to fill an ensemble with some number of sopranos, altos, tenors, basses, etc., then a person’s “gender” (in terms of their vocal range, if not their gender identity in various other respects) is not something anybody would want to conceal or disguise. But of course their race, class, religion, etc., are completely irrelevant, and taking all of that out of the audition process is fairly straightforward. And it definitely works, as Nerd pointed out.
I’ve worked in employment since 1988, and a verbal interview is critical to any hiring process. Written submissions are fabulously easy to fake, including text-based remote interviews.
Once the basic ability to meet the requirements of the position are proven, everything else is in how one communicates with the potential supervisors and/or peers. The verbal, live interview is necessary for this; speed of response, tone of response, body language, all of these things go into the final evaluation.
And, yes, unfortunately that final evaluation includes seeing the person and determining their age, race, and gender. Now, explicit bigotry on the part of persons or institutions hiring, though still a problem, is not nearly the problem it was. The unintended bigotry (covering racism, sexism, ageism, etc.), unacknowledged, and unnoticed, is the big problem. It is a natural thing for people to be more comfortable around people like them — which is why white, male institutions tend to hire white, male colleagues. Awareness of the problem helps, as does acknowledging one’s biases. (oh, and @41, there is no such thing as an unbiased hiring situation; human beings are being hired, by other human beings, and bias will NEVER be eradicated, but it can be accounted for.)
The unconscious bias is most insidious and the most difficult to deal with , because few people, particularly liberals (such as I) want to admit they have it. But we all do.
By the way, @41, the BEST job interview is in fact what you have suggested: watching them at work. Unfortunately it is both unfair and unfeasible to grant job applicants 1 – 3 months on the job, then fire them. Both employers and employees need security and stability. (That’s what are all the internship and co-op programs are: extended interviews.)
We have 3 stages to hiring: an initial paper review of CV, published work, recommendations; a phone interview; an in-person, on-campus interview. Winnowing is going on at each stage.
There’s no way to do any of it blind. The first part has some opportunity, but really, it’s just about impossible to hide sex and difficult to hide ethnicity when your source of info is papers and recommendations. Their name and professional affiliations are right there; if they attended a HBCU that’s a point of pride; recommendations often include personal info. An employment history/degrees awarded is pretty much an announcement of the applicant’s approximate age.
One of the sneakiest problems is a desire to be fair to the applicant. We know our campus and town are very white. Do we unconsciously think they’d never be happy here, just as, since this is very much a teaching position, we tend to regard someone with a long history at Research 1 universities to be unlikely to accept a position with us? Do we always include at least one white Minnesotan (like us!) in the final three as an assumed guaranteed fall-back position? Are we more likely to regard a slate with three black women on it as more likely to result in a failed search than one with at least one white man on the list?
It really does take work to suppress those biases, even when one is liberal.
Security and stability are magic words, too. We desperately want to get the great candidate who will say “yes” to UMM, because a search is a hell of a lot of work for months ahead of time, and having it fail and then needing to repeat it from scratch is terrifying.
It’s fabulously easy for a hiring committee to fake the fairness and the usefulness of an in-person interview. That doesn’t seem to stop anybody. That’s despite the fact that they’re using (with no significant accountability) an ill-defined set of methods/criteria to do this sort of evaluation, one which apparently didn’t come from any systematic training they actually got when they received their degrees (or if it did… then what is the problem with the applicants again?). So who the fuck knows where that even comes from, but as long as they don’t do anything blatantly and unmistakably racist, sexist, etc., in the interview, then we’ll give them a pass and just accept that somehow or another they can do this sort of thing reliably, whatever this sort of thing actually consists of. Why exactly are we supposed to trust them (the hiring committee) to do their jobs well and appropriately, to have some expectation that they are at least minimally competent? But on the other hand, we’re not supposed to have any sort of attitude like that about the applicants, who all invariably have advanced degrees that are supposed to qualify them for the job, not at least until the magic moment when they start getting a paycheck from that institution and can sit on the other side of the table, as if anything like that made a difference…. Am I missing something?
I was at #34…. And I didn’t say you need fire them after a few months on the job. That’s a pretty drastic measure. First of all, people can learn to improve many such skills, once they’ve gotten some more experience. You can also give them all sorts of feedback to make them more effective, provide training and continuing education, and so forth. And if they’ve already been teaching for a while somewhere else, you can find out how they’ve been doing in that respect, via recommendations, their records from their previous institution(s), and so forth.
If in some unusual circumstances, they are so irredeemably bad at communicating (verbally and not in writing, as we’re supposed to be imagining), so that it’s required to let them go more or less immediately, then perhaps that’s unfeasible for some colleges in some cases, but I do not see what would be unfair about it. This isn’t an honorary title or a prize that you’re granting to these people, something which they supposedly deserve that you’d be taking away. It’s a job, they can’t do that job, and it would be unfair to the students to keep such teachers around to do a thing they can’t do. Anyway, there are lots of other people out there who would jump at the opportunity to fill a position like that, no matter what college/university it happens to be. Things like that could just as well happen if you were conducting verbal interviews, so it’s not like any of that has changed…..
However, accredited colleges which are granting the graduate degrees required for a professorship have to be responsible for ensuring such a situation is very unlikely to happen. So you shouldn’t have to worry much about such situations, not as much as you ought to be worrying about the very real and very common situation of biased hiring practices. If you have a pool of applicants who are generally incapable of talking coherently enough to teach the subject matter, yet they somehow wound up with an advanced degree — and not just any old degree but one which allows them to teach it somewhere, which everybody knows involves talking to students, not running experiments or doing calculations or whatever else you might learn from a degree — then our problems certainly did not start when those people came around looking for a job like that. If such degrees don’t really mean much of anything, then maybe that’s a good place to start looking for solutions to this problem, since that wouldn’t amount to acceptance (however reluctant) that we just need to introduce a certain amount of bias when we hire these people.
If that’s what our problem is like — people are routinely incapable of doing the job for which their degrees are supposed to be a basic qualification — then your hiring committee is in more or less the same situation, except that they got their degrees at an even earlier time, when perhaps even less was being done to prepare students with such things as communication skills, because the scope of that problem wasn’t yet fully appreciated (generally, but certain schools may have had a better track record at it than others). Yet nobody seems to suspect, or we’re not given any opportunity to suspect, that maybe part of the problem is with the hiring committee and how they’re doing what they’re doing. How exactly did they manage to develop their communications skills, such as they are, which they’re using to evaluate applicants? Does it seem very safe to assume they learned that when they got their degree, and why would it seem that way? Maybe they learned it over the years while teaching, because they actually got a chance to work at it, and there were various systems in place to make them better at it. Maybe. Or maybe not, in which case they at least shouldn’t be in a position to evaluate other such people, if they should be teaching at all.
I checked the UA Physics faculty listing and certainly is sparse on women but 26% non-white. Also checked University of Minnesota Morris Biology and about 50% women but all available faculty pics are white. Do you have any non-white faculty in Biology? Please tell me if I’m dead wrong on this and those faculty without pics are non-white. If all are white, then I wished you had pointed this out in the opening thread and IMO your argument would have been more complete for this reader.
It might have been more complete if I’d been arguing that Morris was a shining paragon of equality. If you’d actually read the post, you might have noticed that the point was that even egalitarian, well-intentioned science departments fail.
Damn, but this post has been great for whooshing right past some people.
AWhileAgo™, We™ had a cutsy Meme® about RebeccaWatson® being responsible for … well … everything.
Now it’s PZ®’s turn.
Well, at least about the demographics of all Teaching Staff, Everywhere.
In what way? Sounds like you have an agenda.
Rebecca Watson made me do it.
I KNEW IT!!!
@37 – Sigh. Look, the commonest thing in our highly-educated society is for there to be multiple highly-qualified applicants for just about any position out there. Which means that criteria other than the “qualifications” will have to be used to reject all applicants but one. Once other criteria are being used, the human subjectivity of the interviewers becomes the greatest influence. And those subjectivity biases vary widely for every individual and every institution. HR professionals have been trying for over 80 years to find a foolproof way of hiring the best person for the job, and no system, no training of interviewers. no list of computer-given questions has been found to be reliable and widely applicable; industries, people, cultures and communication media change quickly no system has been found to be flexible enough to keep up.
At present, the multiple-person interview team, composed of self-aware, ethical individuals running a multiple-interview environment is the best we have.
And what I meant about 1 – 3 months being unfair, one cannot expect a person to, say, uproot family, sell house, move, etc. and then be told within 3 months they are just aren’t exactly right. Workers have to be given some stability and loyalty.
Consciousness razor
Student evaluations are just about the worst option if you want unbiased information – they are horribly biased on both race and gender.
Maybe I’ll get banned but I won’t mention that forbidden topic which the overlord has told me not to mention.
All these comments are well and good but fail to address the fact that, for example, only 2% of physics PhDs in the US (and 1% overall, which is more relevant, since these are always international searches) go to AA. So, if we imagine all bias is eliminated in the hiring process, physics departments, like at ASU, or at UMM, would look pretty much as they do right now. To first order, all non-black. Until that problem is solved, and that is not a search committee problem, we are stuck in this situation.
If you want to prove bias in the search committees you’d have to find data that shows that the tiny pool of African Americans applying for stem faculty slots is less successful (in a statistically significant manner) than the huge pool of white applicants. I don’t know if such data exist, but it would be interesting.
Hairhead, #44:
Since you’ve got a bunch of highly-qualified applicants, there’s little reason to worry about not using certain specific criteria or certain specific methods, when it’s well-established that those specific ones introduce a bias. This is unnecessary, and they’re not helping you sort out “qualified” applicants from “unqualified” ones anyway. There’s just an illusion that they’re actually doing something useful for you. So why think this is such a big problem that it outweighs others like bias? Doing it is more or less just icing on the cake, if it amounts to anything. What I’m saying then is that if you’re a diabetic or whatever, then it’s a good idea to consider how much icing you ought to have on your cake. Note that perhaps it’s not no icing, because maybe less of it will suffice. (So let’s find out. I figure you have to actually determine such things empirically, because no amount of armchair reasoning can demonstrate anything like that.) Or, whatever kind of condition you may have, don’t slather your cake with certain types of icing that happen to be toxic, even if it’s true that those happen to taste good. Because that’s still a bad idea. Does that make the point a little clearer?
Maybe you just don’t choose the most perfect imaginable applicant out of your big pool of qualified applicants, because you decided (reasonably, I would say) that it was worth it to limit how invasive your inquiry into their private lives will be, which ways are ethical and effective ways to go about evaluating them, how much bias you’re willing to accept in order to get some kind of guarantee about how perfect your applicants are, and so forth. Seems to be perfectly in line with the kind of standards HR departments already use, and I don’t think I’m saying anything that’s unreasonable or even very controversial. So, sure… your results aren’t “perfect,” in this weird sense that I guess I’m supposed to care about; but in fact I don’t care, because other shit matters besides that…. So what?
Again, just to be clear, I was trying to acknowledge that some people worry that maybe something significant would be lost, if you don’t conduct interviews in that way when you’re hiring people. I think there are lots of ways to address that, and some approaches are going to be less effective and more morally problematic than others. We should avoid those. I’m not looking for anything foolproof, but something that involves a fairly simple/clear/straightforward implementation. And hopefully, it will do a lot to address the most significant and real problems we have, like discrimination, instead of relatively minor or rare or even hypothetical ones that you’re paranoid about, like an otherwise-qualified applicant for a professorship having sub-optimal communication skills for example. It turns out that the latter could be addressed in a variety of other ways, whenever that’s actually an issue, without running headlong into the types of problems we should be focused on here.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with how and when and whether people should be fired for anything. Presumably, they should be fired for the same reasons (if they should be fired for it, whatever it may be), whether or not you conducted such interviews before hiring them. Maybe you think otherwise, but I don’t know how to make sense of that. To me, it looks like those questions are just orthogonal to one another.
That reminds me of “not intended to be a factual statement”.
41. NORDOT
I have no agenda. One of the central themes of the opening thread was implicit bias. PZ took the trouble of detailing the demographics of the UA Physics faculty. For me personally, I would have liked a statement of similar implicit bias in his own Biology faculty as an added example to demonstrate that this is a universal problem.
I don’t claim to be climbing the moral high horse when I say this. I put my head also on the chopping block. I have implicit sexist bias buried in my psyche. This was pointed out to me in my response to the following tale:
A father and son were driving home and then suffered a car crash. The father dies and the son is rushed to the hospital with a massive subdural hematoma. The Chief of Neurosurgery is called in to operate. The surgeon cannot perform the surgery for the following stated reason, “this patient is my son. Please have an alternate surgeon perform the surgery.” How could the patient be the son of the Chief of Neurosurgery?
Myself and other liberals revealed our bias by giving the wrong answer to this tale. It brought to consciousness my implicit bias. It is examples such as this that force us to confront our buried bigotry and allow us to learn to be more progressive. I guess maybe that’s my agenda.