Discrimination in Academia: A personal experiment(?)

by | Friday, May 09, 2014

magritte

Try as we might to be open-minded the truth is that we all have biases. These biases can be subtle and insidious and it is rare that we get to confront them head on. A recent story that has been making the rounds on  NPR, InsideHigherEd, and The Washington Post about racial and gender bias in higher education, forced me to face this issue, and though, as it turns out, I turned out OK in the end, it did raise some important questions about us academics.

It is a longish story, mainly because I have to provide some context for the study. So bear with me…

In a study titled “What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations,” the researchers (Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh) sent identical email messages to 6,500 professors across a range of disciplines in 250 of the top universities in the US. Each message indicated that the “student” was impressed with the professor’s work and requested a meeting. These messages were identical in every respect except in one crucial way: the names of the fictitious students.  These were the names used in the study,

Brad Anderson, Steven Smith, Meredith Roberts, Claire Smith, Lamar Washington, Terell Jones, Keisha Thomas, Latoya Brown, Carlos Lopez, Juan Gonzalez, Gabriella Rodriguez, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh, Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Indira Shah, Chang Huang, Dong Lin, Mei Chen, Ling Wong

As you can see the only thing that distinguishes them is that they varied along two key dimensions Gender (male v.s. female) and Race (white, Latino/a, black, Indian or Chinese). What the researchers were looking at was how often professors wrote back agreeing to meet with the students. From this they could infer whether the gender/race of the person writing to the faculty member made a difference to the response rates?

The results are sobering, to say the least. As the NPR story says

… what they found was there were very large disparities. Women and minorities systematically less likely to get responses from the professors and also less likely to get positive responses from the professors. Now remember, these are top faculty at the top schools in the United States and the letters were all impeccably written.

These differences in response go deep and cut across gender and racial lines. As Milkman says (in the NPR report)

There’s absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty.

In addition, there were large differences between departments and schools.

Faculty at private schools were significantly more likely to discriminate against women and minorities than faculty at public schools. And faculty in fields that were very lucrative were also more likely to discriminate. So there was very little discrimination in the humanities. There was more discrimination among faculty at the natural sciences. And there was a lot of discrimination among the faculty at business schools.

In fact when I go and look at the actual data, something more scary and surprising emerged (at least for those of us in education). See Figure 1 (click to see a larger version).

discrimination

What shocked me was the second bar – indicating the second largest discriminatory gap was from my field, Education! The data shows that, in education 65% of the emails from women/minorities received a response, while 86% of emails from white males received a response! A difference of 21%!!

This of course got me to thinking about how I would response if I received an email of this nature. Would I fall in that 21% discrimination gap? I receive emails from prospective students all the time and I TRY to be responsive… but I wondered do I respond differently to people just based on their names?

This was followed by another question? Was I one of the people randomly selected for the study? So I did a search in my email archive, and guess what, back in 2010 I HAD received an email from a Deepak Patel (clearly an Indian male) with exactly the same words as in the emails that had been sent out… and yes (YES!) I had responded. Not just that, but I had responded right away, and cc:d two of my colleagues who were at that time joint-coordinators of our doctoral program to let them know of this potential student.

Here is a screen shot of the message that went out to all the participants in the study (click for a larger view):

email

Here is a screen shot of the exchange (with my response and the original email I had received). Click to get a larger view.

patel-response

Whew! That was close.

But as my son pointed out, was my response connected to the fact that I was receiving a note from a prospective Indian male student (given that I am an Indian male)? Would I have been as responsive if the gender or race had been different? Hmmm… (I love/hate it when my goal of raising a critical thinker comes bites me on MY backside!).

Though I may not have an answer to my son’s question I do think that this paper points to just how strong (and insidious) some of these biases are and just how far we (as a discipline and profession) still have to go.

Topics related to this post: Identity | India | News | Personal | Philosophy | Psychology | Research | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK Radio/Video Show, now on Vimeo

The TPACK Radio/Video show that we had created for ISTE is now available on Vimeo. I think this version is easier to embed and view (as opposed to a 21MB download, as it was the previous time around). TPACK Radio/Video Show ISTE 2010 from Punya Mishra on Vimeo. A fake...

STEM teaching & leadership for urban educators

STEM teaching & leadership for urban educators

The MSUrbanSTEM project was one of the best projects I have ever been part of.  We worked with 124 Chicago Public School STEM educators over three years, in an effort to develop their teaching and leadership in the STEM areas. We have written about this...

Going back home

Amita Chudgar, friend and colleague, just sent me this really nice article in today's NYTimes, titled "India Calling" about the second generation of Indian Americans who are now going back to India. These are kids born and brought up in the US, whose parents had...

Exploring visual space with mathematics

Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...

Plus ça change

Leigh Wolf forwarded me a link to a video commercial with the subject line saying "this is a very intriguing commercial." Of course I took a look at it right away and it was an ad for Kaplan U (on their website) ... and according to Smita it has been receiving TV time...

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

What is the relationship between technology and creativity, particularly in educational contexts? In this article, we provide a critical thematic literature review of existing scholarship at the intersection of creativity, technology, and teaching/learning in...

Mathematical paradoxes & ambigrams: New article

I have always loved paradoxes so it is with great pleasure that the fourth article in our series on Art and Math (co-authored with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar and published by At Right Angles) focuses on paradoxes and visual wordplay. It was great fun coming up with a...

AACTE Major Forum Presentation

I include below a copy of the AACTE Major Forum presentation (announcement here) that I made at New Orleans on Saturday, February 9. There were other things that I participated in (as listed here) and I will post about them later. Matt was supposed to do this talk (as...

Dr. Karin Forssell, New TPACK dissertation

I met Karin Forssell back in 2008 at the Las Vegas SITE conference when she was a doctoral student at Stanford University. She came and asked me if I was working with anybody at Stanford and I said, something along the lines of "not yet, but send me an email,...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *