Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

In the 2 comments you made to me, you're assuming my premise is to criticize her over her gender.

My comment would have remained the same if Dr. Bouman identified as male. The age of an individual when they get their PhD is somewhere around 27-29 (depends on when they start grad school.. it's usually about 5 years) People with more experience realize it's better to work and recognize the team rather than not. Kids fresh out of school just don't have that experience.

Three were linked in the same Washington Post article you referenced.

I do see two. I'm not sure the third you're referencing:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/28/10107 - This is the exact sort of study I was referencing. It only shows that there is a different in result, not opportunity. It further shows that as the baseline competency standard increases (up to labs being operated by Nobel Laureates) - so does the "bias". It proposes explanations for this being either self selection by women, or bias by men. It ignores the most likely explanation which is that though the pool is split about 50/50 by gender, competencies are not.

----

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf - I was familiar with this study, and it's a good example of the ongoing issues with social psychology toy study. For reference the replication rate in social psychology is now at around 25%. Put another way, if a social psychology study tells you something - you'd generally be vastly more well informed if you assumed the opposite, or at least assumed what was stated, was not true!

This study offers a demonstration in a number of ways this has occurred. One major issue is that there was no effort to manage a response bias, other than in broad characteristics (race/gender) of applicants. Corinne Moss-Raucin [1] personally mailed a number of faculty asking them to respond and rate a variety of potential students. One glance at her faculty page will tell you what she's actually doing. So who voluntarily opts into this? In total just around 30% of contacted faculty chose to. I think there is a 0% chance that this is not a biased sample.

The questions were also framed in a context that seems to imply a potential personal "affinity" for an individual. One important nuance here is that the students offered up for consideration were all low quality. The questions to demonstrate bias included:

- "How likely would you be to encourage the applicant to continue to focus on research if he/she was considering switching focus to teaching?"

- "Would you characterize the applicant as someone you want to get to know better?"

Do you think you'd try to keep low performing Jennifer in your office, even if she was looking into teaching instead? Would you like to get to know her better? I mean come on this is just absurd, and a reason that the social sciences and especially social psychology is imploding in on itself. It's like if the "biases" went in the opposite direction our researcher was ready to write up an article about unhealthy professional attitudes towards females and female independence.

[1] - https://www.skidmore.edu/psychology/faculty/moss-racusin.php

Do you think that "random male scientist #237" would be getting as much news coverage, photo-ops and retweets by "YAAS QUEEN SLAY" females as Katie?

Sure thing, this [1] is one better than a meta-analysis. This is a typically extensive report from The National Academy of Sciences in 2010 carried out on gender differences. It involves a mixture of an academic meta-analysis, extensive surveying (with high response rates), and an analysis of real hiring data across six different fields: biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. If it's not clear, that book is available for free in PDF format (right hand side) - you just need provide an email address, which is not validated.

Key findings are covered on page 153. Various highlights:

- The findings on academic hiring suggest that many women fared well in the hiring process at Research I institutions, which contradicts some commonly held perceptions of research-intensive universities. If women applied for positions at RI institutions, they had a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than had male job candidates.

- The percentage of women who were interviewed for tenure-track or tenured positions was higher than the percentage of women who applied.

- For all disciplines the percentage of tenure-track women who received the first job offer was greater than the percentage in the interview pool.

- Female tenure-track and tenured faculty reported that they were more likely to have mentors than male faculty.

- Women were more likely than men to receive tenure when they came up for tenure review.

It's the same story everywhere. Women are more than embraced in science and tech. The problem is not about equality of opportunity, but about equality of result: in spite of the very favorable treatment of women, they remain underrepresented.

[1] - https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12062/gender-differences-at-crit...

---------

I think this is already getting quite long, but one other thing I'd also add is that you can find relevant studies from Scandinavia as well. Norway is generally considered the most gender equal nation in the world. And they too went through a phase of trying to push women into various roles generally filled by men. What they found is that there was a small and roughly constant bump in participation in these fields, as opposed to the self increasing bump you might expect if gender itself produced a strong feedback mechanism. And as soon as the push lapsed, everything went back to "normal" with a great rapidity. I think the thing this really emphasizes is that you can try to push people in one direction or another, much as with some effort you can form a sponge into nearly any shape, yet what happens when you stop pushing that sponge? It just goes back to its normal form.

I'm full on with you about ensuring complete and equal opportunity for any and all women who want to focus on STEM or whatever else, to do so. But in hindsight I sometimes wonder if we go too far with "encouragement." Now going on quite a number of years after graduation, I work with computers. My wife works with people. She was majoring in sociology before I, like the good egalitarian I thought myself to be, persuaded her to swap to computer science. It was probably still for the best overall (as computer science yields skills beyond just tech) but I've always found the irony thought provoking.