When shown empirical evidence of gender bias against women in the STEM fields, men were far less likely to find the studies convincing or important, according to researchers from Montana State University (MSU), the University of North Florida, and Skidmore College.
In the first two parts of the experiment, participants were shown the real abstract of the resume-test study described above, along with the name of the journal that originally published it and its date of publication. They were then asked to evaluate their agreement with the authors’ interpretation, the importance of the research, and the quality of the abstract. This evaluation was carried out by both men and women from the general population, and also by male and female faculty from both STEM and non-STEM fields. The researchers then conducted statistical tests on the resulting data to see if there was a correlation between gender and perception of the abstract.
Men were significantly less receptive to the study abstract than women in both cases. Furthermore, in the case of faculty, there was a strong interaction between gender and field of study — meaning that male STEM professors were much less likely to believe the evidence of gender bias against women in their own field. Importantly, the researchers’ analysis showed that the cause of this statistical interaction was that male STEM professors were more likely to judge the research harshly, not that female STEM professors were more likely to view it positively.
via Think Progress
