More than 40% of women leave tech companies after ten years compared to 17% of men.13 A report by the Center for Talent Innovation found that women didn’t leave for family reasons or because they didn’t enjoy the work.14 They left because of ‘workplace conditions’, ‘undermining behaviour from managers’, and ‘a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career’. A feature for the Los Angeles Times similarly found that women left because they were repeatedly passed up for promotion and had their projects dismissed.15 Does this sound like a meritocracy? Or does it look more like institutionalised bias?
That the myth of meritocracy survives in the face of such statistics is testament to the power of the male default: in the same way that men picture a man 80% of the time they think of a ‘person’, it’s possible that many men in the tech industry simply don’t notice how male-dominated it is. But it’s also testament to the attractiveness of a myth that tells the people who benefit from it that all their achievements are down to their own personal merit. It is no accident that those who are most likely to believe in the myth of meritocracy are young, upper-class, white Americans.16
If white upper-class Americans are most likely to believe in the myth of meritocracy, it should come as no surprise that academia is, like tech, a strong follower of the religion. The upper ranks of academia – particularly those of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) – are dominated by white, middle-and upper-class men. It is a perfect Petri dish for the myth of meritocracy to flourish in. Accordingly, a recent study found that male academics – particularly those in STEM – rated fake research claiming that academia had no gender bias higher than real research which showed it did.17 Also accordingly, gender bias is in fact plentiful – and well documented.
Numerous studies from around the world have found that female students and academics are significantly less likely than comparable male candidates to receive funding, be granted meetings with professors, be offered mentoring, or even to get the job.18 Where mothers are seen as less competent and often paid less, being a father can work in a man’s favour (a gendered bias that is by no means restricted to academia).19 But despite the abundance of data showing that academia is in fact far from meritocratic, universities continue to proceed as if male and female students, and male and female academics, are operating on a level playing field.
Career progression in academia depends largely on how much you get published in peer-reviewed journals, but getting published is not the same feat for men as it is for women. A number of studies have found that female-authored papers are accepted more often or rated higher under double-blind review (when neither author nor reviewer are identifiable).20,21 And although the evidence varies on this point, given the abundant male bias that has been identified in academia, there seems little reason not to institute this form of blind academic audition. Nevertheless, most journals and conferences carry on without adopting this practice.
Of course, female academics do get published, but that’s only half the battle. Citation is often a key metric in determining research impact, which in turn determines career progression, and several studies have found that women are systematically cited less than men.22 Over the past twenty years, men have self-cited 70% more than women23 – and women tend to cite other women more than men do,24 meaning that the publication gap is something of a vicious circle: fewer women getting published leads to a citations gap, which in turn means fewer women progress as they should in their careers, and around again we go. The citations gap is further compounded by male-default thinking: as a result of the widespread academic practice of using initials rather than full names, the gender of academics is often not immediately obvious, leading female academics to be assumed to be male. One analysis found that female scholars are cited as if they are male (by colleagues who have assumed the P stands for Paul rather than Pauline) more than ten times more often than vice versa.25
Writing for the New York Times, economist Justin Wolfers noted a related male-default habit in journalists routinely referring to the male contributor as the lead author when in fact the lead author was a woman.26 This lazy product of male-default thinking is inexcusable in a media report, but it’s even more unacceptable in academia, and yet here too it proliferates. In economics, joint papers are the norm – and joint papers contain a hidden male bias. Men receive the same level of credit for both solo and joint papers, but, unless they are writing with other female economists, women receive less than half as much credit for co-authored papers as men do. This, a US study contends, explains why, although female economists publish as much as male economists, male economists are twice as likely to receive tenure.27 Male-default thinking may also be behind the finding that research perceived to have been done by men is associated with ‘greater scientific quality’:28 this could be a product of pure sexism, but it could also be a result of the mode of thinking that sees male as universal and female as niche. It would certainly go some way to explaining why women are less likely to appear on course syllabuses.29
Of course before a woman gets to face all these hidden hurdles, she must have found the time to do the research in the first place, and that is by no means a given. We’ve already discussed how women’s unpaid workload outside of paid employment impacts on their ability to do research. But their unpaid workload inside the workplace doesn’t help either. When students have an emotional problem, it is their female professors, not their male professors they turn to.39 Students are also more likely to request extensions, grade boosts, and rule-bending of female academics.31 In isolation, a request of this kind isn’t likely to take up much time or mental energy – but they add up, and they constitute a cost on female academics’ time that male academics mostly aren’t even aware of, and that universities don’t account for.
Women are also asked to do more undervalued admin work than their male colleagues32 – and they say yes, because they are penalised for being ‘unlikeable’ if they say no. (This is a problem across a range of workplaces: women, and in particular ethnic minority women, do the ‘housekeeping’ – taking notes, getting the coffee, cleaning up after everyone – in the office as well as at home.33) Women’s ability to publish is also impacted by their being more likely than their male colleagues to get loaded with extra teaching hours,34 and, like ‘honorary’ admin posts, teaching is viewed as less important, less serious, less valuable, than research. And we run into another vicious circle here: women’s teaching load prevents them from publishing enough, which results in more teaching hours, and so on.