Equity and diversity plans won't solve the Canada Research Chair program's gender problem.

The Canada Research Chair program has a long-standing gender problem.

Way back in 2002, the CRC Secretariat commissioned a gender-based analysis of the program which concluded: 

There are several sub-disciplines/fields where women are under represented among the Canada Research Chair nominees. In part, this may be due to the lesser "research maturity" of some disciplines where women are present in large proportion. In part, however, this under representation stems from the slow rate at which most universities have sought out and nominated women for Chairs, especially for Tier 2 Chairs.

The report concluded, however, that "overall, the Canada Research Chairs approval's [sic] process does not discriminate against women nominees".

In 2003, the Canadian Association of University Teachers formally complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission about gender discrimination in the Canada Research Chairs program. The case was settled, but the overwhelming majority of CRC holders - especially Tier 1 and Canada Excellence Research Chairs -- are still men (see here for links and info about the human rights complaint).

In 2014, the CRC program - finding that the gender gap in CRC holders was stubborn and persistent - added a section on "limiting unconscious bias" to their instructions for referees, pointing to research that found that letters of reference written for women tended to:

• include fewer ‘standout’ adjectives (e.g., excellent, outstanding etc.);
• include ‘doubt raisers’ (negative language, hedges, unexplained comments, faint praise and irrelevancies);
• focus on interpersonal attributes versus research skills/achievements (e.g., kindness, compassionate etc.).

Referees were told, "it is important to avoid unconscious bias within letters of recommendation as it can potentially have an unintended negative impact on the overall success/career of individuals—especially in the case of women."

That failed to do the trick either.

On October 12th, the federal government announced funding for 11 new Canada Excellence Research Chairs valued at $10 million each. According to the Globe and Mail, "each competing institution will have to submit a detailed equity and diversity plan as part of the application process that encompasses the hiring of researchers and students around the successful chair."

Equity and diversity plans won't solve the Canada Research Chair program's gender problem. In the past I have been asked to evaluate institutions' CRC hiring processes. Even though the institutions I evaluated made extraordinary efforts to try to recruit women, then ended up hiring men. Why? 

The Canada Excellence Research Chairs program funds "world-renowned researchers." In economics, there are not a lot of world-renowned female researchers. It is hard to have a family and still devote the amount of time to research - and to self-promotion- required to achieve global fame. Because many organizations look to achieve some amount of gender equity, truly outstanding female economists have a myriad of opportunities available to them - better opportunities than a CRC in a cold climate. Moreover, professional women often have professional spouses who are unable to relocate easily. World renown female economists like Janet Yellen, Betsey Stevenson and Esther Duflo all have partners who are academics - and that makes relocation more challenging. 

A program that attempts to attract only the best and the brightest will, in my experience, generally end up favouring men, no matter how hard an institution tries to achieve gender balance. In the cases that I have some inside knowledge of, the universities in question could not find a single female candidate who met the CRC's excellence criteria and, at the same time, was willing to re-locate to Canada. 

Now it could be argued that the proposed gender equity and diversity plans are about more than just the research chairs themselves - they are to apply to the entire team that is built around the Canada Research Excellence Chair. As the government press release says:  

 The government also believes that equity and excellence in the sciences are not mutually exclusive. When all people, regardless of gender, race, age and ability are welcomed into the lab they can work together to create breakthroughs that will help Canada seize new opportunities and respond to grand, global challenges.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that an acute shortage female and/or visible minority lab techs, PhD students and post-docs is not really the number one gender and diversity issue facing Canada today. Here's a picture of one of the CERC's, together with members of his research team [updated]:

The problem isn't that women and visible minorities can't get on a science and engineering career ladder, the problem is that they can't move up it. Jenny Hunt's work speaks to this - she finds in her work on STEM disciplines that  "the most important driver of excess female exits from engineering is dissatisfaction over pay and promotion opportunities". 

If the federal government wanted to do something real to promote gender and other forms of equity in economics, it would put more research dollars into small grants and less into CERCs. Grants that allow junior scholars to go to international conferences, and start building up a little bit of world-renown. Grants competitions that are not hyper-competitive - ones that a person who spends evenings and weekends with his or family might have some chance of winning. Grants that form the middle rung on the career ladder.

Because if the middle rungs on the career ladder are missing, it is pretty damned difficult to rise to the top.

 

Comments

[Linda Welling]

Well done, Frances.

[Frances Woolley]

Thanks, Linda!

[Joseph Savon]

An (almost) serious Question:- How difficult would it be to publish papers by "junior" researchers using neutral "numeros de plume" known only to author, publisher & authors' institution?

[Frances Woolley]

Joseph - not going to happen, but there is a certain amount of evidence that things like the author's institutional affiliation affect the likelihood of a paper being accepted, so I don't think it's an entirely stupid idea.

Why "junior" researchers? Why not all researchers?

[Avon Barksdale]

I think this post is excellent because poses juxtaposes positive and normative issues so nicely.

First, I want to make it clear that I consider myself a feminist. For essentially all of human history, women have been oppressed and discriminated against. To me, the feminist movements of the 20th century represents one of humanity’s the proudest achievements, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences. Unfortunately, still too many places on Earth that see women as second class human beings.

So, why do we see more men in Canada Research Chairs especially in STEM disciplines and economics? Is it true that the origin of these differences are essentially a by product of “unconscious bias” or does it point to choices that both men and women make at a fundamental level?

We must separate the moral position that people should not be discriminated against based on their gender, which is the basis of feminism and the LGTBQ movement, from the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. Cognitive differences between the sexes play out in the career choices of men and women. In her book in her book “Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability”, Diane Halpern (the former president of the American Psychological Association) writes,

“There are real and in some cases sizable sex differences with respect to some cognitive abilities. Socialization practices are undoubtedly important, but there is also good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences, a conclusion I wasn't prepared to make when I began reviewing the relevant literature.”

We must ensure that employment opportunities are not restricted by sexism, but at the same time we should not chase equality for equality’s sake - especially if what we are seeing is in part a reflection of choices rooted in basic human biology.

We must remember that we are taking money away from people to provided the public good of basic research. Let’s demand the biggest bang for our buck regardless of where the equality measure eventually lands. I am not sure that putting more research dollars into smaller grants accomplishes that goal. If we’re honest, most papers don’t need to be written - most are derivative, unimaginative, and careerist. Take a look at the 1927 Solvay Conference picture; there are only 29 people in it. The people in that picture came up with quantum mechanics, relativity (both special and general), the structure of the atom, discovered radioactivity, and on and on and on..., and by accident, they also developed a big chunk of the mathematical framework of modern economics. (Psst..., the Black-Scholes equation is really a “rediscovery” of the Fokker-Planck equation. Planck is second from the left in the front row.) Let’s think about the societal optimal number of people needed in research before spending to increase equality.

[Sue Bertram]

Fantastic ideas and beautifully stated. More money to help young and mid career scientists rise up the ranks. Here here!

[Frances Woolley]

Avon: "I am not sure that putting more research dollars into smaller grants accomplishes that goal."

A couple of points.

Big research breakthroughs are typically made by super-smart people with new ideas relatively early in their careers.

The problem is: you don't know, as a granting agency, which of the many people who claim to be super-smart actually are so, and also which ones have truly great ideas.

So think of research grants as buying lotto 6-49 tickets. It's never guaranteed that you'll hit the jackpot, but you're better off buying a whole bunch of different tickets with different numbers on them than making a really big bet on one particular number.

This is particularly true in field like economics or mathematics or anything theoretical, where generally speaking all you need to do research is a computer - in these fields you don't generally need great wads of money to run labs etc (though it's nice to have enough funds to get 29 people together and have a conference and brain storm).

Another problem with the CERCs and similar programs is that they kick in after people have hit their peak productivity. I can think of one economist in particular who has held a CRC for years, and all the while his his research productivity has been steadily falling, and how his output has dwindled to a trickle of low-ranked publications. Meanwhile smart young people who are great teachers and great researchers can't find a job.

[Frances Woolley]

Sue - thank you!

[Majromax]

> Another problem with the CERCs and similar programs is that they kick in after people have hit their peak productivity.

I'd hazard a guess that "excellence" programs have a serious problem with simple reversion to the mean. CERCs and similar incorporate the unstated assumption that research success has serial autocorrelation, so paying a premium for famed senior researchers will be good value for money.

If we're really looking for value for money, then early and mid-career grants are more obvious investments. Institutions can use these to hire researchers when they're oversupplied and comparatively cheap, and once hired on a tenure track academics change institutions rarely and only for substantial salary/condition premiums.

On the other hand, is the CERC (tier 1) program really about excellence in research, or is it about buying reputation? If it's the latter, then there's no substitute for a stable of well-known names, even if their current output is mediocre.

[Frances Woolley]

Majromax: "On the other hand, is the CERC (tier 1) program really about excellence in research, or is it about buying reputation?"

Exactly.

If the federal government wants to buy CAnadian universities some reputation - well, fair enough. There's worse things the government could be spending their money on. But let's not pretend we're achieving equity and diversity by luring young people into PhD programs and post-docs in the hope that maybe, perhaps, there might be some academic position for them somewhere down the line - when in some cases it's just a "profzi scheme" and the jobs ain't there.

[Phil Koop]

I do not agree with the position taken by Avon Barksdale. The core of this position is the claim that "we should not chase equality for equality’s sake." This may seem self-evident, but I think it is exactly wrong: we should, in fact, chase equality for equality's sake (though not only for equality's sake.) If people like beer and ice cream, then, ceteris paribus, society ought to be supplying a certain amount of beer and ice cream. And if a substantial segment of society values equality, then we ought to be supplying some equality too. This is just as much a public good as basic research.

Second, we should bear in mind that there is no evidence that the provision of tier 1 CRC's increases the supply of basic research. The whole point is that the qualified candidates for these chairs have a surfeit of opportunity; the Harvards and Standfords of this world are more than happy to support them. The public good that is being sought is not research, but prestige. In this respect, it is more like a government-directed Olympic medal program than a productive investment.

To the extent that bringing superstar academics to Canada benefits Canadians in a productive sense and not just a hedonic one, it must be because of "spin-offs" that would accrue to the second, "middle" rank of academics, who might benefit intellectually from direct access to superstars, not to mention advocates for publishing their papers. (Every Bose needs an Einstein.) These are precisely the academics being derided as "derivative, unimaginative, and careerist!" But one way to increase the quality of this second rank would be to increase the pool of candidates from which they are selected; and that is the proposal being made by Frances.

Finally, with due respect Diane Halpern, I would suggest that the research she sites should be interpreted with caution, and should be regarded as suggestive rather than definitive. Such research is necessarily observational, and to first order observational research is always wrong, particularly when effect sizes are small (it's much easier to demonstrate that smoking causes lung cancer than that routine mammograms offer a health benefit.) Meta-studies ameliorate but do not obviate this problem. Also, even were these putative "cognitive differences" to be firmly established, yet we would not have demonstrated cause and effect regarding particular elementary cognitive functions and emergent functions like "physics" or "economics"; nor regarding gender representation in academia.

[Avon Barksdale]

Frances,

"So think of research grants as buying lotto 6-49 tickets."

But where is the real public good part? What research would not get done without government subsidy? Seriously, look at the picture of the 1927 Solvay Conference. Government wasn’t much involved there yet look what came out!

In most fields, including economics, most of the research is bad – we produce tons and tons of not very innovative papers. I think government is part of the problem here. I’m not talking about my hat here – I was an academic physicist for many years before becoming a quant, I know the game. What are the optimal number of 6-49 tickets? You can easily buy too many.

I think data is the public good part (yes I know it’s excludable, but I see a public good part here for quality data) . Government has an important role in generating good data, whether it’s in economics or in other disciplines. In economics, think Statistics Canada. Analyzing that data can largely be done without government. We don’t need to return to 1927, but let’s rely more on private donations and keep the intellectually vapid waste of trees down to a minimum.

[Avon Barksdale]

"The public good that is being sought is not research, but prestige."

Phil, that is exactly the wrong way to think about research and moreover the role of government in society. Donald Trump populism feeds on the interpretation that intellectual elites use the ordinary public to advance their ambition and only offer "prestige" in return.

[Wonks Anonymous]

Robin Hanson argues that universities exist to provide affiliation with "impressive" people:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/impressive-power.html
Going for "world-renowned" superstars seems like a symptom of that.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Just for fun: on a Present Value private enterprise framework, the only part of Einstein's career that would have found a commercial backer is his Einstein-Szilard refrigerator, part of the design still being in use in a special fridge for storing vaccines in isolated third-world villages. ANd his contribution may have been as a patent specialist.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Wonks: someone very close to me has a MBA from a stupefyingly-ranked MBA program. He had sold his start-up which became a division a big multinational and he stayed as head of the "new division".
But he didn't have the badge. the MBA, even though he had grown the company very well on his own.
They used the same books as any downmarket small U. But most of their courses took place in various locales (from London to Seoul) where after the course, they met with business and political honchos. That's what his employer bought for a quarter million $.
Same with prestigious profs. It's not uncommon for alumni in the US to have a fund-raising drive to buy out some guy for a new prestigious lab, the way you do with a sports player or a coach (though it usually cost less...).

[Avon Barksdale]

Jacques,

No, that's not particularly helpful. Look at the Simons Foundation. James Simons is a brilliant mathematician (see Chern-Simons theory) who became a hedge fund manager. He uses his impressive wealth to fund lots of fundamental research.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Yes, lots of research had been funded by business tycoon. But we remember their names mostly because, like other heroes, they are not that numerous. And I haven't seen evidence that their funding decisions have been better or worse than anyone else,

[f chaumaz]

Absolutely in agreement with the original post! I find the lottery analogy especially apt.

Could we not also point to the perverse incentives fostered by national and international rankings, as well as universities’ and individuals’ self-promotion (‘we have spent x million on research’; ‘so and so received an x million grant’ etc)? This is exacerbated by the Canadian cv format – determined by the granting agencies even in the social sciences and humanities – that require dollar amounts to be listed. I have been struck that in the reputational index, money is more and more often a proxy for excellence, the quality of research is increasingly judged by its cost – the measure of input more important than output.
Is this not what leads some universities to require all junior faculty to apply for SSHRC even if all they need are a good library and a computer?
At its most absurd, this logic has led some universities - my own alas - to invest in trying to buy a Nobel prize – dumping many millions (to build lab/buildings/new program etc) in attracting one promising established researcher. That’s one very, very expensive lottery ticket, all the more perverse since it siphons off research money that would allow others in the university to buy cheap tickets.

[Avon Barksdale]

Think of a university as a firm. It's a rational maximizer. Everyone here claims that they are maximizing the wrong thing. First, how do you know what they should be maximizing? Second, if we agree that they are maximizing along the wrong dimension, what is the source of the mismatch? You can't just say things like prestige or trying to buy a Nobel Prize. You have to explain what prestige or landing a Nobel prize winner gets them and then you have to show that chasing these things are not in the universty's interest but only in the interest of some set of agents who've captured the university. Then you have to identify the source of the agents' power that them can work to maximize their self interest over the universty's.

[Patrick]

It's very well established that gender bias in academia is real. Two minutes with Google finds all sorts of good (and rather shocking) studies.

So why not just correct for the bias and reserve 50% of the spots at each levels for women and be done with it?

I'm not an academic. Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that y'all spend a lot of energy fretting, fussing, and preaching to others about gender equity and very little energy practicing it. Either the great and good have the courage of their convictions, or they don't. Time to choose, IMO.

[Frances Woolley]

f chaumaz: "Could we not also point to the perverse incentives fostered by national and international rankings, as well as universities’ and individuals’ self-promotion (‘we have spent x million on research’; ‘so and so received an x million grant’ etc)?"

Yes, definitely - one thing that's come home to me as a result of the conversation here is just how much the CERC program is about chasing the rankings. I'd never thought of it that way before.

[Avon Barksdale]

Patrick,

It's not enough to say there is an over-representation of males or females. You have understand why. Reality cannot be gender biased. You would not want to reject a future Fields Medalist on the basis that the candidate is male and would upset the gender target of the department.

In think Steven Pinker, the world famous cognitive scientist, psychologist, and linguist makes an excellent point:

There seems to be a widespread assumption that if a sex difference conforms to a stereotype, the difference must have been caused by the stereotype, via differential expectations for boys and for girls. But of course the causal arrow could go in either direction: stereotypes might reflect differences rather than cause them. In fact there's an enormous literature in cognitive psychology which says that people can be good intuitive statisticians when forming categories and that their prototypes for conceptual categories track the statistics of the natural world pretty well. For example, there is a stereotype that basketball players are taller on average than jockeys. But that does not mean that basketball players grow tall, and jockeys shrink, because we expect them to have certain heights! Likewise, Alice Eagly and Jussim and Eccles have shown that most of people's gender stereotypes are in fact pretty accurate. Indeed the error people make is in the direction of underpredicting sex differences.

To sum up: I think there is more than "a shred of evidence" for sex differences that are relevant to statistical gender disparities in elite hard science departments. There are reliable average difference in life priorities, in an interest in people versus things, in risk-seeking, in spatial transformations, in mathematical reasoning, and in variability in these traits. And there are ten kinds of evidence that these differences are not completely explained by socialization and bias, although they surely are in part.

A concluding remark. None of this provides grounds for ignoring the biases and barriers that do keep women out of science, as long as we keep in mind the distinction between fairness on the one hand and sameness on the other. And I will give the final word to Gloria Steinem: "there are very few jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other jobs should be open to both sexes."

[Avon Barksdale]

Frances,

Saying things like universities are chasing rankings does not advance the argument. Again, let’s apply some economic thinking here.

1) If universities are chasing rankings, why is this goal wrong? What are universities achieving by chasing rankings and what should they be doing instead?

2) If chasing rankings is the wrong goal, what is the source mismatch? Is it a principal-agent problem? If so, how do the agents benefit from the rankings, and how does the principal suffer? How did the agents get the power to exploit the principal?

[Patrick]

Frances, Sorry but I don't understand. You're talking way over my head.

I will say I agree (I think) when you say "Reality cannot be gender biased", if by that you mean we have no reason to believe that males are better than females (or vice versa) in academic pursuits, so 50/50 is at least a reasonable approach to dealing with the observed bias, regardless of its root cause.

I'd also offer as a hypothesis that gender bias has the effect of excluding relatively more talented women and advancing relatively less talented men - like in the days before blind auditions for orchestra musicians. That's bad for everyone.

[Frances Woolley]

Patrick - I think that was Avon who said "reality cannot be gender biased." I'm not particularly enthusiastic about a 50/50 gender quota in this particular case, as the pool of potential applicants for CERCs, which are awarded primarily in the sciences, isn't close to 50/50, but certainly would not want to be associated with Avon's position.

When the causes of the gender bias are structural (i.e. in this case only awarding chairs to "world renown researchers"), and the structures can be readily changed (put the money into something else), it's better to change the underlying structures than to force gender-equitable outcomes.

[Avon Barksdale]

Again Frances, how are universities not maximizing the correct thing? Only awarding chairs to "world renown researchers" is a strategy to maximize something. If that something is wrong, how did the universities adopt the strategy? What is the source of the mismatch between the real objectives and the incorrect strategy?

[Jonathan Wiley]

I've only given this a quick scan so far, so I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this study from last year:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262.abstract

Basically, the study provides evidence suggesting that differential success of men and women across academic fields is largely determined by whether academics view the brilliance (male) or hard work (often female) as the key to making a positive contribution in that field.

[Jonathan Wiley]

Maybe I'm way off, but to me it seems like different posters are trying to solve different problems.

My impression is that Frances is looking for a policy that maximizes the quality of economic publications.

Avon seems to be trying to find out how to get universities to invest their money efficiently with regard to their own self-interest, although since we're not really talking about for-profit universities, I don't know what "self-interest" means.

Patrick is, I believe, looking for a way to make economic work equally rewarded for males and females. Or maybe he wants the same thing as Frances, except that he and she have different positive expectations.

I have a question regarding those exact expectations.

Frances: "When the causes of the gender bias are structural (i.e. in this case only awarding chairs to "world renown researchers"), and the structures can be readily changed (put the money into something else), it's better to change the underlying structures than to force gender-equitable outcomes."

Do you think there's a clear distinction here between the "outcomes" and the "structure"?

[Jonathan Wiley]

Frances: "So think of research grants as buying lotto 6-49 tickets. It's never guaranteed that you'll hit the jackpot, but you're better off buying a whole bunch of different tickets with different numbers on them than making a really big bet on one particular number.
This is particularly true in field like economics or mathematics or anything theoretical, where generally speaking all you need to do research is a computer - in these fields you don't generally need great wads of money to run labs etc (though it's nice to have enough funds to get 29 people together and have a conference and brain storm).
Another problem with the CERCs and similar programs is that they kick in after people have hit their peak productivity. I can think of one economist in particular who has held a CRC for years, and all the while his his research productivity has been steadily falling, and how his output has dwindled to a trickle of low-ranked publications. Meanwhile smart young people who are great teachers and great researchers can't find a job."

How much of this do you think is specific to economics and how much applies to basically every academic field?

[Frances Woolley]

Jonathan: "Do you think there's a clear distinction here between the "outcomes" and the "structure"?"

Great question, and great comments - thank you. Working on another post right now, however, so can't get my head aback into this one. Sorry.