Lincoln Laboratory Technical Women's Network hosts talk on diversity

Photo of Sally HaslangerProf. Sally Haslanger

The MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Women's Network (LLTWN) and the Laboratory's Diversity and Inclusion Office coordinated the 30 March LLTWN meeting that focused on ideas for encouraging workplace diversity. Guest speaker Sally Haslanger, Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, and the director of Women's and Gender Studies at MIT, initiated the discussion with a presentation entitled "Recognizing the Best and the Brightest: Gender and Race in Research," a look at possible reasons why women and minorities are still underrepresented in many fields, including engineering and the sciences.

While academic and research institutions, major businesses, and professional organizations typically view themselves as meritocracies that seek to employ and promote "the best and the brightest," the fairness inherent in a true meritocracy seems to falter if one looks at the numbers of women and minorities achieving higher-level positions. Various studies have shown that women and minorities still face barriers in hiring, performance reviews, and promotions.

A study done at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, discovered that both male and female university psychology professors preferred 2 to 1 to hire a candidate with a male name over one with a traditionally female name.1  Similarly, researchers have found that applicants with African American–sounding names are invited to fewer callback interviews than applicants with comparable resumes but "white-sounding" names.2  Research reported on in Discourse & Society found that letters of recommendation for male applicants were longer and focused more on the applicants' qualifications than letters for women, which more often included equivocating qualifiers such as "It’s amazing how much she has accomplished."3

Prof. Haslanger suggested that what is operating to keep women and minorities from attaining more success in their professions is not a decades-ago style of overt discrimination but more subtle, nonconscious, and pervasive perceptions held by people. Calling these perceptions schemas, Prof. Haslanger explained that schemas are implicit and necessary to categorizing experiences, important for us when learning how to interact with our world. We use schemas about people to facilitate our interactions with them. For example, we expect teachers to care about children and police officers to help in a crisis, so we depend on their judgments; if one later disappoints, we see that individual as only an "exception to the rule."

However, schemas are built on information limited by individual experiences or by "conventional wisdom" and thus can be unreliable, such as the old fallacy that girls "are not good at math." All schemas are shortcuts used in making decisions, and the less time we have to contemplate a decision, the more often we react almost intuitively on schemas, including those that may be erroneous. Quick reliance on a schema might be smart when one is approached by a ski-masked, black-clad stranger on a dark street but not smart when judging a job applicant.

What then can be done to ensure more fairness in institutions? Many good suggestions were offered at the meeting. Having performance reviews done by multiple evaluators or by different evaluators from year to year could decrease the chance that one person's schemas were determining an employee's fate. Concrete metrics used in evaluations would counter faulty perceptions. For example, a reviewer may have developed the impression that a person produced a large body of published articles, but the actual numbers may not support that perception. Taking ample time to consider resumes, evaluations, and letters of support may lessen the reliance on quick-reaction assessments. And, recognizing that we all operate on schemas, have nonconscious biases, can induce us to consciously apply objectivity to decisions about others.

References

  1. R.E. Steinpreis, K.A. Anders, and D. Ritzke, "The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applications and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study," Sex Roles, vol. 41, no. 718, pp. 509–528, 1999.
  2. M. Bertrand and S. Mullainathan, Poverty Action Lab, vol. 3, pp. 1–27, 2004.
  3. F. Trix and C. Psenka, "Exploring the Color of Glass: Letters of Recommendation for Female and Male Medical Faculty," Discourse & Society, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 191–220, 2003.

 

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