[Phys-L] implicit bias (and plain old bias)

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

We would like to think that our colleagues are all professionals,
all refined modern intellectuals, not perpetrators of racism and
sexism.

The data says that's not entirely true. No anecdotes needed; this
is hard data.

  Katie Langin
  "Racial and gender biases plague postdoc hiring"
  https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/06/racial-and-gender-biases-plague-postdoc-hiring

> Bradley Miller is more likely to be hired than José Rodriguez. Zhang
> Wei (David) is more competent than Jamal Banks. And both Miller and
> Zhang are more competent and hirable than Maria Rodriguez or Shanice
> Banks.
>
> These postdoc job candidates are fictional. But the differences in
> how they’re viewed based on name alone—despite identical CVs—by a
> sample of professors are real. That’s according to a new study that
> unearths evidence of racial bias in biology and a combination of
> gender and racial bias in physics, highlighting both the pervasive
> nature of various biases in science as well as important disciplinary
> differences.
>
> “This is a really, really important study,” says Corinne
> Moss-Racusin, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore
> College in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2012 Moss-Racusin published
> a similar study, which found that biology, chemistry, and physics
> faculty members who reviewed applications for a lab manager position
> favored applicants named John over otherwise identical applicants
> named Jennifer. The new study, published today in the journal Sex
> Roles, is an important advance because it manipulates race as well as
> gender, she says. “It certainly supports a lot of anecdotal findings,
> self-reports, correlational data—but to really have some hard
> experimental numbers … is really important.”

Upstream reference:
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01052-w

Earlier study:
  https://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474