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Advice for men to promote women in science
Most male scientists don’t try to be sexist. They would like to support their female colleagues, but may not know what would help. Laura L. Mays Hoopes has an article the website of The Scientist with her advice for men in science to improve the climate for women. The article is focused on things that will help women’s day-to-day experiences in science, and is aimed at well-meaning men. Our favorites are:
If you’re on a hiring or tenure committee, don’t start reading the files until after you review the primary literature on unconscious bias. You can access references from Jo Handelsman’s site.
This is a stellar piece of advice. Research on “unconscious bias” shows that even though we think we’re objective, we diminish the achievements of women and/or minorities compared to the achievements of white men. So while we’d love to be like one of our memorable colleagues and say that we “only make decisions based on quality”, the research clearly shows that our very perceptions of quality distort when we compare women and men. Making this research widely known among male scientists would probably be the single biggest thing that would improve life for women scientists.
When you think about someone to appoint to an editorial board or to write a review article, be sure to consider women as well as your particular favorite young men and male cronies.
When you are looking for a nominee for an award (I’m not talking about the awards for the BEST WOMAN, I’m talking about research awards in general), replace that “young hotshot man” image with a “young hotshot woman” image. Or even an “old hotshot woman.” If you don’t know anyone to consider, email me at lhoopes@pomona.edu and I can suggest someone.
These are practical suggestions that follow from the need to work against unconscious biases. While more and more women have become scientists, it is till rare to see women on editorial boards - and even rarer to see women win research awards. We’ve been to conferences in our field where the only awards given to women are those which are for women only. It’s infuriating.
The Scientist web site has the full list of tips, and invites comments from readers. We may write about the reader comments in a later post.