Korman & Goodwin Response to Williams & Ceci (2015): Don’t Throw Out those Equity Training Materials Just Yet.

Kudos to Korman and AIM Network colleague, Goodwin, for their recent In Mind Blog post in response to Williams and Ceci’s (2015) Proceedings from the National Academy of Science publication entitled, “National Hiring Experiments Reveal 2:1 Faculty Preference for Women in STEM Tenure Track.“

Korman and Goodwin (2015) note:

By presenting lifestyle information explicitly, Williams and Ceci (2015) have conducted an impressive and tightly controlled study in which they show that women can be favored in hiring, provided that all other things are equal. …But once we introduce some of the “noise” of a real hiring situation, we can no longer be sure that the playing field is equal….

Stellar women do indeed rise to the top of candidate pools, but they must be outliers to do so. [Further] the gap between ratings of stellar and strong female candidates is often greater than the rating gap between stellar and strong men. As a result, in a real hiring process, strong women can still end up ranked below their equally qualified “…strong” male peers. 

They conclude that although the Williams and Ceci’s results are hopeful, it is “not the time to throw out those training materials yet!”