Many of the commentators---let's ignore their sex for the moment---suggested including women in the Feyerabend conference. Then the question was raised, but are they of the right quality, status, rank? That is, do they bring down the average quality of the conference in virtue of their being of inferior status, or, in Vincenzo Politi's words, not someone whose work is both relevant to the topic of the conference and also as widely recognized as the work of the invited speakers (HOPOS-L archive, CFP: Feyerabend Conference, Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 14:57:20)? It is extremely important that such a discussion of quality, status, and rank recognize the scourge of evaluation bias and its long-term and pervasive consequences. One well-designed study this past year, published by the National Academy of Sciences, established prominent evaluation bias among both male and female science faculty in their evaluations of a student applying for a managerial job, who was randomly assigned either a male or a female name (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). These professors examined the qualifications of the students and decided whether to hire them, what salary to give them, and whether to mentor them and how much to do so. The results were that both male and female scientists hired more men, gave them higher salaries, and offered more mentoring to them, even though the male applications were identical to the female applications. When probed about their reasons for not hiring or mentoring the female applicants, the professors explained that they based their decisions on the inferior competence of the applicant: the female applicants were perceived as less competent by all professors (with identical applications between males and females). This is what evaluation bias looks like, and it has been established in many, many contexts since the 1970s---this is only the most recent. Unless philosophers and historians of science wish to claim that they are not like all other human beings and academics that have so far been tested and that they never exhibit the unconscious biases affecting all of their colleagues, both male and female, we must always take a serious degree of evaluation bias into account as a contextual factor in our judgments and actions. This means, for one thing, that evaluation bias has likely affected our meritocracy and that a woman in a professorial position is likely to be underemployed; that is, she likely is qualified for a higher status position than the one she is in. This is also, of course, true for men, given the way the job market works today. But it is extremely important to remember, when offering speaking engagements to conferences, not to infer someone's abilities from her academic positions or institutions, given the likely operation of evaluation bias in her situation.
...MoreDescription Reflections on a study that demonstrates an unambiguous gender difference in hiring to academic positions.
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