Good article. Here’s something funny: I work in a largely female environment — a cable tv network – and I have felt penalized since the beginning for being insufficient communal, sweet, affectionate, etc.

As a guy, I constantly feel like I don’t get the corporate culture. It seems to value niceness over competence, effectiveness, thoroughness.

Amy Vanderbuilt, in her “Complete book of etiquette; a guide to gracious living,” recommends using phrases like “follows directions well” if you want to tactfully but effectively make sure no one hires a servant you just dismissed.

Nice catch on the age-old catchwords, Julie!

Seems like they should control for the sex of the candidate as well. If females are discriminated against for being female and communal words are correlated with being a female, then wouldn’t they get the same results? What happens with the male candidates that are praised with communal words?

Moreover if some additional trait X causes female candidates to be passed over more often, and X is correlated with being female, and communal terms are correlated with being female, then this still seems consistent with the present analysis.

Grant- did you even read it? They removed all terms related to gender when asking people to review the letters. Gender was taken out fo the equation of reading the letters.

@Grant: They removed indication of gender from the letters before they were evaluated. See above where it says, “they removed names and personal pronouns from the letters and asked faculty members to evaluate them.”

Thanks for the responses. Good point. But I don’t think this covers it. I am not an expert in these things, and could be wrong. However, it seems to me that the readers still might be able to reconstruct the sex of the applicant from things other than the name or pronouns. Furthermore, if X were correlated with being female, then it could still be X which matters and not community terms (X being correlated with community terms simply because they are both correlated with being female). For example, it could be the tall people get better letters of recommendation. Women, being shorter on average than men, would have poorer letters. Moreover, we would still expect to see that communal terms are correlated with low review because people that are described in communal terms are more likely to be female, thus more likely to be shorter, thus more likely to be given a bad letter of rec. Tall hear is just a stand in for whatever you like.

It (currently) seems to me that if sex were controlled for, then the results would be more convincing. Of course, it could still be that X is correlated with community terms and X leads to bad letters of rec (even controlling for sex). [it seems impossible to really get causation instead of correlation using this data, for that you need to experiment—like planting community terms in letters—perhaps a good follow up study?].

In the article it says women were described with MORE communal characteristics and men with MORE agentic. What I would like to know is if the MEN who were described as communal were hired more, the same, or less often than the women with communal descriptions. But, we’ll have to wait for the follow up study.

It seems like a positive feedback loop. If women are described as communal, maybe they are offered courses to teach less often, which would lead to fewer chances to say these women performed well as leaders. Which leads to more communal descriptions….

This is a very interesting study. What I wonder, and what doesn’t seem to be questioned at all, is if the difference in the description of the personality traits was accurate. So it is assumed that the difference in description is due to a bias in the writer of the letter. And that may be true, not saying it’s false. But it is assumed and simply stated rather than shown. An alternative explanation is that the writers of the letter are equally accurate in assessing the personality traits of the men and women that they are writing for, and the women in fact *are* more communal than the men. This should not be surprising considering the different ways in which boys and girls are raised. We are raised to value different things, so why would it be unexpected that, as adults, our behaviors reflect different value systems?

Another good question to think about, then, is if the aggressive characteristics really do make more effective leaders? Or is the gender bias located in assuming characteristics men are more likely to have are better for leadership?

@ CuriousinDC. You may be missing the point. It doesn’t matter for purposes of this study whether the attributes described in the letters accurately describe the job seeker. The point is that when gender is masked, there is a bias against hiring applicants described as having characteristics that are being labelled as “communal”. There’s already research showing that (a) there is social pressure for women to conform to standards described by these terms, and (b) women are more likely than men to be described in these terms, other things being equal. The study being described here adds to a body of research that shows collectively that women as a class still encounter barriers to professional advancement. My question would be this: because the descriptors in the “communal” set describe qualities that are normative for women, and because there may still be a social tendency for men who embody characteristics expected of women to be viewed negatively, if information about gender were included in these letters, would we find that men described by the “communal” descriptors are more or less likely to be hired than women described in those terms (or in any terms)?

I also wonder about how descriptors like “communality” are perceived in different fields. For example, I’m thinking that “supportive & collegial” and “works well as part of a team/committee” might be seen as ideal qualities for a female OR male candidate in a field like education, which places value on collaboration in both research and practice. On the other hand, it’s no accident that education is one of relatively few academic fields in which women are well represented, so this mediating factor of _disciplinary_ preferences may not make any difference since the values of the field are “feminized” by its demographics.

I also second CouiousinDC’s question about the relationship between the candidate’s actual performance/qualifications and how they get described in reference letters. I feel like this has been studied more than the perception of those letters (the subject of the current study), and I’d like to see these two bodies of research synthesized. Preferably in time for me to give this information to my own letter writers…

Interesting! I’ve just been asked to provide letters of recommendation for some female students who worked for me over the summer. I will be sure to use appropriate language! Thanks for the tips!

Because of the economy, I have been busy doing career coaching for people who have been laid off. So when I heard this story on the radio last week, I listened. Job seekers should consider these findings when asking for letters of recommendation.

I wonder if ‘agency’ in women is considered as favorable as it is in men. I’m thinking of a female professor I knew who always spoke her mind, was unafraid of conflict, and took on leadership roles. Other faculty and students would talk about her behind her back, and generally seemed to criticize her for her non-communal behavior. I wonder if they would have reacted the same way if she had been a man. Similarly, I wonder if a male faculty member showing ‘kindness’ and ‘nuturing’ behavior would be criticized. I’m not sure of a way to test this…. maybe hire male and female actors, have them give talks at an academic conference during which they display ‘agentic’ or ‘communal’ behavior, and then survey the unsuspecting audience for their impressions?

I wonder if this reveals as much about the academic environment as it does about gender bias. Would it hurt colleges and universities to be a little less ‘professional’ and a little more collegial/communal? Why do hiring committees apparently dismiss so many good team players and relational leaders?

A shortage of women in academia? I don’t bloody think so. Academic and educational institutions have been hotbeds of feminism since the 70s – to the point where having a penis is practically a criminal offense in some of them. This sounds to me like more feminist bleating along the lines of the “women don’t get paid as much as men” bullshit. These people won’t stop until men have been reduced to robot slaves and women own and control everything. Preferably the man-hating bulldykes and their pet man-traitors behind it all.

Mystikan, you are so very wrong. Hilariously so.
For example, Cal Tech first even *ADMITTED WOMEN* in 1970.

Many of the Ivies have the same kind of track record. They at least have an excuse that they didn’t admit women until that time either, but at least they ahd women’s colleges to make up for it.
I am an academic – in electrical engineering.

Go look at the faculty (not lecturer, but research faculty) numbers at UCSD.
They have under 10% female faculty. Look at UC Berkeley, UCSB, Stanford etc.
Ditto in physics research insitutions. Ditto in mathematics research institutions.
Look at UC Berkeley and Harvard’s math faculty.

I believe EE numbers are that females get near 19% of the PhDs. If you look at major research universiites,

USC EE is at 5.5 out of 89.5 faculty (givingfaculty only 1/ 2in EE and 1/2 in another department 1/2 a slot.). That’s 6.2%.

UCSD ECE has TWO women faculty out of 73. That’s 2.6%.

Again, 19% of the doctorates granted go to females, and I believe there are a higher percentage of females at the top tier schools as students. MIT for example has very good statistcis on female enrollees, female faculty numbers. I don’t think MIT’s reputation is suffering, but they have a far higher percentage of female faculty than other universities – because they think it’ simportant, and they are less sexist.

Your statements are just hilaroius. I was a physics student as an undergraduate. There was an 8 floor building. IN that building, there was a men’s room on every floor. There were a total of two women’s restrooms.

You need to seriously get a reality check. I’ve been lucky to never meet any man hating women, or really any women-hating men – but I think you have a very skewed view of reality. Good luck, because you are going to need it.