*500-750 words*

 

Read the following 2 articles and develop an analytical essay that does the following –  (a) Identify how successful the research study was at using an intersectional approach and (b) how would you revise the study protocol or findings to be more intersectional?

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 1/8

S C I E N C E

XY Bias: How Male Biology Students
See Their Female Peers

MARCELO DEL POZO / FLICKR

Over the last three years, Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan have
asked over 1,700 biology undergraduates at the University of
Washington to name classmates whom they thought were “strong
in their understanding of classroom material.” The results were
worrying but predictable. The male students underestimated their
female peers, over-nominating other men over better-performing
women.

In three large classes, men overrated the abilities of male
students above equally talented and outspoken women.
E D YO N G FEB 16, 2016

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=YbpdhAwAAAAJ&hl=en

https://depts.washington.edu/anthweb/users/grunny

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148405

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 2/8

Put it this way: To the men in these classes, a woman would need
to get an A to get the same prestige as a man getting a B.

“A lot of people make the assumption that issues of gender in
biology are gone because so many women enroll,” says Eddy. “But
we know there are strong unconscious biases equating science to
males. They’re just there in the air.”

Her study is the latest to show the challenges faced by women in
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In the U.S.,
women earn around half the doctorates in these fields, but so
many drop out at every step of the career ladder, that men always
dominate the top echelons. As Helen Shen writes in Nature,
women comprise “only 21 percent of full science professors and 5
percent of full engineering professors” and “on average, they earn
just 82 percent of what male scientists make in the United States—
even less in Europe.”

The causes of this attrition are manifold, but sexual
discrimination is an indisputable part of it. Women in STEM
repeatedly report experiencing sexual harassment, being
mistaken for administrative staff, being forced to prove
themselves to a degree that their male colleagues are not, being
told to behave in more aggressive, outspoken masculine ways
while simultaneously facing backlash for doing so.

And several careful experiments have shown that faculty
members—both men and women—are more likely to spend their
time mentoring men, to respond to emails from men, to call on
men in classes, to rate (fictional) male applicants as more

http://www.nature.com/news/inequality-quantified-mind-the-gender-gap-1.12550

https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-stem

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0022-4537.00200/abstract;jsessionid=0F11932D4FD00B337D8726A844BED936.f01t03

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/safe13-field-site-chilly-climate-and-abuse/

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

http://www.lifescied.org/content/13/3/478

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 3/8

competent and hirable than identical female ones, and to hire a
man for a job that requires math.

These biases, sometimes manifesting outrightly and sometimes
insidiously, collectively create an environment where women feel
like they don’t belong, like they aren’t valued, like the odds are set
against them. Confidence falls, perseverance wanes, and careers
die by a thousand cuts.

It begins early. Eddy has been studying the University of
Washington’s undergraduate biology course for a few years to try
and understand how biases play out among the students
themselves. She teamed up with Daniel Grunspan, an
anthropologist who’s interested in how information travels within
groups. They surveyed three large classes of 196, 759, and 760
students respectively, asking them to nominate particularly strong
peers at various points through the academic year. They found
that men consistently received more nominations than women,
and this bias only got worse as the year went on. The question is:
Why?

Performance? Men got better grades than women in the three
classes but the difference was only statistically significant in one;
even then, the scores differed by no more than 0.2 of a grade-point
average. Participation? The class instructors deemed more men
than women to be “outspoken,” and Eddy’s previous work
certainly showed that women comprise 60 percent of the
students, but just 40 percent of the voices heard in class.

But even after adjusting for both these factors, the team found
that male students still disproportionately nominated other men,

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.full

http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/30/1/47

http://www.lifescied.org/content/14/4/ar45.full

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25185231

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 4/8

giving them a boost equivalent to a GPA increase of 0.77. By
contrast, the female students showed no such biases, giving other
women a paltry boost of just 0.04 GPA points. As the team wrote,
“On this scale, the male nominators’ gender bias is 19 times the
size of the female nominators’.”

The team also found that the ‘celebrities’—the three students in
each class with the most nominations—were all men. Sure, they
had good grades and spoke up frequently, but they all had female
peers who were equally outspoken, with grades just as high. As
Grunspan and Eddy wrote, “It appears that being male is a
prerequisite for students to achieve celebrity status within these
classrooms.”

“They have the right of it,” says Kate Clancy from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Their paper is consistent with
the ways in which implicit bias influences who we tend to see as a
scientist—if we culturally associate maleness with scientific
abilities, it makes sense that we’d overvalue men’s contributions in
the science classroom.”

“It’s also pretty consistent with the natural experiment I’ve been
in for the past 10 years as a female scientist married to a male
scientist,” she adds. “The junior female faculty that I’ve started
mentoring in recent years report the same thing: They have to beg
and plead and buy coffee for colleagues a million times before
anyone associates their expertise with their name.”

Eddy expects that even stronger biases lurk in other STEM fields.
After all, there are even stronger negative stereotypes about
female ability in physics, maths, and engineering. And in these

http://www.anthro.illinois.edu/people/kclancy

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 5/8

subjects, women are typically outnumbered in classes. They must
contend not only with the same biases that biology student face,
but also with stereotype threat—a well-documented phenomenon
where the anxiety of fulfilling a negative stereotype hampers the
performances of people from minority groups.

But Eddy takes it as a hopeful sign that the women in the study
didn’t show biases towards their female peers, especially since
other researchers have found that gender biases exist among
female faculty members. “It’s hopeful,” she says. “Maybe things
are changing culturally, helping women to overcome those
historical biases.”

She has also tested some psychological tricks that have helped
students to cope with stereotype threat in past trials, including
simple writing exercises designed to combat stereotype threat by
affirming a student’s values. Other “band-aid solutions” might
help too, including doing more work in small groups where
women feel more comfortable participating, or having more
female role models up front. The instructors in the classes that
Eddy studied were almost all men, and it’s perhaps no coincidence
that the one with the lone female instructor also had the smallest
gender biases.

We want to hear what you think. Submit a letter to the editor or write
to letters@theatlantic.com.

http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychologists-steel-minority-students-against-fear-failure/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/25/15-minute-writing-exercise-closes-the-gender-gap-in-university-level-physics/

https://www.theatlantic.com/contact/letters/

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 6/8

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 7/8

7/24/2018 XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/male-biology-students-underestimate-their-female-peers/462924/ 8/8

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume 1/10

GENDER

Research: How Subtle
Class Cues Can Backfire on
Your Resume
by Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik

DECEMBER 21, 2016  UPDATED APRIL 04, 2017

https://hbr.org/topic/gender

https://hbr.org/search?term=lauren+rivera

https://hbr.org/search?term=andr%C3%A1s+tilcsik

https://hbr.org/

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume 2/10

Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of

coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. The stakes are

high: getting one of these rare internships virtually guarantees full-time

employment after law school. The salaries are unbeatable, six-figure sums that

catapult young students to the top 5% of household incomes nationally and are

often quadruple of those offered in other sectors of legal practice. These jobs

also open doors to even more lucrative employment in the private sector as well

as prestigious judiciary and government roles. For these reasons, employment

in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1%.

Now imagine four applicants, all of whom attend the same, selective second-

tier law school. They all have phenomenal grade point averages, are on law

review, and have identical, highly relevant work experiences. The only

differences are whether they are male or female and if their extracurricular

activities suggest they come from a higher-class or lower-class background.

Who gets invited to interview?

We set out to answer this question in a series of studies reported in the

December 2016 issue of American Sociological Review.  Based on prior

research showing that hiring in top professional services firms is highly skewed

toward applicants from wealthy families, we expected that an applicant’s social

class background would play a decisive role in determining interview

invitations. And indeed, we found that, in contrast to our national lore that it is

individual effort and ability—not family lineage—that matters for getting good

jobs, elite employers discriminate strongly based on social class, favoring

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/81/6/1097

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10457.html

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume 3/10

applicants from higher-class backgrounds. But our research uncovered a

surprising — and disturbing — twist: coming from an advantaged social

background helps only men.

We uncovered this through a field experiment with the country’s largest law

firms. Specifically, we used a technique — known as the resume audit method —

that is widely seen as the gold standard for measuring employment

discrimination. This method involves randomly assigning different items to the

resumes and sending applications to real employers to see how they affect the

probability of being called back for a job interview. All in all, we sent fictitious

resumes to 316 offices of 147 top law firms in 14 cities, from candidates who

were supposedly trying to land a summer internship position. All applicants

were in the top 1% of their class and were on law review, but came from

second-tier law schools. This was important because graduates from the most

elite law schools (e.g., Harvard and Yale) are typically recruited on-campus. But

law school students from second-tier schools must compete for coveted

internship positions by sending in their resumes directly to firms in hopes of

attracting employers’ attention by virtue of their C.V.s.

We signaled gender by varying the applicant’s first name (James or Julia).

Directly indicating a parent’s occupation or income on a resume might be

strange for an employer to see, so we signaled social class position via accepted

and often required portions of resumes: awards and extracurricular activities.

Reflecting the fact that social class is a complex characteristic that cannot be

boiled down to income, education, or lifestyle alone, we used a constellation of

resume items to signal social class.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pager/files/annals_pager

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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For example, to capture the economic

component of class, our lower-class

applicants received an award for

student-athletes on financial aid. To

incorporate its educational competent,

they listed being a peer tutor for fellow

first-generation college students. By

contrast, our higher class candidate

pursued traditionally upper-class

hobbies and sports, such sailing, polo,

and classical music, while the lower-

class candidate participated in activities

with lower financial barriers to entry

(e.g., pick-up soccer, track and field

team) and those distinctly rejected by

higher-class individuals (e.g., country

music). But crucially, all educational,

academic, and work-related

achievements were identical between

our four fictitious candidates.

Even though all educational and work-related histories were the same,

employers overwhelmingly favored the higher-class man. He had a callback rate

more than four times of other applicants and received more invitations to

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume 5/10

interview than all other applicants in our study combined. But most strikingly,

he did significantly better than the higher-class woman, whose resume was

identical to his, other than the first name.

Why did the higher-class man do so much better than the higher-class woman?

To further explore this issue, we conducted a follow-up experiment with a

sample of 210 practicing attorneys from around the country. We asked each

attorney to evaluate one of the same resumes we used in our field experiment

and to tell us whether they would like to bring the candidate in for an interview.

We also asked them to rate their candidate on factors proven to influence how

favorably people view job candidates but that vary between men and women.

These included perceptions of the candidate’s competence, likability, fit with an

organization’s culture and clientele, and career commitment.

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/75/6/894.abstract

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume 6/10

Just like the employers in our audit study, the attorneys we surveyed favored

interviewing the higher-class man above all applicants, including the higher-

class woman. This time, though, we were able to understand why. Attorneys

viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as being better fits with the

culture and clientele of large law firms; lower-class candidates were seen as

misfits and rejected. In fact, some attorneys even steered the lower-class

candidates to less prestigious and lucrative sectors of legal practice, such as

government and nonprofit roles, positions that tend to be more

socioeconomically diverse than jobs at top law firms.

But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-

class men, attorneys declined to interview these women because they believed

they were the least committed of any group (including lower-class women) to

working a demanding job. Our survey participants, as well as an additional 20

attorneys we interviewed, described higher-class women as “flight risks,” who

might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might

even leave paid employment entirely. Attorneys cited “family” as a primary

reason these women would leave. Parenting strategies vary between social

classes, and the intensive style of mothering that is more popular among the

affluent was seen as conflicting with the “all or nothing” nature of work as a Big

Law associate. One female attorney we interviewed described this negative

view of higher-class women, which she observed while working on her firm’s

hiring committee. The perception, she said, was that higher-class women do

not need a job because they “have enough money,” are “married to somebody

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3534372.html

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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RELATED VIDEO

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Why So Few “Diversity Candidates”
Are Hired

Finalist pools can reinforce the status quo.

rich,” or are “going to end up being a helicopter mom.” This commitment

penalty that higher-class women faced negated any advantages they received

on account of their social class.

Our findings confirm that, despite our national myth that anyone can make it if

they work hard enough, the social class people grow up in greatly shapes the

types of jobs (and salaries) they can attain, regardless of the achievements

listed on their resumes. More broadly, our results illustrate a phenomenon that

social scientists call “intersectionality” — a fancy way of saying that, when it

comes to understanding sources of advantage and disadvantage, the whole is

greater than the sum of its parts. Crucially, we have found that privilege works

differently for men and women in the labor market. While coming from a

higher-class background helps men, it can actually hurt women.

Together, biases related to social class

and gender skew employment

opportunities toward men from

privileged backgrounds. Our research

adds another twist to just how difficult

it is for certain groups to get ahead,

even when they achieve an advanced

degree.

There are some potential solutions for

law firms, however. While biases

themselves are difficult to change and

 PLAY 2:18

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merely making people aware of them

via training has little payoff, there are quick and cost-effective ways to make the

playing field more even in resume screening. When it comes to social class, the

answer is simple: ditch the extracurricular activities. We were able to conduct

our study only because employers and career services offices encourage (if not

require) students to lists hobbies and activities on resumes. Without this

information, we would not have been able to indicate social class background

effectively. While social class still manifests in other types of resume cues

(especially attendance at a top-tier undergraduate institution or law school),

blinding evaluators to extracurricular activities or having students omit them

from resumes entirely could eliminate those class signals that are least

performance-related.

As for gender, blinding evaluators to first names (or substituting with initials)

could help keep more women in the pool. In fact, one reason why women seem

to do better when they come from the most elite schools may be that employers

have limited ability to screen resumes and do not have the chance to engage in

the types of resume-based class and gender discrimination we found in our

study. Eliminating signals about class and gender as resumes are screened could

open the door more widely for talented individuals with varied backgrounds,

while creating a more diverse workforce of qualified talent.

https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

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Lauren Rivera is an Associate Professor of Management & Organizations
at Kellogg School of Management and the author of Pedigree: How Elite

Students Get Elite Jobs.

András Tilcsik is a professor at the Rotman School of Management, a fellow of

the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship, and coauthor of

Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It.

Related Topics: HIRING

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36 COMMENTS

Eric Johnson  a year ago

https://hbr.org/search?term=lauren+rivera

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx

Rethink Risk

https://hbr.org/topic/hiring

https://hbr.org/topic/gender

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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REPLY 1  0 

How confident are we that this effect is real? The overall offer rate for the total sample was

14/158 for men and 8/158 for women, this is not statistically significant by the standard

benchmark (in this case, p=0.18). And, analyzing a sample by subgroups if you can not find an

effect in the overall sample is like textbook p-hacking.

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