Here is an interesting stats problem from this week's Boston Globe.
In 1999, an internal MIT report concluded that women faculty at MIT had
received lower pay and fewer resources then their male colleagues. This
week, the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) released a statistical
analysis showing that MIT "may have reacted to political correctness
before checking all the evidence." This report supposedly documents,
"compelling differences in productivity, influence and grant funding
between the more senior males and females." The report argues that the
gender difference in MIT salary and lab space was justified because "few
would question the fairness of rewarding those who publish more widely,
are more frequently cited, or raise the most in grant funds (p. 8, IWF
report)"
The Independent Womens Forum 13-p report is available at:
http://www.iwf.org/news/mitfinal.pdf
With the headlines "Fuzzy math on women" and "MIT bias claims
debunked," the Boston Globe reported the IWF's major conclusion, that
women professors probably deserved their lower pay and smaller labs
because of their lower productivity:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/039/metro/MIT_bias_claims_debunked+.sh
tml
An Globe op-ed piece by Cathy Young on 2/7/01 states, "Monday, the
Women's Forum followed up with another report that demonstrates that the
senior women in MIT's biology department, however distinguished in their
field, did not quite measure up to their male colleagues in the number
of publications, frequency of citation, or outside grants." <Young's
2/7 op-ed piece can be obtained from the Globe archive for $2.95. -
don't bother IMHO>
I had just presented an example of sex discrimination to my graduate
stats class (Chapter 2 in Ramsey & Schafer's Statistical Sleuth), and I
told the class that the IWF had probably done a multiple regression
analysis showing that gender wasn't a significant term in a regression
of salary after publication number or citation frequency had been added
as an explanatory variable. When I downloaded the IWF report, I was
quite frankly amazed that a statistician had attached his name to it.
Admittedly, the IWF was hamstrung by being unable to get any of the
relevant data from MIT, but that didn't prevent the IWF from reaching
the conclusion that the productivity of women faculty was less than men.
I typed the publication and citation data from p. 11-12 of the report as
an SPSS file and exported it as an excel file. Both are available in a
zipped file on my web site:
http://www.es.umb.edu/edg/ECOS611/MIT-IWF.zip
As a class exercise, you could have your stats classes use
non-parametric tests (or parametric) to test whether there really is a
significant difference between male and female faculty in the biology
department at MIT in publication number or citation frequency (the grant
data isn't provided). Note, that the authors of the IWF study divided
the biology faculty into older and younger groups and did separate
analyses on each group. The Rush-Limbaugh dittoheads in your class, who
want to find striking gender differences in productivity, will be
profoundly disappointed with these IWF data (not one null hypothesis can
be rejected at alpha=0.05 using a Mann-Whitney U test).
--
Eugene D. Gallagher
ECOS, UMASS/Boston
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