Dennis, your comments can be condensed as follows:
1. [your view] I am not doing inferential statistics in the IWF
Report, so I shouldn't have signed on as a statistician.
Comment: An absurdly provincial view. Statisticians need not do
"inferential" statistics to analyze data and their substantive
implications in important ways.
2.[your view] I looked at only Biology, but surely MIT must be
interested in the entire university.
Comment: You didn't read our report carefully. We could,
easily, have analyzed the handful of women scientists outside
the Biology department. However, Biology was the only department
with suitable comparison groups, Biology was the home of
Nancy Hopkins, the chief complainant. Biology includes about
half the women scientists at MIT, and is an area of science
where, unlike math and physics, women are found in substantial
numbers and already competing well. Many would argue that,
by restricting ourselves to Biology, we did the men at
MIT a disservice. Many would have argued, had we gone
outside Biology, that we were being patently unfair.
3. [your view] Citation counts are worthless as an indicator of
productivity, so I should be ashamed of having used them without
issuing many BOLDFACE caveats.
Comment: Besides reflecting a very powerful bias on your part,
this reflects the kind of awesome double standard that is found all
too frequently in discussions of politically sensitive topics. You
appear to be holding us to standards that (a) reflect huge personal
prejudices and (b) are much more stringent than you hold the
MIT report writers to.
Feminists have been using relatively modest differences in "impact
indices" to make broad and unwarranted assumptions about scholarly
behavior of men and women. They do this because men publish more than
women, and citation counts help them present themselves in a better
light.
I have never heard ANYONE ever object to the notion
of using citation counts, much less point out the methodological
design shortcomings in these studies. In other words, citation
counts are fine when they are leading to politically correct
conclusions.
Every sensible person recognizes the limitations of citation counts.
We do. They are still used very frequently as impact indicators. You
seem particularly emotionally tied up in this issue. I'm not sure why.
But your dramatic assertions that citation counts are worthless or
nearly worthless are simply not accepted in the community at large.
I guarantee you, at "merit increment time," the fact that one
professor has 10 times the citation count as another will be used,
and indeed, if the higher-cited professor is denied a salary
increment, he/she can often win, simply on the basis of the
citation count.
Keep a couple of things in mind. With respect to the senior faculty,
(a) There is a nearly FIVEFOLD difference across two groups of 5 and 6
scientists.
(b) Our selection procedure was to take the group of senior
women, and then select only the senior men who got degrees
in the same time span ('70-'76) as the senior women. This
procedure excluded two Nobel Prize winners who got their
degrees within 2 and 3 years of Nancy Hopkins. There are two
biologists at MIT who got their degrees within 3 years of Hopkins who
are Nobel Prize winners. [Would you like to know their citation
counts?] Do you think they should be paid more than Hopkins?
Conclusion:
Dennis, I recognize that you have a powerful bias against
citation counts. I also recognize that, in some cases, they
can mislead. However, the IWF report's assertion about the relative
performance of senior men and women at MIT is not misleading.
As we speak, a third (male) member of the department is queueing up
for a Nobel Prize. He has a very high citation count.
The best interpretation of the facts are that
(a) the senior women in MIT Biology are outstanding
scientists who want to be pampered.
To quote the MIT report itself
[page 11] "one would have assumed that all tenured
women would be treated exceptionally well -- pampered,
overpaid, indulged."
[aside: Dennis, does that sound slightly like sexism to you?
What do you think about a report that claims to be "data
driven," presents NO data (not even summary data that
easily could have been presented without compromising
privacy), and includes a number of statements like that?]
(b) However, the truth is that the senior male Biologists
at MIT include a substantial number of completely awesome,
superstar high producing, Nobel Prize winning [or close
to it] scientists. They probably feel like perhaps they should be
pampered a bit too, since they outproduce the women by
a huge margin.
In such situations, egos get bruised.
And, in the modern academy, where so much is hopelessly
confused, such bruising might be confused with "gender
discrimination."
Since we don't know how resources were allocated at MIT,
we of course do not know whether discrimination occurred.
However, for MIT to imply that the thought of possible
performance differences is "the last refuge of the bigot"
is a much bigger stretch than anything in the IWF report.
I'd suggest you take a serious look at (a) The original MIT
report, (b) Kleinfeld's analysis, (c) the IWF report, and
then re-evaluate your own very obvious double standard.
All the best,
Jim Steiger
---------------------
James H. Steiger, Professor
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4
-----------------------
On 14 Feb 2001 14:30:02 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (dennis roberts) wrote:
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
