Radford:
Thanks, I agree. The data we examine do not include
salaries, and we will never be allowed to
see such data. But, of course, Dr. Gallagher's
randomization test would almost certainly find
"no significant difference" in salaries or lab space between
the senior men and women, thereby, apparently,
[if his rationale is appropriate] releasing us from
any concerns about discrimination.
One (unfortunate) outcome of the MIT report is
to render the connection between claims of discrimination
and documentable evidence even more
tenuous than it was before. Indeed, "discrimination"
itself is now declared to be "unconscious,"
"unintentional," "systemic," but nonetheless
in need of drastic remedies. We can all feel
virtuous, while shifting resources on the
basis of gender.
The MIT report asserted, while presenting
no relevant data at all, that discrimination existed.
The investigating committee was chaired by the chief
complainant. She complained about her
marginalization and lack of power in her
department.
It turns out that, in the IWF
comparison group, several men had
citation counts an order of
magnitude greater than hers. Our
comparison group only included
male faculty who got their Ph.D.s
in the same time frame as the female
senior biologists. As a result, it
excluded two Nobel Prize winners
who got their Ph.D.s in 1968 and
1969, actually within a few years
of the chief complainant. These
Nobel Prize winners had publication
and citation counts that are similar
to the top male producers in our
senior comparison group.
The original MIT Report included the following
statement.
[page 11] "one would have assumed that all tenured
women would be treated exceptionally well -- pampered,
overpaid, indulged."
This tells you, in a nutshell, the mindset that
the female complainants brought to the Dean of Science.
When these complainants came calling,
the Dean of Science had a luxury. With only 20-25 women
in his faculty, he could afford to shift substantial
resources in their direction to quell a political disturbance,
without impacting substantially on resources available to others.
And, the advantages his actions brought him are well documented.
Indeed, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Vest and Birgeneau
justified their actions by pointing, in their concluding paragraph,
to the positive political consequences! What they did must be
right, because it has resulted in positive political fallout
for them and MIT.
Now, it turns out, that these women, who so desired
to be pampered and indulged, simply because they
are tenured women [and in short supply] had male
cohorts who were Nobel Prize winners, and several
other colleagues who outperformed them
on objective performance measures by amounts
that any rational person would consider noteworthy.
Yet, MIT insisted in the report that to try to attribute
the "discrimination" [which they provided no evidence of]
to performance differences would be "the last refuge
of the bigot."
I am not alone in noticing the grossly inappropriate
nature of this language, and the very clear biases it
represents.
The fact is, nobody [with the possible exception of
committee members, most of whom were not disinterested
parties] knows the facts about MIT.
It is definitely possible that some people were discriminated
against there. Indeed, it is quite possible that some
men, by recent initiatives, have been discriminated
against. However, the data seem to indicate that senior
female biologists at MIT have not been as productive as
their male cohort, and this raises the possibility
[it does not prove] that some differences in power,
status, and benefits are the result of this difference
in productivity.
Our primary contention is that any claims of "discrimination"
on the basis of unequal outcomes must be examined *including*
performance data. Academic performance assessment is
difficult, but it is done [imperfectly] all the time.
Relevant data have been, amazingly, almost
completely absent from such "equity" assessments.
All the best,
Jim Steiger
----------------
James H. Steiger, Professor
Dept. of Psychology
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4
---------------
On 15 Feb 2001 19:06:35 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal)
wrote:
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>Jerry Dallal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> We often have a group of individuals who are judged comparable in
>> responsibilities and performance. In such cases, it *may* be
>> appropriate to use permutation methods. The rationale would be:
>> There is some variation in salary due to situation-specific
>> "whatever", so we don't expect everyone to be making exactly the
>> same money. One way to attempt to detect discrimination against a
>> particular group is to ask whether their salaries are consistent
>> with what one would expect assigning salaries at random without
>> regard to group membership.
>
>That would test whether one had evidence that salaries were related in
>some way to group membership. It would NOT test whether any such
>relationship is due to "discrimination". It would do so only under
>the assumption that there were no relevant differences between groups
>other than salary. That is of course exactly what the report under
>discussion is disputing. In disputing this, it is necessary only to
>show that the actual people in the groups differ, not to make
>inferences to a larger population (in the report, however, it seems
>that only selected subgroups were actually looked at, so there is some
>inference to the whole group implicitly being made). This is in
>contrast to trying to show discrimination, where even after
>eliminating any possible legitimate reasons for a difference, one
>WOULD need to consider statistical significance, since otherwise, one
>could mistake a totally capricious salary scheme for a discriminatory
>one.
>
>To add another example to the discussion, suppose that there were a
>statistically significant difference in salaries between men and
>women. But suppose that it also turned out that all the men were
>educated in Britain, whereas all the women were educated in China.
>Would anyone take this as evidence of GENDER discrimination? I don't
>think so. It makes no difference whether such a relationship between
>gender and country of education is or is not statistically significant,
>it undermines the conclusion of gender discrimination regardless.
>
>The discussion here seems rather strange to me. Surely the burden of
>proof ought to be on those who claim that discrimination exists, since
>given the small numbers involved, the defence might be hard put to
>definitively refute a claim of discrimination even if it's completely
>unfounded. If the large differences in publication citations,
>etc. seen aren't statistically significant, it seems quite unlikely
>that the differences in salaries are statistically significant. It
>seems even less likely that a model that accounted for possible
>dependence of salary on performance would find a significant gender
>effect. Moreover, data on salaries was apparently not available to
>the authors of any of the studies under discussion, so nobody is in a
>position to even try to demonstrate that discrimination exists.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Radford M. Neal [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>University of Toronto http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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