Then they state that this is all correlation, and we don't know about a dozen or two different variables such as whether the grant process self selects for more men to apply (and thus fail). No conclusion that men are disadvantaged may be drawn, they say.
Is this study worth building on? Why are people finding it interesting enough to vote it up to the front page?
What am I missing?
Research on this topic is rare, so when some is available people are very interested.
Is it ongoing though? It seems to me that this is exceedingly rare and discouraged, given the political climate of most academic institutions in the western world.
Everyone alive today has 50% female ancestors and 50% male ancestors. Regardless of your gender identity, your ancestry is equally balanced in terms of gender privilege.
Biasing for/against people today is just a new injustice, it doesn't retroactively fix the injustices of the past, and the individual being discriminated against wasn't alive or working during the time or place when people matching their demographic would have been advantaged.
But it does help compensate for the injustices of the present. Culture is inertial: hundreds of years of tradition doesn't go away overnight, even if we no longer approve of it.
Euronews reports that the 2023 WebSummit survey found “more than 50 per cent of the 500 female participants saying they had experienced sexism in the workplace”, whereas “just six per cent of the male participants disagreed there was gender equality and 14 per cent said they neither agreed nor disagreed”. (The WebSummit website is awful, but if you really want a direct source: [1] links to Google Drive.) I wonder how much that effect is in play in the comments here.
[0]: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/11/four-in-five-men-in...
[1]: https://websummit.com/blog/women-tech-workplace-gender-bias-...
So the MRAs telling me feminists want to go beyond equality and advantage women over men are right!? I have been constantly told that was just a straw-man argument.
Gender equality is a vastly more popular position than privileging one over another. Openly stating that your goal is create gender inequality is an easy ticket to make your movement unappealing.
In American academic circles in particular, "equality" is out and "equity" is in.
"From that point onwards, several measures were implemented to counter gender inequality in research funding. First, panelists in the TP got implicit bias training. At first, these trainings were given face to face, whereas nowadays all panelists watch a video that addresses implicit bias before they start with their evaluations. Second, the wording of the grant calls and instructions for panelists and reviewers changed. Van der Lee and Ellemers found that the majority of the wording was masculine, which led them to argue that the policy goal of NWO (achieving gender inequality) was not reflected by the instructions that those involved in the grant evaluation."
We want to have a just system for the living.
