I think there needs to be a solution to the racism shown by the research done here.
Note: I know that the article have “what we can do” section, but it does not propose any applicable solution.
We also found that, unlike similar US studies, there was no significant bias against female students. In fact, there was some evidence of positive bias, or preference, for female students.
And then, in the caption:
Our study found academics did not discriminate against potential candidates based on gender.
Some mild irony there
But in seriousness, really good to see this quantified, but sadly not a huge surprise
They also do not descriminate against evidence based on reliability.
We initially planned to give academics a week to respond, but after IT at one university noticed several staff had received emails with identical text, we ended the experiment after 24 hours.
My thought was this would get flagged and might affect the results as soon as I saw they were using identical text. Their intentions might have been different from most fake emails, but we’ve got systems meant to catch cases like this, so there could be a bias introduced by the order in which the emails arrived, as every subsequent one was more likely to be flagged.
While some were curious or supportive, the majority were complaints. These were primarily about our use of deception (a well-researched and supported method of studying bias).
Just because it’s well-researched and supported doesn’t mean anyone’s going to feel any better about being deceived, especially those that did take time and care in responding, maybe even juggling things around in their schedule to fit in a meeting, only to realize it was a lie. A potential result from this study is more non-responses in general to students seeking meetings with academics.
Not a bad idea for the study overall, but not great execution.
I also wonder if there’s something sinister behind the slight positive bias towards women instead of it being entirely academic.
Megan MacKenzie, the more junior author (at the time a senior lecturer), received calls threatening her with consequences for her career.
Why only mention the more junior author? Did the senior authors not get targeted? Did they receive different threats? There’s definitely an implication here and I’d rather not assume… :/
And how “funny” - when “outed” (and were they?) for being biased, the reaction was to be an absolute turd? Ugh.
