Business

Letter: Women in STEM: Show this to employers, will you?

     
September 2, 2014

From:

In reference to your article about Luigi Zingales’s research (“Why women find it harder to get math-based jobs,” Summer 2014), it’s nice to see research to back up what people know; but this has an air of “dog bites man” to it. There’s nothing new about the very real level of workplace discrimination against women. We can encourage women to take all the math, science, and quantitative-finance classes in the world, but if employers think that there’s just no way that a woman can be as good as a man at math, then it’s all doomed.

Between discrimination in the hiring process and bad management in the workplace, women are leaving quantitative fields while managers complain about a shortage of people with these skills. It’s a terrible market imperfection. Why should anyone go into STEM-related fields if they won’t be valued? Zingales and his coresearchers aren’t breaking any new ground here, unless their work is able to convince employers that maybe women aren’t playing victims when they bring up discrimination.

Ann C. Logue, ’91
Chicago

Zingales responds: 

I appreciate Ms. Logue's frustration. Sometimes to prove even the most obvious facts beyond a reasonable doubt, we need to resort to a fairly abstract environment. This is what our paper does. Nevertheless our research has one very important implication for business practices: we should require managers to undertake the Implicit Association Test, designed to detect hidden biases. Our paper shows that the result of this test is correlated with the actual degree of discrimination. This requirement will make workplace biases transparent and, ultimately, help reduce discrimination. 

Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

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