I haven’t been posting much, partly because I’ve been busy with job applications. Today will be a short one.
As I was writing a research proposal, I went back and reread this 2015 study Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines, by Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, and Freeland. The study investigates the phenomenon where different academic fields differ in gender disparity — e.g., women account for 30% of philosophers but 70% of psychologists. (In fact, there is a project at Concordia, Canada, on trying to understand exactly what sets philosophy and psychology apart. I very much look forward to their results!) In particular, Leslie and colleagues aim to test the hypothesis that “field-specific ability belief”, the belief that success in the given field requires specific natural talents that cannot be taught, is responsible for gender disparity. They test this hypothesis against both the null and two alternatives: one is that fields require long and inflexible work schedules are more hostile to women; the other is that highly selective fields are more hostile to women, motivated by beliefs in biological differences (the authors cite this article as a reason to be skeptical).
They compiled a questionnaire consisting of questions assessing field-specific ability beliefs and other information such as workload and selectivity. The questions used to measure field-specific ability beliefs are as follows (found in supplementary material, scored on 7-point Likert scales.)
- Being a top scholar of [discipline] requires a special aptitude that just can’t be taught.
- If you want to succeed in [discipline], hard work alone just won’t cut it; you need to have an innate gift or talent.
- With the right amount of effort and dedication, anyone can become a top scholar in [discipline]. (Reverse scored)
- When it comes to [discipline], the most important factors for success are motivation and sustained effort; raw ability is secondary. (Reverse scored)
Because people’s answers to these questions are highly internally correlated (alpha= 0.9), the scales are combined into one.
The authors found that field-specific ability beliefs significantly correlates with gender disparity across multiple models and even after controlling for a few potential confounders. The other two hypotheses did not reach significance.
They further showed that field-specific ability beliefs significantly correlates with African American representation but not Asian representation, with the thought being that African Americans, but not Asians, are stereotyped to lack talent.
Here’s their figure on gender disparity:
(A) STEM and (B) Social Science and Humanities.
Ok, here’s my question. Look at where philosophy is! It’s more talent-oriented than math and music!
My question is: do others get the same sense? I’m not questioning the study (they had n=58 for philosophers which isn’t bad and there’s little reason to suspect that people would lie). I actually have not had this sense at all. Sure, philosophy is more “thinking” than “reading” (which is what I associate with talent vs. hard work) when compared with, say, history and comparative literature, but I never got the sense that it requires more talent than statistics or linguistics. Very strange.
Also, I didn’t know music comp was that bad! And I remain convinced that, if talent is a thing (which it isn’t), education is 100% talent-based.
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