Gender dynamics in committees

Thanks to Marie Kerjean on mastodon, I got aware of a conference on gender and science at Collège de France. If you understand French, there is plenty of interesting talks to watch on various fields of research, see here.

In this blog post, I’d like to highlight a tiny part of the talk by Esther Duflo (a prominent French economist working at MIT). In general, the talk is about all the mechanisms that explain why there are so few women in many fields of research, with a focus on economics. For several such mechanisms I was not very surprised, having heard about the topic before (although it is still nice to see it discussed with solid references). But there was one phenomenon did not know about, and it’s about bias in committees deciding about academics’ careers (e.g. tenure committees).

It is well known that men tend to be biased against woman in many settings (and also women can be biased against women, but less). This is one of the reasons why it is now common to have rules enforcing that every committee should have some quota of women. Surprisingly, it has been established that men can be more biased against women when there is a woman in the committee. And this implies that the committee as a whole is more biased, because women’s less-biased opinions are not enough to oppose this trend. An explanation is that, when a woman is present, men tend to be less committed to gender equality, or that their male identity is strengthened.

I had never thought about it before, but in retrospect it feels familiar. I have only been in a few committees (namely, two committees for PhD awards), and I have not detected this phenomenon, but I did get the temptation of thinking “Since there is a person from research area X, I don’t need to be very careful about not being biased against X”. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that the same would apply to gender.

Of course this does not mean that we should remove woman quotas for committees. I guess the conclusion that there is one more bias mechanism to be aware of, when being in a committee.

If you look for a paper on this, the one I could find is Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter? published in American Economic Review (one of the top journals in economics). It uses data from associate and full professorships committees in Italy and Spain, and randomized external evaluation to assess the bias.