The University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science repudiated a tweet by one of its emeritus faculty members who claimed that “half of the female STEM faculty in the U.S. were hired over more qualified men.”
The Jan. 1 tweet came from Pedro Domingos, who joined the UW faculty in 1999 and is the author of The Master Algorithm, recommended reading by Bill Gates and also bookshelf background in Chinese president Xi Jinping’s 2018 annual address. He has almost 50,000 Twitter followers.
Domingos was similarly denounced by the UW last winter for comments he made online in a debate about AI ethics.
His latest tweet was also condemned by the editor of Science magazine Holden Thorp; university researchers nationwide; and by industry professionals, including Jeff Dean, Google’s senior vice president for research and health and Allen School alumnus.
“Former faculty member Pedro Domingos unfortunately used the holiday weekend to yet again tweet meritless, sexist, inflammatory, attention-seeking commentary that reflects poorly on him and everyone associated with him. We, once again, repudiate his views,” said the Allen School in a statement Monday.
Domingos joined the UW in 1999 and gained the “emeritus” title after retiring in 2020. We’ve reached out to Domingos for additional comment.
A scroll through Twitter found little to no public support for Domingos’ tweets by other researchers. Those weighing against his views included Muhammad Zaman, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University; Hope Jahren, professor of geobiology at the University of Oslo and author of Lab Girl; Ramya Kumar, who is joining the Colorado School of Mines as an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering this spring; Chris Combs, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at University of Texas at San Antonio; and Aarit Ahuja, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Brown University.
“The first time you’re targeted by a Twitter mob, you’re shocked,” Domingos tweeted. “The second you just shrug.”
Jennifer Golbeck, a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, criticized Domingo in a series of tweets and said he lacks data to support his view.
“In terms of data to back his claim up, there really isn’t any,” Goldbeck told GeekWire. “None of the evidence Pedro presents supports his point and, in fact, most of it contradicts him.”
Domingos linked to a 2010 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine examining faculty hiring in several STEM fields. That report showed that the percentage of women who received the first job offer exceeded the percentage in the candidate pool.
But the report also noted the possibility that better-qualified women may have applied to academic jobs, and that fewer women Ph.D. graduates than men entered the academic job market, highlighting the “leaky pipeline” in which women abandon academic careers at higher rates.
Golbeck noted that Domingos did not provide evidence for another statement: “Affirmative action means women get hired over men even when they’re less qualified.”
Said Golbeck: “There is no affirmative action or quotas at my university or any other I know of (and I know a lot). He of course provides no source for his claim,” she said.
Ed Lazowska, longtime UW computer science professor and former chair of the computer science department, also rejected Domingos’ claim, noting that the UW is bound by a state anti-affirmative action initiative. “The women we admit to our degree programs, and women we hire to our faculty, are every bit as qualified as the men,” he said. “It’s the law.”
Lazowska added: “Diversity is essential to the quality of any organization and the quality of its output — diversity of backgrounds, of experiences, of strengths, of perspectives.”
Domingos’ tweets this week brought renewed attention to the gender gap in STEM careers and barriers women face.
A report by the National Academies in 2018 documented pervasive “gender harassment” of women, involving demeaning behavior and implications that they do not belong in science. “Sexist hostility,” such as comments that women were not smart enough to succeed as scientists, were reported by 25% of female engineering students and half of female medical students in one university system.
While women have seen gains in education and employment in most STEM fields over the last few decades, the proportion of computer science bachelor degrees awarded to women declined after 2000. That’s only begun to rise in the last few years. Nineteen percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science were awarded to women in the U.S. 2017-2018, and 23% of doctorates, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
Lazowska pointed to a range of efforts by the Allen School to be welcoming to women and increase student and faculty diversity.
The Allen School, for instance, belongs to the Building Recruiting and Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) Program, an initiative to increase the diversity of undergraduate computing programs. That initiative is led by Harvey Mudd College, once a heavily male-dominated undergraduate tech school. Half of its graduates are now women.
The initiative aims to increase diversity using measures such as outreach programs to high schools and building community among under-represented students.
The Allen School now awards 29% of its computer science and bachelor’s and doctorate degrees to women, higher than national averages. In the past six years, the Allen School has grown by 28 faculty members, half of whom have been women.
The school won an award in 2015 from the National Center for Women & Information Technology for supporting women undergraduates.
“We do this through outreach, through recruiting, through creating a welcoming and inclusive environment, through a variety of programs that make people feel that they belong,” said Lazowska. “So although Domingos is an outlier whose statements we categorically reject, these statements are tremendously damaging because they inevitably reflect on us, even though they do not represent the environment in the Allen School.”
Psychologists at Cornell University, referenced by Domingos, published a commentary and conducted studies
on faculty rankings of mock applicants to STEM faculty jobs. One of their studies suggested that women are favored over identically-qualified men, though some questioned the real-world relevance, and other research has come to different conclusions. Another Cornell study with the same methodology explored deeper, refuting the notion of under-qualified women gaining the upper hand in hiring. “Faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the more-qualified men over the slightly-less-qualified women, and they also preferred the stronger women over the slightly-less-qualified man,” concluded the researchers. “These data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males.”The barriers to women’s full participation in STEM are complex. In 2019, science leaders discussed ways to increase gender diversity in the STEM research workforce in a commentary in Science magazine. They pointed to studies showing that male postdocs receive higher salaries, and that male faculty members report larger salaries and startup packages. Systemic barriers to women’s advancement include unconscious bias, social and cultural factors such domestic labor burdens, and sexual and gender-based harassment, they concluded.
Views that women somehow have less ability for STEM careers are still not uncommon. Google in 2017 fired an engineer for attributing gender disparities in tech largely to biology, in an internal memo. Several other employees agreed with him, according to a report.
Stuart Reges, a principal lecturer at the Allen School, in 2018 wrote a controversial essay with a mix of messages about gender disparity in computer science, saying that “women can code, but they often don’t want to” because of cultural reasons.
According to the Science commentary, many institutions have instituted policies to improve mentorship and support faculty diversity, for instance adding an extra year on the tenure clock for new parents.
More work remains to make STEM a welcoming and fair place for women, said the authors. Among other measures, they suggested that institutions track metrics for quality of mentorship, as well as institutional service, a burden often born disproportionately by women.
Golbeck said that as a woman in computer science, she has “put up with this kind of criticism my entire academic career.”“It’s profoundly damaging to work so hard and then be told over and over that you have not earned your achievements and to know that many people think you don’t deserve to be there,” she said. “It has been a constant battle for me and, frankly, most women I know in computing. Impostor syndrome is not just a personal thing but the result of this kind of behavior from men in the field.”
from GeekWire https://www.geekwire.com/2022/uw-computer-science-department-denounces-retired-professors-tweet-on-women-hires/
