Evidence Of Racial, Gender Biases Found In Faculty Mentoring

Parents Forum
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<p>Everything’s racist.</p>

<p>Hell, this post is sexist. </p>

<p>“Someone had mentioned something about certain groups that should be avoided. This many not sound too politically correct but Indians and Chinese people are two groups in particular, that at least in my experience will not hesitate to ask a tutor 100, 200 questions, send them 20 emails or call them at 2 am if they have to.”</p>

<p>If I’m paying a ton of money for a tutor, I bloody well hope he would answer all of my questions about the subject matter. I’m Indian-American and I have enough tact to not call my tutor at 2AM or when he’s busy with his own work. </p>

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<p>I can still remember being in Calc II tutoring and this Indian guy would ask like 7, 8 questions back to back, like non-stop- it was all about him, no regards for the other people in the group.</p>

<p>The tutor was starting to get really annoyed and I just wanted to say "Dude, shut the **** up but anyways, no tact, no limits, no common sense. I gave him some dirty looks, otherwise he would probably ask another 20 questions and not get a freaking clue.</p>

<p>Indians are raised with this weird culture where everybody is supposed to cater to them.</p>

<p>I work at a job on campus and Indians are the only ones that will ask some bizarre questions like “Can you fill out this form for me?” I usually say NO and think to myself, "Are you freaking serious? Do I look like your personal assistant? </p>

<p>When I worked at the Memorial Union help desk, most people would come and say “How do I get to this place?”. Indians would be like “I need help”, expecting me to basically drop everything I am doing to go help them.</p>

<p>If you want to make this racial, go ahead but has nothing to do with being Indian or Chinese or Brazilian, it is more about what I call “Third World culture”- cultures that do not value manners, individualism, independence, personal space, respect, etc</p>

<p>I can see how some professors would be jaded after dealing with people like this.</p>

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<p>I’m Indian and I’ve never even had a tutor before.</p>

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<p>“even there an impact may be due to stereotyping rather than racism.”</p>

<p>I don’t see the distinction. If you’re a person in power, like a professor, and you treat someone negatively because of the stereotypes you believe about members of that race, then your actions are racist.</p>

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<p>I really don’t like this study at all. I don’t think it proved what they wanted it to, as someone mentioned early on.</p>

<p>Two major issues:

  1. The email itself was very generic. No mention of the professor’s research, other than the meeting is “my first priority” when visiting the campus. A warning sign that a student is emailing a zillion other professors too. And the date was “today/next Monday” which if I saw that in a subject from someone I didn’t know (and they were sent from a .com email not a .edu email), I would laugh it off and not even click. I was shocked they got anything more than 25% in terms of responses, and often got more than 60% even for the “discriminated against” folks.</p>

<p>2) The name selection is outrageous. They used the opinion of 38 people, with a list of 90 names, and asked to identify the gender and race of the person solely based on their names. You can see that the “white” names are really WASP names - no Kowalski, no Martinelli, no McCoy, no Markov. They read “rich”. And the Hispanic and Indian names are extremely common, another concern. Finally, the Chinese names included both Dong and Wong as surnames, which can have negative meaning to some. I just don’t think they were scientific about the name choices.</p>

<p>Another issue is that citizenship was not mentioned, and there are significant issues for getting visas for international students depending on the university. Our department has to fill out paperwork and so on, our university does not help at all.</p>

<p>I also wonder why “mentoring” was mentioned. The email said the student was applying to multiple graduate schools, and wanted to meet me. A mentor is not someone who meets with an applicant prior to applying. A mentor works with either their own students or students already at their college, in this context.</p>

<p>I guess I don’t like that the conclusion is all that valid, mainly considering the spamming nature of the original email, and I am suspicious that they actually got such a high response rate. Maybe they should do a similarity search on the professors responses.</p>

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<p>Most stereotyping is about culture, not race. Some stereotypes are true. Race is correlated to culture, especially for immigrants. </p>

<p>If you treat someone negatively, <strong>or positively</strong> based on beliefs about race not culture, that could be racist.</p>

<p>If a student comes from Utah, attended a good school, has a decent GPA, and has university educated parents, it would be fairly reasonable stereotyping to expect him or her to be relatively sober and be capable of further study. If you then found out that student was black, and this made you change your mind, that would be racist.</p>

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<p>I share @Youdon’tsay’s frustration. People are willing to see - or not see - whatever they want. Yes, the research study is flawed - as are ALL scientific studies, natural, physical, and social sciences alike. The whole point of science is to build upon past studies and improve. And there’s a vast body of literature in several different social sciences showing bias against black, Latino, and Asian students (the model minority stereotype is actually quite harmful to Asian students in many cases, since it was never designed to actually benefit them). This only goes to support the already very large body in that area. There’s also a vast body of literature showing forms of discrimination against girls and women in education, typically in math and the sciences.</p>

<p>There’s also literature supporting the choices of the names that they used, showing that people attach races to certain names and that people are likely to assume that “generic” names like Meredith Smith belong to white people (specifically Western European-descended white people). This kind of study has been done before. It’s a flawed approach, but a scientifically sound one.</p>

<p>It amuses me how many ways people will try to twist and turn the pretty plain results (that are supported by 2-3 decades’ worth of research into this same issue from different angles) into something else, or try to invalidate them based on nitpicky things that actually have nothing to do with the science itself. Whether or not the message is generic doesn’t matter, since the exact same message was sent out with each student. If anything, the study suggests it’s possible that professors may be more likely to give Meredith Smith or Brad Anderson a chance if they make a gaffe, but less likely to extend that benefit to Latoya Smith, Juanita Gonzalez, Mei Chin, or Deepak Patel.</p>

<p>Overinterpretation/overgeneralization should be cautioned against too; this doesn’t mean that professors discriminate against the students that they’re working with or that they do it in person. </p>

<p>@rhandco: 1) If the response (or lack thereof) was because of the generic nature of the email, it should have been evenly applied across groups. It wasn’t.</p>

<p>2) There’s a lot of research supporting the idea that people attach races to certain names. Yes, they deliberately used WASPy names, presumably because using the names of other white ethnic groups would skew the results (Markov or Kowalski may bring associations with Eastern Europeans or immigrants, for example). What the heck is rich about Anderson or Smith? And Dong and Wong are common Chinese surnames. Sure, people may associate negative meanings with them, that was the entire point of the study.</p>

<p>3) Assuming that a student will have immigration/visa problems because of their name is racist. Avoiding taking on international students because the school might have to fill out paperwork has a whole other set of problems attached to it.</p>

<p>4) A person’s primary advisor during their doctoral study is called a mentor. The student was probably trying to meet with said professor to see if they would be a good fit as a mentor.</p>

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<p>No and no. Stereotyping can be attached to a culture or a race. Or a gender, or a nationality, or any identity or categorical label. There’s a large, large body of research on stereotyping in academic research, and it’s not mostly about culture. Also, while some stereotypes may be influenced by truth, many (most, I would wager) are not. And regardless of whether they are influenced by truth, the incorrect application of them harms people.</p>

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<p>You can define culture as you like, but to me it certainly includes aspects such as nationality.</p>

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<p>No it is not racist.</p>

<p>A badly designed study on the willingness of professors to waste time on someone they are not going mentor just doesn’t contribute to understanding of biases in faculty mentoring.</p>

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<p>“If a student comes from Utah, attended a good school, has a decent GPA, and has university educated parents, it would be fairly reasonable stereotyping to expect him or her to be relatively sober and be capable of further study. If you then found out that student was black, and this made you change your mind, that would be racist.”</p>

<p>Here’s a concept, sorghum. Why not just take people as they come?</p>

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<p>I agree that there is a lot of GOOD research supporting bias based on names and assigning a racial or ethnic group to that name. As far as I know, good research has been done showing clear bias in hiring and housing. I certainly believe there may be bias by professors choosing research grad students. But bad research is bad research. It is equally frustrating to have people accept results that may not be accurate just because they prove their point and argue that any questioning is nit-picking. Or, in some cases, that those questioning the results are racist or sexist in some way. I am a woman scientist and there is definitely some “boys club” mentality out there, but I would not use this study to support that. </p>

<p>IMHO, it is not nitpicking to point out some pretty significant flaws in the study design and interpretation. The “press release” analysis given in the NPR report (and I support NPR and think they usually do good work) is very misleading and could be argued is twisting and stretching the results to say that faculty provide less mentoring to minority students because they don’t answer an unsolicited email. Science, even social science, has to be based on good analysis. </p>

<p>Again, the results in the actual study show almost NO bias from public college professors (not significantly significant in most cases). This was not really reported, although the paper spends much time discussing how private school professors are more likely to be less supportive of minority students than public professors.No bias shown against Hispanic women by any group, yet no further analysis of that.</p>

<p>Basing over-reaching conclusions on a flawed study may limit good research into the real issue - are grad school admissions biased against students by race, gender or ethnicity? Do professors actually accept fewer diverse students into their labs or research studies? Do they mentor those students less effectively? Is the bias against students from diverse backgrounds, or foreign students who may require immigration help and be deficient in English (which may be more of an issue for TAs in a private college). </p>

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<p>I was giving an example constructed to illustrate that stereotyping may not be racist, and may have some rational basis. </p>

<p>No need to be sarcastic.</p>

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<p>The flaw about the reply is not about the generic email, but rather about the lack of any understanding of what the reply was.</p>

<p>If the replies to all the minorities was “Great, I cleared my calendar, when can you meet?”, and the replies to the white males was “Thank you for your interest, I am too busy to meet. I may be able to meet if you are accepted into our highly competitive program”, one would not conclude that people are biased against minorities.</p>

<p>Secondly, and this is a minor point, but amusing nonetheless…since the list was done automatically, I would think that an email from Robert Smith to a professor doing research in Woman’s Studies, may get a better reply than one from Sally Smith. I am sure there is some flip side example to make the counter point.</p>

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I agree that I am curious about the responses–but surely nobody really thinks that this kind of result is likely to have been the case? I wonder if the study authors have responded to this criticism anywhere.</p>

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<p>Here’s another study that involved an application for a lab manager job–the only difference was whether the applicant was “John” or “Jennifer.” <a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.abstract”>http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.abstract&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>It is possible that there were too many issues in how to characterize the range of responses.
The rejection and acceptances are relatively easy, but I imagine there is a vast middle ground of replies that could either be considered “encouraging” or “polite blow-off” depending on how you read it.</p>

<p>Regardless, I would have thought the study authors would have at least mentioned this since it is a big red flag about drawing any conclusions from the study.</p>

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<p>from the study:

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<p>The mentoring study also showed the same thing (minority students didn’t do any better with minority professors as well) which the study mentions is a well known issue. </p>

<p>I didn’t realize that.</p>

<p>I am now not going to post something about that…</p>

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<p>Hunt:</p>

<p>From your cited study.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read the whole thing, but this is remarkably similar to the circumstances of the first case (the OP study). In other words, faculty responses to marginal candidates show bias. Maybe it should say evaluators prefer marginally competent males to marginally competent females. (I haven’t read though it to see how much bias is there.) </p>

<p>The language in this should make the designers of the study blush. It says that, if people are clearly competent, it might cause otherwise biased people to evaluate the candidate fairly, (rather than in the way that would help satisfy the objectives of this study.) And Elizabeth Warren is writing a book that says the world is rigged!!!..indeed–at least these studies are.</p>

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<p>racist whites being racist, what’s new?</p>

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<p>What is new is that the minority professors and the female professors showed the exact same bias.</p>

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<p>dadx, I thought it made sense to provide a candidate who was “in the ballpark,” but not clearly exemplary. Don’t you agree that scenario is more likely to smoke out hidden bias? It may be true that what these studies really show is that if there’s nothing else to go on, decisionmakers will have a preference for white males. I think that’s enough to keep on digging into the issue.</p>