MIT Study on Faculty Gender Bias Criticized

A right-wing think tank sharply rebuffed a year-old MIT internal study--which claimed the university discriminates against its female faculty-- contending that the initial study was based largely on rhetoric and not evidence.

Last week MIT held a well-publicized conference on approaches to remedy gender bias at universities across the country last week, one year after its newsletter published an article alleging "pervasive" and "institutional" discrimination against women. Harvard was one of nine universities to participate in the conference, along with Yale and Stanford.

But a report by the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), which focused on MIT's biology department, reported yesterday that this pattern vanishes when the productivity of the women in question was taken into account.

"In conceding to the findings of sex discrimination by an ad-hoc faculty committee, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have reacted to political correctness before checking all the evidence," the IWF report's introduction said.

"Just because men and women don't show exact equal outcomes doesn't mean there's discrimination," said Kimberly M. Schuld, IWF's director of policy.

The IWF report compared the men and women in the department in four categories--published papers, total citations, citations per paper and research grants. It found that "the differences...between the sexes were rather dramatic," accounting for differences in pay.

The primary author of the article alleging the discrimination, MIT Professor of Biology Nancy H. Hopkins, said the report's data was "meaningless" and its methodology "laughable."

She said the work done within MIT's large biology department was so diverse that its faculty could not be compared through blanket measures of academic performance or assessed by anyone outside of the institution.

"We have people in fields from chemistry to information analysis," she said. "It's not remotely possible to do it...You can do any kind of study you want if you want a particular conclusion."

Schuld countered by saying MIT's original internal study was flawed.

"[It] has a lot of rhetoric but not a lot of facts...When they do their own self-study, they have their day in the sunshine," she said.

The IWF's mission statement says it "speaks for those who...reject the false view that women are the victims of oppression."

--Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.