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Women: Their Underrepresentation and Career Differentials in Science and Engineering Proceedings of a Conference (1987) / Chapter Skim
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DISCUSSION: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS FOR RESEARCH ON SEX DIFFERENCES IN THE SCIENTIFIC CAREER
Pages 163-170

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From page 163...
... o As Hornig notes, any studies of graduate funding that leave out level of funding provide ambiguous and/or incomplete results. By leaving out key variables that are known to be causally relevant, too many results serve only to describe distributions, rather than explain how those distributions are generated.
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From page 164...
... The figures quoted by Hochschild for the University of California at Berkeley are quite misleading, since the effects of differential rates of advancement are confounded with timevarying rates of entrance into academia. • If a cross-sectional study finds that less productive women have less prestigious positions, it is unclear whether the lesser productivity resulted from being forced into a position less conducive to research or whether the lesser position resulted from poor performance.
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From page 165...
... If only productive scientists are selected, inferences on factors affecting less productive scientists can only be made if one is willing to assume that factors affecting productive scientists operate in exactly the same fashion as they do for unproductive scientists. And even if such an assumption can be made, severe statistical problems must be addressed.
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From page 166...
... , but it is critical that generalizations not be made to the entire population of women Ph.D.s and that care is taken to avoid introducing statistical bias. Problems in Uniform Measurement Variations in the measurement of research productivity can cause differences in results, and possibly generate spurious findings of sex differences.
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From page 167...
... . .as the outcome of a sequence of events, and to concentrate upon predicting or explaining the probability of occurrence and the nature of those events, than it does to take a life as an additive function of certain background variables plus a stochastic error term." This statement suggests that the scientific career must be viewed as a series of critical events occurring at unique times for each individual.
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From page 168...
... Given the argument that events unfold over time, definitions of productivity and number of children must be carefully restricted to a specific period of time. Productivity must be measured to include only those publications occurring during graduate school.
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From page 169...
... Rose Monograph Series. Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.
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Key Terms

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  • independent variables

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  • american sociological
  • life experience

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  • sample selection
  • scientific career
  • institutional location
  • causally relevant

  • past research
  • sociological review
  • domestic obligations
  • academic rank
  • uniform effects

  • include publications
  • adequately assessed
  • longitudinal studies
  • negative residuals
  • lesser position

  • results serve
  • explaining differential
  • designs commonly
  • dence exists
  • sociological association


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