Awards and recognition in academia: gender and prestige

• In Event: 3-119 - Gender Inequality in Developmental Psychology

Integrative Statement

Formal recognition in academia takes several forms: intra-institution awards that recognize accomplishments and awards from professional organizations. Recognition at home can take the form of named chairs or special prizes. Recognition from professional societies (like SRCD) can take the form of research awards (like Senior Distinguished Contributions Awards (SDCAs). Between 2005 and 2017, SRCD's SDCAs went to 14 women and 11 men. Other recognition is invitations to give keynote talks at conferences or university colloquia. SRCD's 2019 program has 36 invited speakers, 19 women and 17 men. Since considerably more than 50% of developmental psychologists are women, SRCD is one example of an apparent under-rewarding of women.
Developmental psychology is not unique. Women were underrepresented among university colloquium speakers at 50 major US colleges and universities in 2013-2014 in six fields, including psychology. An analysis of 3,652 talks showed that men were more likely than women to be colloquium speakers, even after controlling for the gender and rank of the available speakers (Nittrouer et al, 2018). In a survey, female and male faculty at top universities reported no differences in the extent to which they valued or turned down speaking engagements; the gender disparity was not due to women not wanting to talk. Women's presence on colloquium committees was related to having more women speakers. Women may issue invitations to women differently from men; women's names may also be more cognitively available to women. Having women chairs of awards panels is also linked to more awards to women (Casadevall & Handelsman, 2014). The presence of women in a position of authority may give credibility to women nominees.
Four mechanisms conspire to put women at a disadvantage relative to men. 1) Gender schemas, which women and men equally subscribe to, results in a small overvaluation of men's achievements and small undervaluation of women's (Stewart & Valian, 2018). 2) The accumulation of (dis)advantage is such that the small gains that men receive, and small impediments that women receive, accumulate over time to produce large differences in achievement (Martell et al, 1996; Merton, 1968). 3) Gatekeepers preferentially attend to prestige and award the already awarded (Chan et al, 2014). Women are slightly less likely than men to work at the research-intensive (44% vs 47%; NSF data) institutions that house the majority of awardees. 4) Moral licensing gives rise to bad behavior; e.g., the act of disagreeing with an explicitly sexist statement makes it more likely that an individual will then prefer a man for a male-dominated job (Merritt et al, 2010; Monin & Miller, 2001).
Recognition matters because prestige provides an audience for one's ideas, and that is the first prerequisite for influencing the field. It also matters because of its impact on young people of seeing a variety of individuals as awardees and keynote speakers.
The remedies for the under-recognition of women are i) keeping and making use of data on the availability pool, ii) calculating the expected likelihood of female speakers, and iii) having more women on panels.

Authors

• Virginia Valian, Hunter Coll & CUNY Grad Ctr
  Presenting Author

• Abigail J Stewart, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author