AIAA Shuns Gender Diversity In Scholarship Selections
Is this for real? Did @aiaa just award all 10 of their graduate scholarships to men? In the last 3-years, ~500 collegiate women in aerospace have applied to the @owensfellowship – most engineers & many headed to grad school – so the excuse can't be the talent pool. Outrageous! https://t.co/R1bgmGrZIM
— Lori Garver (@Lori_Garver) September 17, 2019
Apparently @aiaa could not find any qualified women and/or was not concerned that they had none in this group. This does not technically qualify as a #manel so a new hashtag is needed to denote a pure male group of selectees @ManelWatchUS
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) September 17, 2019
AIAA does NOT discriminant. If the 10 best are all male, then its because the 10 best ended up being male. I’m a 35 year member. Never once saw discrimination and I’ve been very active in AIAA.
You can’t even spell “discriminate”.
ture
As the NASA Watch tweet put it, they “could not find any qualified women and/or was not concerned that they had none in this group.” If all 10 of the best qualified people were men, doesn’t that say something is seriously wrong about the available candidates? If the selections were completely unbiased and nondiscriminatory, that would imply 10% or less of the applicants were women. That is a huge symptom of a problem.
Worse, it isn’t clear that the selections were completely unbiased and nondiscriminatory. I doubt anyone was _intentionally_ discriminatory, but there are many, many forms on unconscious and intrinsic bias. Just the natural tendency for people to like people who are like themselves will create bias if the selection panel isn’t diverse. Styles of presentation and debate are not gender neutral, and people will favor people whose style is similar to their own. I don’t know how many applicants there were. We know ~500 women applied. If there were less than 5000 applicants total, no female selections suggests the process was, in fact, biased.
It’s the primary issue with counting, as we’ve discussed elsewhere: numeration forces a much deeper look, exposing intrinsic issues far beyond the remit of the current desire to be fair.
What’s an Association to do in this situation, if Mr. Horse’s AIAA characterization is accurate- and I have no reason to doubt his view?
Well, they could make a clear statement recognizing the apparent unfairness of the selection, identifying underlying reasons, and suggesting a path to a future with a more desirable outcome. Something like:
“While we are proud of the current scholarship recipients, we also recognize a glaring lack of diversity. While AIAA remains committed to rewarding excellence, our unique position in the scientific community affords us the ability to do something about the obvious inequities. Here is what we propose…”
A clear statement along those lines would, I think, be the right thing for the AIAA to do. What they would propose to do is a more difficult matter, since it isn’t clear what the problem is or how to fix it. I guess they could say that, list a few of the possibilities, and say they have set up a committee or working group to figure it out and recommend changes. But then they actually need to follow through on that. There have been far too many cases where an organization says, “we’ve got a problem and we’re studying it and possible solutions,” and then, in the long run, nothing actually changes.
“What they would propose to do is a more difficult matter”
It sure is, which is why I didn’t offer any.
It has been over 5-years since I’ve been on Discuss – but since I highlighted this concern, I want to share updated info from AIAA. First – their leadership has been incredibly responsive to my personal inquiries and they are clearly concerned about this outcome. They reported to me that ~20% of the applicants were female and their selection process is gender-blind. They shared statistics from past years, which include two recent years were more females than males received their undergraduate scholarships. Bottom line – they intend to learn from this and make adjustments to their process/participants if needed. I’ve pledged to assist in any way possible and have secured their President as a Brooke Owens Fellowship mentor for 2020! When Dan was at Purdue, he recommended several of his top students to the Fellowship and their President is also committed to positive change. As a long-time AIAA member, it means a lot to me that my comments were met with such receptivity and wanted to share these developments.
Thanks for telling us more about this. The details are concerning. But I think it is a very good sign that the AIAA is concerned by this. I worry more when people aren’t worried about a problem than when they have one and are worried about it.
So this is a tempest in a teapot based on the FACTS that the selection process is gender-blind.
No the issue is that AIAA is so tone deaf that it does not occur to them that their selections are always of one gender. Check some Twitter comments and you will see that various committees within the AIAA couldn’t;t be bothered to look into this. It took this tempest to get AIAA to pay attention.
Happily, inquiries by Ms. Garver reveal that the ‘tone deafness’ was apparent but not actual. A statement of some sort from AIAA could be useful.
So when did the gender-blind selections start? If it has been ongoing for years then seems to me there is no case about this supposed sexual discrimination. Just saying.
You are just guessing.
What, exactly, do you mean by “gender-blind”? If you mean it can’t be an official criteria, I suppose that started several decades ago. Do you mean redacting names, personal information and all other information which could reveal or imply gender? I’m not sure if there is any such policy. And there have been studies where that sort of information was deliberately replaced with information implying a different gender, and then the files were sent to reviewers. Guess what? Otherwise identical applications get different reviews, depending on the apparent gender of the applicant.
But you are also focusing on the selections themselves. Even if it were 100% nondiscriminatory, what if they get far fewer applications from women than men? What if, for dozens of subtle reasons, women are discouraged from applying? Then the whole process is discriminatory, even if the selections themselves are not. That’s a problem, and it isn’t adequate to just shrug it off and say the AIAA isn’t in control of that part of the problem.
I took this information from Lori Garver’s statement here:
“They reported to me that ~20% of the applicants were female and their selection process is gender-blind.”
And did she say that all AIAA selections have – or are gender-blind? Did AIAA define what “gender blind” means?
Correct – I was just sharing information as it was relayed to me. I do not know what their process is or why they consider it “gender-blind”. They have accepted my offer of assistance and I thought it best to give them credit for responding in a receptive way to the concerns I and others have raised. Lots of good points in this thread that are much appreciated.
There are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. This is the latter not the former.
If the selection was totally random and 20% of the applicants were female, then there is a 10% chance that all of the recipients would be male (0.8^10).
Which could make this a coincidence. More interesting is Dr. Graver’s comment that the majority of awards went to women in “two recent years.” That makes a statistical fluke look more likely. But this is also the sort of thing the courts consider worthy of “strict scrutiny.” It’s been an historical problem, so it’s something we need to pay careful attention to. I’d say this is at the level where I’d like to keep my eyes open and see how it goes, rather than shrug it off as a potential, statistical fluke.