Professors Love Answering Cold Emails from White Dudes, “Meh” on Everyone Else
From NPR’s transcript of a Morning Edition story: Group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. They emailed more than 6,500 professors at the top 250 schools pretending to be the students. And they wrote letters saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? The letters to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different. […] Brad Anderson. Meredith Roberts. Lamar Washington. LaToya Brown. Juanita Martinez. Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong, Mei Chen. […] All they were measuring was how often professors wrote back agreeing to meet with with the students. And what they found was there were very large disparities. Women and minorities [were] systematically less likely to get responses from the professors and also less likely to get positive responses from the professors. Now remember, these are top faculty at the top schools in the United States and the letters were all impeccably written.Two more kickers: “There’s absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty,” and, “In business academia, we see a 25 percentage point gap in the response rate to Caucasian males vs. women and minorities.” Word, this sounds great, we’re doing great. [NPR]
But white male privilege doesn’t exist?
And then there’s this:
Milkman found there were very large disparities between academic departments and between schools. Faculty at private schools were significantly more likely to discriminate against women and minorities than faculty at public schools. And faculty in fields that were very lucrative were also more likely to discriminate. So there was very little discrimination in the humanities. There was more discrimination among faculty at the natural sciences. And there was a lot of discrimination among the faculty at business schools.
Uh-huh tell me again how science and money are ideologically neutral.
Wowza.
i will always reblog this because people always want to say “what gatekeepers?” “who is doing this racist stuff?” “why would you say that MOC and Women are discriminated against?” well lets think about it….. here is an excellent example. People reaching out on their own attempting to gain perspective/guidance/mentors because hey, bootstraps and shit, and they are largely ignored if they are not white males. Actual educators in the field who are molding and shaping the minds of the youth, who have invaluable information and expertise on the subject they teach, who are the gatekeepers to this information ONLY share it with white males. People would like to relegate racism to murder and brutality… but this is another type of violence. This is perpetuating a cycle of poverty by withholding the literal wealth of knowledge as well as withholding the benefits of a well built network. Do you know how invaluable having a mentor is for many MOC and WOC? a hell of a lot of us are first generation college students. I maneuvered the education system completely blind, stumbling into whatever. It took A LOT of getting things wrong to get it right. Can you imagine if I had a connection with a college professor to help guide you through the process? Give you insight on the field you are studying? How important that connection is? How important it is to know who they – as valued experts in their field – know? Now. When you exclude women and men of color from that experience, from that potentially life altering relationship then you are slanting the odds against us because of our gender/skin color. That is violence. You are limiting my prospective wealth. You are limiting my prospective growth. All in favor of white men.