stance, a widely cited study of peer-reviewed evaluations of post-
doctoral research applications shows that reviewers consistently gave
female applicants lower average scores than male applicants, despite
similar levels of productivity.^28 More broadly, we know that men’s
traits are generally viewed as more valuable than women’s, and that
men are generally judged as more competent.^29 In addition, women
academics are often perceived as “less productive and/or incapable of
succeeding in full-time, tenure-track positions,” which results in wo-
men’s performances being subject to both more scrutiny and higher
standards than the performances of comparable men.^30 “Attribution
biases” are frequent; these occur when “people tend to attribute the
behavior of members of their in-group to stable causes, while they
attribute the behavior of out-groups to situational causes: he’s bril-
liant, but she just got lucky.”^31 Such biases are especially likely in situ-
ations of tokenism, for example, when there are only a few women
in a department or within a rank. Social categorization and same-
group (“in-group”) biases that lead to attribution biases are part of
normal cognition, and they occur regardless of people’s conscious
feelings toward other groups.^32 Only continual self-evaluation, time,
and systems of accountability can redirect these cognitive tendencies.
These findings inform the scholarship of some of the panelists,
several of whom are well versed in the literature on gender inequality
in academia. For instance, a political scientist explains that men may
be more likely to dismiss the work of women colleagues as “not in-
teresting,” and that such appraisals “would obviously be a case of
kind of bias...itwould be rare that you’ll find that the people who
are different from you are doing things that you rate more highly.”
Also aware of the literature on bias, a historian, when asked how he
deals with questions of diversity as he evaluates proposals, answers:
“I [don’t] foreground them, but I try to take them into serious con-
sideration...AfterI’vegonethroughabatchofproposals I look for
a pattern. Are the ones that I’m scoring higher distinguished by gen-
222 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity