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The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
There is also the bias against female professors. At the U.S. Naval Academy, 11 men and four women applied for tenure in 2021, including Professor Carolyn Chun. Of those 15, 10 men were granted tenure—none of the women were. Chun, a maths professor, calculated the odds: “There are 3,003 scenarios where 10 people can be chosen from the 15 applicants, and only 11 scenarios where all 10 are men. All things being equal, the chance that the top 10 applicants would all be male is 11 out of 3,003.” In other words, she calculated a 99.6 percent chance of gender discrimination.
“It’s telling that, at the highest level, women comprise only 25 percent of the faculty,” Chun told the Washington Post. “At the middle level, it’s 31 percent, and at the lowest level, it’s 46 percent. This suggests that women are being held back compared with our male counterparts.”
Chun was denied tenure because, after telling her students that, statistically, female students did better on tests than male students, several of the men complained and accused her of giving preferential treatment to the women. This illustrates the significant impact that student feedback can have on a professor’s career and, like virtually all aspects of life, there is a gender bias.