liveonearth (liveonearth) wrote,
liveonearth
liveonearth

Recommendation Letters can screw you out of a medical job

If you are a woman, especially. Women are more likely to be described as "cooperative, affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, nurturing, tactful or agreeable", and it turns out the last thing you want is for someone to sing those praises for you in a recommendation letter. Why? Well researchers at Rice University did a study in which they took the personal pronouns out of recommendation letters. The readers couldn't tell if the applicant was male or female. They controlled for all the concrete academic reasons that a person might be selected, or not, in a medical and academic field, meaning that the letters were sorted as to be equal in that regard. Then they asked "who would you hire"? The answer was that the people hired would be the ones described as "confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken and intellectual". And those words of course were more often applied to men. If you apply those words to a woman, you're practically calling her a bitch in our culture. So women can't win. No big news there, but the lesson is clear. We can influence our reference letter writers to use a different paradigm in speaking about us, and get hired more.

SOURCE
http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/news2010-11-09-letters.shtml
Tags: community, education, gender, isms, language, leadership, medicine, science, sexism, work
Subscribe

  • Wolverine Watchmen: Wannabe X-men vs the Feds

    I've been interested in human xenophobia (which I think is instinctive) and race and class warfare since I become politically aware some time in…

  • QotD: I Think

    I think, therefore I am... confused. --Benjamin Hoff in The Tao of Pooh

  • QotD: If you don't

    "If you don't do it this year, you will be one year older when you do." -Warren Miller

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Comments allowed for friends only

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 0 comments