For years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been sending grant proposals out for peer review. In addition to writing an evaluation, reviewers rate the proposals “Excellent”, “Very Good”, “Good”, “Fair”, or “Poor”. Proposals need very high ratings to get funded.
X was usually a great guy, and I had a high opinion of him. So I was surprised when he told me that when he reviews proposals written by women, he gives them lower ratings than if the same proposals had been written by men. He told me that he assumed that NSF gave preference to proposals from women. By downgrading them, he believed he was leveling the playing field.
I don't know whether NSF was really giving preference to women in the 1980s or 1990s when we had that conversation, or whether it does now. But no one ever told me that they downgraded proposals by men to level the playing field in the 1960s or 1970s or earlier, when discrimination against women in reviews and elsewhere was blatant.
Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!
I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.
Monday, June 15, 2020
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