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N.M. Reid 219et al., 2012a), and the accompanying supplementary material (Moss-Racusinet al., 2012b). A particularly concerning result was that female scientists exhibitedthe same gender bias as their male counterparts.These results reverberated because they felt real, and indeed I felt I recognizedmyself in this study. During my many years on search committees,and during my five-year tenure as department chair, efforts to hire femaleresearch-stream faculty were not successful. It took me a surprisingly longtime to come to the conclusion that it was easy to decide to make an offer tothe best female candidate in any given hiring season, but much, much harderfor females in the next tier ‘down’ to be ranked as highly as the men in thesame tier. Our intentions were good, but our biases not easily identified. Withreference to the PNAS study, Laba says:“The scientists were not actively seeking to discriminate... They offeredsimilar salaries to candidates that they perceived as equally competent,suggesting that, in their minds, they were evaluating the candidatepurely on merit. The problem is that the female candidate wasjudged to be less competent, evidently for no reason other than gender,given that the resumes were exactly identical except for the name. [···]I’m sure that most of the participants, believing themselves unbiased,would be shocked to see the results.” (Laba, 2012a)I’ve presented this study in two talks, and mentioned it in a number ofconversations. The reaction from women is often to note other related studiesof gender bias; there are a number of these, with similar designs. An earlystudy of refereeing (Goldberg, 1968) involved submitting identical articles forpublication with the author’s name either Joan or John; this study featuredin the report of an IMS committee to investigate double-blind refereeing; seeCox et al. (1993). A more common reaction is to speculate more broadly onwhether or not women self-select out of certain career paths, are genuinelyless interested in science and so on. This deflects from the results of the studyat hand, and also diffuses the discussion to such an extent that the complexityof “the women thing” can seem overwhelming. Here is Laba in a related post:“Let’s recap what the study actually said: that given identical paperworkfrom two hypothetical job candidates, one male and one female,the woman was judged as less competent and offered a lower salary.This is not about whether girls, statistically speaking, are less interestedin science. It’s about a specific candidate who had already metthe prerequisites... and was received much better when his name wasJohn instead of Jennifer.” (Laba, 2012b)We all have our biases. The ABC News report (Little, 2012) on the paperdescribed a “small, non-random experiment,” but the study was randomized,and the authors provided considerable detail on the size of the study and theresponse rate. The authors themselves have been criticized for their bar chart