Having just gone through the process of getting recommendations to join VMware, I was very interested in this news out of Rice University: Recommendation letters may be costing women jobs, promotions.  The researchers found that, in letters of recommendation for academia, women were more likely to be described in communal terms (helpful, tactful, kind, agreeable) and men were more likely to be described in agentic terms (aggressive, confident, ambitious, intellectual).  Further, when scrubbing these letters of recommendation for names and pronouns, and controlling for other variables important in academia (number of publications, postdocs, etc), the letters that were more agentic were rated as stronger.

I’m trying to get my hands on a PDF of their peer-reviewed article to learn more.  In the interim, this brings to mind plenty of questions.  I wonder what would happen if you were to take these letters of recommendation and swap the genders.  We know what happens when you remove gender from them, but I wonder what happens if you take a woman’s recommendation letter and replace Jane with Jim.  If a man’s recommendation letter says that he’s “helpful” and “tactful”, how does that impact the perception of him as a candidate?  If a woman’s recommendation letter says that she’s “aggressive” or “intellectual”, how does that impact the perception of her as a candidate?

The researchers say that they’re going to next consider letters of recommendation for medical faculty positions.  I hope that they, or someone else, continue to extend this research to other fields.  Academia surely has a shortage of women, but speaking as a software engineer with degrees in math and CS, they’re not the only ones.  There were only a handful of women in my upper-division courses, and even fewer female professors.