MIT made headlines earlier this year by claiming to have proved a pattern of discrimination against its female faculty. The media were impressed with the study because it came bearing the prestigious imprimatur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and because it purported to be "scientific." Unduly impressed, it turns out. A typically credulous New York Times editorial actually offhandedly gave the game away when it noted that "more powerful than the statistical data are the perceptions of the women interviewed."
As the economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth pointed out the other day in a piece for Investor's Business Daily, the MIT findings depended both on an arbitrary assumption that all MIT tenured professors are equally "exceptional" and on a fuzzy redefinition of discrimination to mean a "pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty."
Furchtgott-Roth, co-author of Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America, observes "it is ironic that MIT is now engaged in self-flagellation of its hiring policies, because, unlike most top research universities . . . it has been open to women for most of its history."