Are STEM Faculty Biased Against Female Applicants? A Robust Replication and Extension of Moss-Racusin and Colleagues (2012)

In a seminal study investigating gender bias in academic science, Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) found bias against female lab manager applicants with respect to competence, hireability, mentoring, and salary conferral. This topic was revisited here as a registered replication report with four studies—one direct replication, two direct replications with extensions, and a meta-analysis. The present set of studies, all using the same methods and materials as the original, sampled from a larger and broader pool of faculty than did the original, collectively reflecting the breadth of STEM disciplines at R1 universities across the United States. The reported studies all had higher power to detect smaller effect sizes than in the original. Across these studies, Moss-Racusin et al.’s (2012) findings failed to replicate, and biases were consistently in the opposite direction—favoring female over male applicants (albeit with smaller effect sizes). We discuss the implications of these findings for the broader literature on gender bias in science and its implications for the scientific workforce.