2017年12月四级第3套仔细阅读 Passage 2 原文翻译及答案解析

Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, compared with their male counterparts. Christopher Intagliata reports. As in many other fields, gender bias is widespread in the sciences. Men score higher starting salaries, have more mentoring (指导), and have better odds of being hired. Studies show they're also perceived as more competent than women in STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. And new research reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, too. "Say, you know, this is the best student I've ever had," says Kuheli Dutt, a social scientist and diversity officer at Columbia University's Lamont campus. "Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: 'The candidate was productive, or intelligent, or a solid scientist or something that's clearly solid praise,' but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one of a kind." Dutt and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in geoscience. They were all edited for gender and other identifying information, so Dutt and her team could assign them a score without knowing the gender of the student. They found that female applicants were only half as likely to get outstanding letters, compared with their male counterparts. That includes letters of recommendation from all over the world, and written by, yes, men and women. The findings are in the journal Nature Geoscience. Dutt says they were not able to evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of the applicants using the data in the files. But she says the results still suggest women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their careers starting with those less than outstanding letters of recommendation. "We're not trying to assign blame or criticize anyone or call anyone conscious sexist. Rather, the point is to use the results of this study to open up meaningful dialogues on implicit gender bias, be it at a departmental level or an institutional level or even a discipline level." Which may lead to some recommendations for the letter writers themselves.

与男性同行相比，申请地球科学博士后职位的女性获得优秀推荐信的可能性几乎只有一半。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。与许多其他领域一样，性别偏见在科学界普遍存在。男性获得更高的起薪、更多的指导，并且有更大的被雇佣机会。研究表明，在STEM（科学、技术、工程、数学）领域，男性也被认为比女性更有能力。新研究还显示，男性也更有可能获得优秀的推荐信。哥伦比亚大学拉蒙特校区的社会科学家和多元化官员库赫利·达特说：“比如说，你知道，这是我教过的最好的学生。”“将那些优秀的推荐信与仅仅是好的推荐信相比较：‘该候选人工作勤奋、聪明或是一位可靠的科学家’之类的明显赞扬，但没有任何内容将候选人标榜为卓越或独一无二。”达特和她的同事们研究了1200多封地球科学博士后职位的推荐信。这些信件都经过编辑，去除了性别和其他识别信息，这样达特和她的团队可以在不知道学生性别的前提下给它们评分。他们发现，与男性同行相比，女性申请人获得杰出推荐信的可能性只有一半。这包括来自世界各地的推荐信，并且确实由男性和女性撰写。研究结果发表在《自然地球科学》期刊上。达特说，他们无法利用档案中的数据评估申请人的实际科学资历。但她说，结果仍然表明，地球科学领域的女性从职业生涯一开始，就因为那些不够出色的推荐信而处于潜在的劣势。“我们并非试图归咎、批评任何人或称任何人有意识的性别歧视者。相反，重点是利用这项研究的结果，在部门层面、机构层面甚至学科层面上开启关于隐性性别偏见的有意义对话。”这可能会为推荐信撰写者本身提出一些建议。