Interesting Features at PWN for 4.13.15

News from the PWN Pipeline: 

'The person you are negotiating with has probably adopted a planned strategy to test you.'

Natalie Reynolds, the Managing Director of advantageSPRING Limited and a leading expert on the topic of effective negotiation, has penned an article for The Guardian describing her top 5 tips to negotiating the best deal. She notes that many people are certain that they are negotiating when, in fact, they are actually just arguing. Reynolds reminds us that proposing ideas that help the other person see the way you are thinking is far a more effective approach than arguing. This is a great quick read and a fantastic reminder of successful strategies for negotiation.

"It's too soon to say, 'OK, problem solved.' We haven't solved the problem of underrepresentation of women in the sciences."

A recent study by researchers Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci of Cornell University created three hypothetical candidates for an assistant professorship (an extremely well-qualified woman, an extremely well-qualified man, and a slightly less qualified man), developed comparable job application packages for each candidate, and asked 873 tenure-track male and female faculty nationwide to rank the candidates. Williams and Ceci found that a woman applying for a tenure-track position in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field at a US university is twice as likely to be hired as an equally qualified man. These findings, specifically highlighting the hiring phase of STEM careers, offer some insights into the issue of underrepresentation of women in STEM faculties. The study authors suggest that successful training programs about gender and hiring as well as growing beliefs in gender parity in STEM may have influenced the study outcome. Some limitations of the study include the generalizability of the findings to the real world as well as potential biases earlier in the selection/interview process.