Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geoscience were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendat

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问题     Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geoscience 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 say 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 consciously 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.
What do the studies find about the recommendation letters for women applicants?

选项 A、They are hardly ever supported by concrete examples.
B、They contain nothing that distinguishes the applicants.
C、They provide objective information without exaggeration.
D、They are often filled with praise for exceptional applicants.

答案B

解析 本题可参照文章的第3段。从文章的第3段可知,将这些优秀的推荐信与一封仅仅是良好的推荐信比较一下:“申请人富有成效,或者具有才智,或者是一位可信赖的科学家,或者是很明确的赞扬,” 但这并没有让申请者从众多申请人中脱颖而出。据此可知,B项正确。A、C两项在文中未提及。D项不正确,文中是说推荐信里可能是很明确的赞扬。B项与文章的意思相符,因此B项为正确答案。
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