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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 does Dutt aim to do with her study?
选项 A、Raise recommendation writers’ awareness of gender bias in their letters.
B、Open up fresh avenues for women post doctors to join in research work.
C、Alert women researchers to all types of gender bias in the STEM disciplines.
D、Start a public discussion on how to raise women’s status in academic circles.
答案A
解析 本题可参照文章的最后两段。从文章的最后两段可知，Dutt说，他们无法评估文件中使用数据的申请人的实际科学资格。但她说，研究结果仍然表明，从那些并不优秀的推荐信开始，学习地球科学的女性在职业生涯刚开始时就存在着潜在的劣势。“我们并不是在试图指责或批评任何人，或者将任何人称为性别歧视者。相反，关键是要利用这项研究成果，在不管是部门层次、机构层次，甚至是学科层次，展开有意义的、关于隐晦的性别偏见的对话。”这可能会给推荐者本人提供一些建议。A项表述与此意思一致。B、C两项在文中未提及。文中提及的公开讨论并非针对女性在学术界地位的提高，故D项错误。A项与文章的意思相符，因此A项为正确答案。
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