Proving and Quantifying Sexism In many areas of life, especially
in cases where a person must apply to enter an organization,
field or job, there are large gender gaps. Whenever feminists
call for equal representation by women in a particular endeavor,
detractors often claim that adding more women means better-
qualified men will get bumped down. They claim that in order to
get an equal number of women and men, the bar must be lowered on
quality. For example, some in the skeptic movement have claimed
that adding more women speakers at skeptic and atheist
conferences means replacing more qualified men with less
qualified women. As a feminist, I don’t believe this is true. I
believe that increasing representation of women will increase
the quality of the endeavor. I also believe the thing keeping
women from certain fields in which they are under-represented is
institutionalized sexism. As a social scientist though, I don’t
just want to believe these things. I want to prove them and I
want to measure them. To do