I think you're right about most of this, especially the fact that news media coverage is "bite-sized" and incomprehensive.
But, I'd like to point out that the lack of women in STEM fields is about decision-making power and not necessarily equity. Women aren't fighting for equity in garbage collection jobs either.
If women are to have equal say on the goings-on's of society they need to partake in the upper echelons of power equally (Government, Corporate Leadership, STEM positions etc.).
I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being in the government. What matters is that each individual has equal opportunity regardless of characteristics such as gender that are not directly relevant to the position. The tribal point of view does the opposite: rather than de-emphasising characteristics irrelevant to the situation at hand, it amps up those characteristics in a tribal us-vs-them conflict situation. Complaining that there aren't enough women in STEM seems to me as silly as complaining that there aren't enough people with red hair in STEM. What we should strive for is a world where each individual has the same opportunity based on their merits regardless of irrelevant characteristics, not a world with an elaborate system of conflicting tribes that lobby top-down control to ensure that their tribe gets an equal number of tribes(wo)men in prestigious positions.
Yes, what you described is a pure meritocracy and all things being equal, that would be GREAT, unfortunately, all things are not equal.
If all people got equal encouragement, inspiration, and opportunity (from the moment of birth) then we could simply focus at the moment of judgement (which btw, is also currently biased [1]). So that is basically what STEM advocates are working on, making sure women and other disadvantaged minorities have equal encouragement, inspiration and opportunity (specifically to learn) so we can claim to have an equitable meritocracy.
> The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.
Encouraging everyone equally is great, but the problem is that many of these advocates seem to operate under the unsubstantiated hypothesis that there are no correlations between gender and career choice except those caused by upbringing. This leads to the idea that an unequal representation is necessarily a sign of a problem that needs to be fixed. I don't think this is supported by the data. We know from biology and other fields that there are natural differences. We also know that in more emancipated societies where people have more opportunity to choose what they want, there is a greater gender imbalance in universities (example: highest % of women earning science degrees is Iran; no western european country nor the US nor Canada is even in the top 20). Perhaps a gender imbalance is a sign of a society where individuals can do what they really want.
We'd have to look at a meta-study to weed out problems in individual studies.
"Encouraging everyone equally is great".
We should probably just end the argument on that point we both agree :). The rest will work itself out. If everybody was encouraged and inspired equally and there were still imbalances your point will remain. Unfortunately, that's not true today, so we won't know.
Iran and India have much higher representation of women in STEM fields, and while they have other issues with misogyny, the inculcation of ambition (across gender lines) is very high (I say that having lived in India). The result seems to contradict any "biological" predilections.
> Iran and India have much higher representation of women in STEM fields, and while they have other issues with misogyny, the inculcation of ambition (across gender lines) is very high (I say that having lived in India). The result seems to contradict any "biological" predilections.
I don't see how it does. If I were to guess I'd say that in those countries there is a greater economic necessity to go into a high earning field in order to earn freedom than in Sweden and Norway. In Sweden and Norway people can follow their passion instead, without having to worry too much about the pay.
It seems inadvisable to me to assume that all differences must be due to socialisation and therefore indicative of a problem that has to be fixed, until the time that research shows this to be the case. Otherwise we risk implementing policies with incentives that make people less happy overall, by incentivising careers that people don't really want to go in. At the very least it should be a warning sign if your metric for gender equality shows Iran at the top and Sweden at the bottom.
And until I see definitive proof (meta-studies, convergence in scientific beliefs) that passion is something you are born with and not learn from your environment (through you know..inspiration, encouragement, and reaffirmation). I'm gonna keep trying!
Because currently, a 'passion' for STEM fields will tilt your future power prospects. If there is a systematic bias that causes a tilt the other way, it is simply untenable.
(a) Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation.
(b) Unless male economists are uniquely meritocratic there's more at play here than personal bias. It seems more likely that the other subjects have a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance. Since those preferences seem to occur at a subject/departmental level it seems even more unwise to try to generalise off the back of them.
(c) If you do want to generalise, there are other more generalisable studies that contradict the results of this one.
You can speculate on the reason why the discrimination exists, but calling it "a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance" is again a collectivist attitude, as if the treatment of somebody's grandmother somehow confers a debt that must be repaid to their granddaughter but not to their grandson, because the granddaughter is in the same tribe as her grandmother. From an individual perspective it's just discrimination. According to the study an individual human has a 2:1 hiring advantage compared to another individual human, simply because of an attribute that should not significantly factor into the decision. It doesn't suddenly stop being discrimination because the advantaged gender happens to be the female one. By the way, I think this is particularly damaging for the talented women who were hired on merit, because it becomes rational to believe that they they might not have been hired on merit.
I've had Williams/Ceci 2014 quoted at me before and it was hugely over-generalised then too. There's simply no rational basis for claiming (like you implied) that it shows wide-spread discrimination against men. It's a study of tenure-track hiring for four STEM subjects, one of which showed zero bias.
> The drop out rates for males are (much) higher.
Seems off-topic, can you explain the relevence of this? There are serious problems with boys education but they don't seem to have a problem with discrimination in the workplace, see [0][1][2][3][4].
> ... simply because of an attribute that should not significantly factor into the decision.
That's an opinion I think there's reasonable evidence to discard, or at least add some nuance to.
Diverse workplaces are more pleasant to work in, and in the case of universities it seems reasonable to believe (based on the work of Carol Dweck & others) that having relevant female role models would improve outcomes for female students in STEM subjects.
Additionally there's a growing body of evidence that documents how diverse workplaces have higher productivity; and gender gaps in entrepreneurship negatively affect GDP (Cuberes & Teignier for a 2015 example http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21661804-gender-equal...)
[0] Female students seen as less competent than identical male students with identical application materials, offered lower starting salaries (Moss-Racusin et al, 2012)
[1] People in gender-incongruent roles penalised more heavily for mistakes (Brescoll, Dawson, & Uhlmann, 2010).
[2] Voluble women perceived as less competent and less suitable leaders, inverse true for men (Brescoll, 2011).
[3] Women who succeed in male-dominated fields percieved as not likeable (Heilman et al, 2004).
[4] Students question the competence of female teachers who evaluate them negatively, less so than male teachers (Sinclair & Kunda 2000).
> Seems off-topic, can you explain the relevence of this?
You said:
> Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation.
That's why I mentioned it.
> Diverse workplaces are more pleasant to work in
If somebody's opinion was that all male workplaces are more pleasant to work in, would you find that a reasonable basis for discriminating against female applicants?
> Additionally there's a growing body of evidence that documents how diverse workplaces have higher productivity; and gender gaps in entrepreneurship negatively affect GDP (Cuberes & Teignier for a 2015 example http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21661804-gender-equal...)
Not a very convincing study. They just noticed that women work less than men, and calculated the increase in GDP if women worked as much as men. Note that from the data they use it is apparent that women work more in poorer societies. So maybe women work less in richer societies because they can. This is a good thing, because it means the things people do are dictated more by their passion and less by economic necessity.
The other studies are all about perception. I wonder how much of it is due to the effect that I mentioned (if you confer a selection advantage to a group then it becomes rational to believe that post selection individuals in that group are less competent). I'm also a bit wary of publication bias. I've heard from people in the field that there are certain results that are good for your career and certain results that are not.
Do you know of any reliable studies showing actual discrimination of the magnitude that the study I cited showed?
You keep dodging the fact that this entire comment thread started from you massively overstating the results of a single study, taking it far past the credible scope of the study.
Either knowingly or unknowingly you're abusing both the study's findings and the scientific method as a whole.
We can talk hypotheticals or debate the relative merit of affirmative action, or discuss the flaws in specific studies (because let's face it perfection is hard in social science), but first we need to address why you feel the need to misrepresent the findings of studies. Did you not read the abstract you linked to?
I did. How did I misrepresent it, and how am I overstating the results of the study I cited? How am I abusing the scientific method as a whole? When you make these grandiose claims it would have been nice to provide at least some form of accompanying argument, rather than just stating it as fact.
At risk of repeating myself... You've taken a study that looked specifically at tenure-track faculty hiring within four STEM subjects, i.e. a very specific, limited, scope. You then presented that as "evidence" in a general context (in reply to a point about hiring in general being biased against women) in order to argue that the hiring process is biased against men, without any mention of the limited scope of that study.
The way I see it, one of these things is true;
(a) You made a mistake, fair enough, no big deal
(b) You're unfamiliar interpreting studies, fair enough, no big deal
(c) You're misrepresenting science to further an agenda
Given your vociferous objections to affirmative action I'm guessing (c) but happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.
(d) You are deeply embedded in an ideology and therefore not able to deal with facts in an unbiased way. Had the results of that study been the reverse, the study would have been fantastic since it is objectively much stronger than any of the studies you cited.
All you are saying is that due to bad luck during upbringing, some people have less merit than others. Furthermore this bad luck is not statistically independent of various other characteristics.
Why does this imply that meritocracy is not great?
You do realize that the term meritocracy is literally a joke, right? I mean, it was actually invented as a joke by a sociologist, who's apparently not very observant because he'd assumed everyone would get it. Obviously, every 'cracy believes that it's a meritocracy; the only defining characteristic of one that actually calls itself meritocracy is a lack of self awareness. The word meritocracy sounds to me exactly the same way "positive energies" sounds to me and you; it makes me laugh because it is a word that expresses absolutely nothing but the cluelessness of those who may use it with a straight face (the only difference is that "positive energies" wasn't originally invented by a physicist as a joke, while meritocracy was).
I mean, a noble family really did have a greater relative contribution to the economy and to society than a common family (or, at least, could have been said to have a greater contribution by the norms of the time) -- until it didn't, and that's when things changed. It's not like previous societies realized that they're not meritocracies; they utterly and truly believed that their system was the best possible one (and they could prove it!) and that there are people who are less represented in positions of power is just bad luck. No society (that lasted long) has ever said, let's put all the people with real talent at the bottom. It's only when resources were allocated differently due to political action (or natural disaster, like the black death) talent "suddenly" grew where everyone had until then known little talent could be found (and they were right: there was little talent because talent requires cultivation to become effective).
So I guess you're against trying to find a cure for cancer.
BTW, it's pretty funny that you call systematic bias a "label", yet bad luck is something that seems sufficiently explanatory to you. It seems to me that "bad luck" is a label that you apply to something that you don't wish to study because you just don't care. It's bad luck that humans can't fly. It's bad luck that people die of the flu. As pretty much everything humans do is try to eradicate things that could be labelled as bad luck, actually using that term is essentially yelling "I don't care about this! I like things as they are!"
Can you do the same (or even provide a coherent definition of) systemic bias? If so, you may convince me it is worth studying. Im unconvinced it is even well defined, since I've never seen a definition that advocates of it consistently apply.
> Can you do the same (or even provide a coherent definition of) systemic bias?
Easily! But just as your reasoning is completely dependent on an axiomatic value (death is bad), so is mine: That many people's freedom to cultivate, explore and express their talents is hindered by those in power (positive claim) is bad because freedom is good (normative claim), therefore we should study how those restrictions work so we can remove them.
But don't get me wrong: the distribution of power will change (it always does), yet inequality will grow again (it always does; a dynamic system that is not perfectly balanced and that includes positive feedback loops will always go out of balance) and this process will be repeated. I know this because pretty much all of history has been this way: inequality grows; social strife grows; people demand change; others first politely and then less so explain to them that that is scientifically/theologically impossible or that things are best as the are; after a lot of struggle things change and power shifts; inequality grows and so on and so forth.
> Im unconvinced it is even well defined, since I've never seen a definition that advocates of it consistently apply.
You are right in the sense that "systemic bias" is a term invented to explain to laymen what "bias" is. To social researchers, it's clear that all social bias (where "social" means "not exploding volcano in one town and not in another") is "systemic" (whatever that means). It really means nothing more than "a result of social dynamics disproportionately directed by those with power", and even that is a definition for laymen because obviously, that's what power is, so it really means "a result of social dynamics". But even that is redundant because every social phenomenon is a result of social dynamics (that's what a social phenomenon means), so it really just means "bias". Personally, I hate the term "systemic bias" because "systemic" may suggest either a bureaucratic bias or something dictated by law or decree.
The theme of the series is basically how societal power dynamics play out on a multi-millennial timescale. The author called the series Dune after he noticed that, from above, sand dunes form a wave pattern over the land, so suddenly something he had only thought about at a local level had much greater meaning from this higher perspective of time. Anyway I thought it seemed up your alley. The first novel is a classic but it just scrathes the surface thematically.
> You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender.
This distinction results from a poor understanding of what you call the "collectivist view". This approach does not view a social group as a constructive set -- a tribe as you call it -- but as an empirical, emergent set. The idea is that certain shared experiences that arise in society create a correlation of viewpoints and goals. Note that this isn't a statistical construct alone but also a social construct. If social dynamics give rise to certain shared experiences, then the shared experience would likely give rise to certain shared views and goals. Once again, this is not a philosophical question, but an empirical one. It either really happens or it doesn't.
Either women statistically have common goals or they don't (they do). This isn't a tribe also because a single person can be part of many such correlative social groups. A woman could be working-class and share goals with other working-class people (men and women).
In other words, I don't think that there is a difference in philosophy, but a difference in a philosophy vs. empiricism. One side says that philosophically every individual is on his own (based on the premises that the people holding this view seem to accept), while the other groups says, well, maybe, but in practice there are clear group dynamics that arise and can be seen empirically.
> One woman isn't really helped by another woman being in the government.
How do you know?
> The tribal point of view does the opposite: rather than de-emphasising characteristics irrelevant to the situation at hand, it amps up those characteristics in a tribal us-vs-them conflict situation.
Nah I think that that's just the common description among those who oppose the liberal view, and is usually a result of failing to notice what the demands really are. It's not us-vs.-them but a group that is empirically and statistically found to have opposing interests to those of another group. What you call "tribal conflict" is either empirically found to be real or it isn't; I don't think it can be argued against based on some philosophical notion.
For example, statistically and empirically women get pregnant more often then men. Statistically and empirically, the father is less likely to care for the child than the woman. As a result, statistically and empirically, issues relating to abortion, contraceptives or day care affect the lives of women more than men.
For example, statistically and empirically women get sexually assaulted and harassed more than men. Statistically and empirically, then, issues relating to sexual harassment/assault laws matter affect the lives of women more than men.
For example, statistically and empirically, women get paid less than men for doing the same job. Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws.
>Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws.
I don't think that actually follows:
1. People are perfectly capable of caring for injustices they don't experience personally. E.g. men being interested in pay-equity laws not because it would benefit them, but because of a belief that they are necessary for a just society.
2. People are also perfectly capable of acting against their best interests. E.g. women being against pay-equity laws because <insert reason why women "deserve" to be paid less>.
Which is why I said statistically and empirically. As to men caring about this too, this is obviously possible, but even if they care, they are less affected, so they may prioritize it less. Like the joke about the chicken and the pig vis-a-vis breakfast: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!
I am quite affected by pay equality. The presence of it with my current employers means that we have much better demographic representation here. We're able to retain a lot of good engineers/scientists that happen to be women or minorities, that at a previous employer would have left due to the pay disparity (or silently or loudly suffered, affecting work performance and morale).
I simply mean that some time between 300 BC and 2016 AD somebody figured out that the human mind is great at explaining pretty much anything, so between bouts of solemn cogitation we might want to check out what's really going on in the real world just to make sure that we're on the right track.
Logic is obviously necessary, but as today we know that our universe is not a logical tautology, just one of many possible-Kripke-worlds, different models for the logic can lead to different results, so opening the window from time to time to see which of the possible worlds we actually live in is a good idea.
> If women are to have equal say on the goings-on's of society they need to partake in the upper echelons of power equally (Government, Corporate Leadership, STEM positions etc.)
But, I'd like to point out that the lack of women in STEM fields is about decision-making power and not necessarily equity. Women aren't fighting for equity in garbage collection jobs either.
If women are to have equal say on the goings-on's of society they need to partake in the upper echelons of power equally (Government, Corporate Leadership, STEM positions etc.).