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A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

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101–108 of 108 posts

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#101

Another funny fact about the 'halo effect' discussed here: when rating individuals for aptitude on a variety of tasks, straight men have a positive bias towards attractive women, whereas straight women have a negative bias towards attractive women (a kind of 'jealousy' phenomenon). This jealousy phenomenon seems less apparent when it's straight men rating men.

Or perhaps, women knowing that women often get promoted on their looks, and aware that good looking women tend to have a warped interaction with reality, are doing the right thing by nuking their chances.

There have been several eye opening AMAs on reddit where people had things like gender changes, or went from attractive women to not attractive, and suddenly realizing that they had essentially been in a bubble.

Heck I was just discussing this recently with a Neuro Science PHD student and she had had the same realization - coming in to work one day she needed help carrying stuff, and multiple people volunteered to help along her way. She reached work telling her co-workers that reality was amazing and that her faith in Humanity had been restored.

A colleague pointed out that thats not normal - and asked her what sex all the volunteers were - they were universally male.

Attractive women tend to end up in a bubble of sorts, and it has a distorting impact on their interaction and expectations of normal behavior.

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#102
post #72

Anecdotal, but in my experience smart girls are uglier and cute girls are stupider. This is verified by comparing 2 groups: nightclub girls and science research nerd girls. As a group the nerd girls are uglier on average, because there are several severely plain nerd girls, though an individual nerd girl may be very attractive. As a group the disco girls are stupider on average, because there are several severely dit…

You are very off track. All the evidence I've ever come across points to the opposite conclusion: there is a positive correlation between beauty and intelligence. A few seconds of googling turned this up: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament... I've seen actual journal articles on the matter as well. Facial symmetry is influenced by genetics, the oxygenation of the womb, as well as other facto…

'Judging by your incredibly stereotyped conceptions of "disco" girls'

Go down to eg Thai Square nightclub in Trafalgar Square, London UK on midnight Friday or Saturday and tell me what you see.

'silly, evidence free post'

I never claimed evidence, I claimed anecdotal experience. Go down to the EE PhD labs in eg Imperial College, London UK, any time of the day, any time of the week, and tell me what you see. I bet you the girls in there would be offended by comparison to the Thai Square girls.

'you might not be particularly smart or attractive'

Stay off the ad-hominems asshole.

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#103
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 Questions then: A) Do you disagree with my position on effort? B) How else is one going to encounter this phenomenon in real life? C) How should I correctly test the hypothesis?

Gather an unbiased representative sample of the population. Rate their intelligence and appearance. Plot a graph. I'll also make the following observations. Girls in a club may appear dumber than they are because they're drunk and having silly fun. Girls in a research lab are quite possibly wearing less makeup than they would wear to a club. It's entirely possible you're looking at the same set of girls, but aren't r…

"Girls in a research lab are quite possibly wearing less makeup"

Well I think that's my point. The girls in the club put in quite a lot of effort in makeup and dress, and are tottering around in high heels, to make themselves more attractive. (I've seen girls put themselves through comical levels of suffering merely for the sake of wearing heels.)

The girls in the research lab are probably instead putting that effort into reading research papers to make themselves better informed. They may well be wearing lab safety gear.

"It's entirely possible you're looking at the same set of girls"

Maybe, somehow I doubt researchers have the time to get out of lab though.

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#104
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a line in the John Adams miniseries where the Continental Congress had just selected Washington to lead the army. Ben Franklin turns to Adams and says: "he was bound to lead something; he's the tallest man in the room". Apocryphal, sure. A clever mnemonic, you bet.

Mnemonic?

The scene itself (or the lines themselves) is (are) the mnemonic, something that helps me remember height co-related with command.

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#105
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or indeed, height/attractiveness could be (almost certainly are) correlated with self-confidence and assertiveness. Which is obviously something of a chicken/egg thing.

I don't think confidence or assertiveness cause height

Heh. Indeed. The chicken-and-egg thing being, "If people like tall or attractive people, and that causes confidence or assertiveness, when tall or attractive people are promoted, is that because other people like them, or because they are confident and assertive?"

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#106
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since we already know the answer: fast-food is both affordable and calorie-dense // Fast-food is not affordable in the UK. It's substantially more costly than preparing your own food. There is no way that we could afford to eat fast-food more than a couple of nights per week; then we'd have to cut the quality of food on other nights considerably. McDonalds for one adult costs about what we spend on a meal for 4 coo…

Are you sure, on a calorie basis? McDonald's is far more calorie dense than anything a sane human could make at home.

I was going more on a regular meal portion than an analysis of calorie content, fat, salt, additives and such.

FWIW a medium bowl of noodles is 2MJ (according to WolframAlpha; tea tonight, but we had pork left-overs in ours +0.5MJ [or so, not on WA]), Big Mac is listed as 2.2MJ + 1.3MJ for fries.

So that's only 40% more calories.

Big Mac and fries is ~£3.50 in the UK.

Our food was about 35p per portion plus the pork which I'd say was 75p + cooking and cleanup costs [40p?].

On that basis we'll say £1.50 vs £3.50 for 40% more calories as a gross estimate.

So I'm not sure but ...

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#107

I have a suspicion that there's a cognitive bias at play here, whereby men unconsciously overrate the competence of attractive women and underrate the competence of unattractive women. While I have no evidence to back it up, it does a better job of passing the sniff test than the implicit assertion that men are consciously hiring unqualified women simply because they're attractive.

> a cognitive bias at play here, whereby men unconsciously overrate the competence of attractive women [...] // Only men? I don't consider it likely but it seems mathematically possible that men are entirely even handed on the appearance of women but that women are highly partial to more attractive women. That would mean that as more women entered higher echelons of companies there would be more bias towards hiring a…

I questioned whether or not to include women, and elected not to because I simply don't know enough about how their minds work. In addition, most of the people making the hiring decisions are currently men, so the influence of a cognitive bias in women on the overall makeup of the pool of employees would be considerably less than one in men. It may well be that the same bias exists in both men and women, but I strongly suspect it does in men, whereas I have no idea if it does in women.

Re: A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

#108

I'm slightly apprehensive (terrified) about commenting on this topic or any relating to gender/race because it seems like the bar for public crucifixion is somewhat low, even to those who just want to add data or other side-points to a discussion. Anyway, and I apologize in advance if I derail the topic, but I think there's a semi important distinction to qualify this discussion, because I do think the discussion app…

Unless these studies were controlled for gender - and it appears that they were not - height is just one more factor which both men and women have to contend with. And if that's the case, then attractiveness is still a lopsided standard which women deal with more.
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