High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#81

Post by cperciva » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 2:53 AM UTC

melindajb wrote: post #76

cperciva wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. She states very clearly in the last line: this is a call to action to review the language in reviews for for bias, not just the scores. Right, and I'm taking that as saying "HR should look for bias in the language used in reviews because I think they will find it ". 2. I can see you and others here very willing to accept the possibility that women just are more aggressive and that worries me about potential bias f…

I can see where you are coming from. I understand that innate perception, no matter how well intentioned, is a really hard thing to observe and think critically about in ourselves. I just want to ask you about the last line. you truly, truly have NO opinion about what you read there? you don't think there's anything amiss or disturbing at all about the apparent pattern? I confess based on that and your answer to #3,…

I believe that if I have a bias, it is that I assume good faith. But I don't think this is an incorrect bias to have, given that my experience has been that most people act in good faith most of the time.

I just want to ask you about the last line. you truly, truly have NO opinion about what you read there?

About whether the individual reviews are accurate? Only that it is most likely that the reviewers were not deliberately skewing their reviews in any direction.

you don't think there's anything amiss or disturbing at all about the apparent pattern?

Much to the contrary, it is very clear that there is a problem. What concerns me most is the possibility that the reviews are completely accurate -- since that would indicate that there is a large pool of less-aggressive women who are being overlooked during hiring or discouraged from entering the field.

you sound a bit, well like a robot

A past girlfriend told me that I reminded her of ST:TNG's Commander Data. I decided to take this as a compliment. I don't think she meant it as one.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#82

Post by clairity » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 3:33 AM UTC

chc wrote: post #78

melindajb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me understand: you think nothing of value can be determined from this study even though my entire newsfeed on facebook is full of my friends in all industries sharing it as exactly in line with their experiences?

I don't think nothing of value can be determined from the study, but I do think what clairity said can't be determined from the study. It really is entirely possible, going strictly by the findings here, that ornery women are overrepresented in this area in much the same way that upper-class white women are underrepresented among convicts. Your experience may tell you different, and your experience may very well be r…

one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented.

your desire to espouse that alternative hypothesis is another subtle form of bias that discounts an otherwise uncomfortable potential conclusion (and it's uncomfortable for both genders). which is not to put it all on you because many people (all?) carry this bias to some extent. it would really help if folks were simply open to the likelihood of bias running through us without feeling like we're all bad people because of it.

(this is the same subtle bias that urges media to "balance" the climate change issue by giving the deniers equal airtime. sure, the conclusion that climate change is due to people has a (very) small chance of being wrong, but let's spend our energy finding solutions, not trying to poke little holes in what is likely a real and serious problem.)

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#83

Post by andrewflnr » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 3:59 AM UTC

melindajb wrote: post #52

andrewflnr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cperciva did not attack the methodology at all, which would be clear if you'd thoroughly read the first sentence. He didn't really say anything that disagreed with it at all, but rather put forward a hypothesis explaining the data therein. Said hypothesis implicitly acknowledges that it is harder for women to get into the workplace. But because his phrasing happened to include the phrase "sampling bias", you got angr…

I find it telling that you jump right into assigning me an emotional response for countering his logic with my own. Do you often accuse women of being too emotional? Or too aggressive? I can tell you that I have a male named account on hacker news and it never, ever gets called too angry, or aggressive, or emotional. Try it sometime, as a woman. It's most instructive.

I'm not sure I've ever called anyone too aggressive or too emotional. I can say that you are far from the first commenter I've castigated for completely missing the point. You're still doing it. No one in this subthread is disputing that there is an issue wrt women in tech. Whatever the other evidence, there's enough smoke to indicate a fire. I was going to ask for details on your male-named account, but realized I believe you, and it doesn't change the situation.

As for deducing an emotional response, your logic was obviously[] (and self-destructively) flawed, and the usual cause for that is some sort of emotional involvement. This is completely universal. I hardly needed to know, in addition, that this an emotionally sensitive topic. Which it is, what with everyone being accused of something.

While I couldn't vouch for my specific language in previous posts, this is not the first time I've done this and I'm guessing it was mostly men before. I'll try to work on bthem more evenhanded, when it comes up; I don't like a perceptual bias any more than you do.

[] For reasons I won't bother repeating. I'll just note that you didn't bother refuting any of them and went straight for the personal attack.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#84

Post by tachyonbeam » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 4:06 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #41

cperciva wrote: post #20

My immediate thought when I saw this a few days ago was "sampling bias" -- not that the author had a biased sample of professional women, but rather that professional women are a biased sample of women. Given the social environment -- pushing both females and males away from what they might have preferred as a life trajectory -- I think it's very likely that the average professional woman is significantly more aggres…

As complete populations, girls aren't any smarter than boys on average, but in those programs the girls are always among the top students -- because it's only the most exceptional girls who overcome the social factors which keep most of their peers out of those subjects. Social factors like the assumption that women who consistently outrank their peers are 'significantly more aggressive'? I'm sure you mean well but y…

Well, as a woman doing a computer science PhD, I'll say I initially felt that my advisor didn't respect my opinions, always argued against my ideas, even though I was better informed much of the time (and that's normal, he only has a mile-high view of my thesis work). This made me angry, and I didn't hesitate to show it. I stood up for myself and I must have come off as abrasive at times. Other factors may have contributed (I'm now the most senior student in the lab), but I feel like he treats me with more respect now, and our relationship has much improved.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#85

Post by NotAtWork » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 4:57 AM UTC

melindajb wrote: post #64

NotAtWork wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You have a sampling bias in the types of people you associate. Facebook applies a filter to posts which selects for things that are popular with a wide swath of your friends and which support your political/social views (as guessed by their profiling tools). That something blows up with your friends on Facebook is usually a better indicator that it's polarizing drivel than that it's a well thought out, impactful…

Polarizing Drivel. Wow. That's pretty harsh. The author posts the data, then calls for further study. Isn't that the very basis of science? She admits fully its potential for inaccuracies and wonders aloud about its flaws. Isn't that what peer review is for? The women in tech say it feels true, and it matches their experience. So why isn't the Hacker News Community demanding a peer reviewed study and supporting it, a…

Looking at the data, I don't think the author did anything with it than see initial numbers matched her feelings, and then called on people to undertake a massive, actual study because she just know this is it.

I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.

I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.

I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.

The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.

Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#86

Post by chc » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 5:27 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #82

chc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think nothing of value can be determined from the study, but I do think what clairity said can't be determined from the study. It really is entirely possible, going strictly by the findings here, that ornery women are overrepresented in this area in much the same way that upper-class white women are underrepresented among convicts. Your experience may tell you different, and your experience may very well be r…

one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented. your desire to espouse that alternative hypothesis is another subtle form of bias that discounts an otherwise uncomfortable potential conclusion (and it's uncomfortable for both genders). which is not to put it all on you because many people (all?) carry this bias to some exte…

> one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented.

I might be setting myself up to look dumb, but I don't realize that. Obviously there's something causing the phenomenon, but as far as I can tell, the data does not contain any good clues as to what it is. It could be that people perceive women's actions differently from men's. It could be that the women in question actually are more abrasive in general than their male peers and the people's comments are an accurate reflection of reality. It could be that people perceive abrasiveness equally, but they are more likely to complain about it from women because they have lower expectations of men.

I'm not espousing any of these ideas — and I'm definitely not saying your explanation is wrong. Like I said, I don't feel qualified to support any hypothesis here. But I don't see how this study supports any hypothesis more than the others. Where do you see it?

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#87

Post by cperciva » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 7:03 AM UTC

tachyonbeam wrote: post #84

anigbrowl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As complete populations, girls aren't any smarter than boys on average, but in those programs the girls are always among the top students -- because it's only the most exceptional girls who overcome the social factors which keep most of their peers out of those subjects. Social factors like the assumption that women who consistently outrank their peers are 'significantly more aggressive'? I'm sure you mean well but y…

Well, as a woman doing a computer science PhD, I'll say I initially felt that my advisor didn't respect my opinions, always argued against my ideas, even though I was better informed much of the time (and that's normal, he only has a mile-high view of my thesis work). This made me angry, and I didn't hesitate to show it. I stood up for myself and I must have come off as abrasive at times. Other factors may have contr…

Not to discount your experiences (obviously I have no idea about the details), but I know some faculty who are dismissive of all their students' ideas -- and deliberately so, based on the argument that until a student is able to stand up for their ideas, they're not ready to receive a PhD.

Personally I think it's an unnecessarily cruel approach, but it does seem to produce good results at times.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#88

Post by tomp » Fri, Aug 29, 2014, 8:59 AM UTC

melindajb wrote: post #64

NotAtWork wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You have a sampling bias in the types of people you associate. Facebook applies a filter to posts which selects for things that are popular with a wide swath of your friends and which support your political/social views (as guessed by their profiling tools). That something blows up with your friends on Facebook is usually a better indicator that it's polarizing drivel than that it's a well thought out, impactful…

Polarizing Drivel. Wow. That's pretty harsh. The author posts the data, then calls for further study. Isn't that the very basis of science? She admits fully its potential for inaccuracies and wonders aloud about its flaws. Isn't that what peer review is for? The women in tech say it feels true, and it matches their experience. So why isn't the Hacker News Community demanding a peer reviewed study and supporting it, a…

There is almost no science in studies like this. There are so many variables, that you'd need to collect hundreds of thousands of data points to narrow down the influence on just a couple of variables... and even then, you can't be sure you've found something significant and meaningful. To do science, you need controlled experiments, and these are practically impossible to do with people. Even the well-known psychological "experiments" have been disputed in the recent years [1] [2].

[1]: parapsychology experiments cannot be disproved http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

[2]: "The Stanford Prison Experiment was flawed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073748

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#89

Post by kngspook » Sat, Aug 30, 2014, 9:20 PM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #70

bkirkbri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a pet theory that the reason that women (as well as non-traditionally-masculine men) are considered bossy, while other men are considered "go-getters" is due to a lack of the threat of violence. Not that a type-A guy is going to assault you if you don't capitulate to their authority. More that there is a perceived or possible threat. In contrast to women who would be considered bossy or abrasive because they d…

I've never heard this but the idea seems compelling! Another way to describe it might be as a mismatch between the pecking order according to our simian brains and what's on the org chart. I.e. we don't resent bossy behavior by someone we perceive as a dominant alpha, but bristle when it's someone we see as below us in the "pack".

It also seems to tangentially make sense with the bias against "smaller" men in leadership positions.

Re: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews

#90

Post by kngspook » Sat, Aug 30, 2014, 9:22 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #6

I think this is an outgrowth of our general social tendency to judge men by what they do ("he works at a hedge fund!") and women by what they're like ("she's really sweet!"). I found this paragraph in particular interesting: > Words like bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead . . . . Among these words, only aggressive shows up in men’s reviews at all. It shows…

But if you remove the other advantages/disadvantages of being female/male, and just ask someone: "Would you rather be judged on your profession/career or personality/behavior?", I think most rational people would pick the latter.