[steego]

Let's qualify it by posting a link which demonstrates gender bias when people read the same resume with a different name.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...

This is hardly the only study. There are many more.

My favorite was the law students from second tier schools where males who signaled coming from middle class backgrounds had a huge statistically disadvantage from males signalling wealth.

The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...

Bias and prejudice are real and evaluating people is hard. To make things worse, your brain likes to save energy by substitution rigorous evaluation with heuristic evaluation and then convince itself it did the rigorous work.

The problem isn't gender discrimination is rife, it's that thousands of forms of discrimination is rife because heuristic-based discrimination is what we excel at, not rigorous evaluation.

I hope that didn't make it more touchy.

[peak_body_yo]

> The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.

Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed. It used male hobbies for both males and females. Rich females don't generally sail. I think their stereotypical activity would be humanitarian efforts.

And if it wasn't flawed, what conclusions do you draw from the study? Lower class women did 5 times better than lower class men. The lower class is many times larger than the upper class, so only a tiny percent of men enjoy the the upper class privilege while most men are doing terribly.

Looking at the big picture by aggregating the lower and upper class, women do better than men.

> http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-....

I'll give this some legitimacy but it's one study and not completely convincing. It can't be generalized outside of science research positions.

One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.

[ThomPete]

Exactly. What most people forget that while men are in the top of society they are also in the bottom.

[peak_body_yo]

I think that there is a decent case that upper class men do enjoy gender based privileges. But then people use that as evidence that all males are privileged and it's just not true. I mean it would be great if there was a chance that I could become a CEO or an exec, but 99.99% of people won't so it doesn't matter to most males if all execs and CEOs are male.

On the disparate power dynamic, I doubt the males with power care about the wellbeing of the other 99.99% of males. They will look out for the interests of super high class males which may not overlap with the interests of lower class males.

I think that non high class females benefit much more than non high class males from the power of super high class males. The super high class males will spend time around females and make transfer payments in the services industry. Sugar babes, prostitutes, strippers, webcaming, regular waitresses, etc. They are more likely to enjoy the wealth of high power males and have a much easier time forming a relationship (romantic or platonic) with a super high class male.

[ThomPete]

Of course they do mostly for historical reasons which are changing and partly because of industry choices.

Most structural issues are gone today and those that are left benefit women as much as men. In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards.

[steego]

> Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed.

Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.

Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.

People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)

This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.

All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.

It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.

> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.

Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.

[ThomPete]

If you add middle eastern sounding names the same result happens.

Yes we have biases all of us but they are certainly not by any metrics confined to only women. Try being +40 in Silicon Valley, try being black or latino male on WallStreet, try making it as a hip-hop artist as a black guy. Try being fat in the fashion industry, try being a nerd in high-school.

The world is rife with bias and prejudice against all sorts of "these are not like me" but the solution is not and have never been to force quotas through whether in board rooms or on the job market.

If you want to change things changes them at their root cause. Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks so that they are less depending on existing ones. Teach them not to excel at school as that doesn't really matter but to learn how to sell themselves. Teach them that if a job posting names 10 skills and they have all but two it's still a job for them.

These are the real barriers to entry not modern day companies light biases.