[BlackAura]

The belief that ideas can be judged in a vacuum is a very different thing than ideas actually being judged in a vacuum.

Ideas are not judged in a vacuum - humans are rubbish at doing that. We allow various factors to influence how we evaluate ideas, even when those factors have nothing to do with the idea itself. Race and gender being very obvious ones.

Example: In a meeting, a woman comes up with an idea. Everyone ignores her. Thirty seconds later, a man says the exact same thing, and suddenly everyone is in awe about how amazing this idea is.

And yes, that does happen. A lot.

However, most of us believe that we aren't doing this. We believe that we're evaluating ideas on merit alone, and are therefore completely blind to the fact that we're not. Humans are rubbish at being objective, but very good at fooling ourselves into believing that we are.

The only way to approach evaluating ideas on merit is to be aware of one's own biases, one's own point of view, various power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and all that stuff. Once you're aware of what you're actually doing, you can try to factor that into how you evaluate ideas.

[yellowapple]

I guess that makes more sense, though I'd argue that not having the necessary information to make those biases could result in ideas actually being judged in a vacuum (how can you be biased against someone if your subconscious is incapable of knowing whether that someone is subject to its biases?). This is part of the reason why the "hacker" subculture (if the Jargon File is anything to go by) claims itself to be more egalitarian than other STEM-oriented subcultures; since a lot of collaboration is entirely text-based, it doesn't invoke gender/racial biases (or at least does so far less often).

Basically, in the scenario you've described, if the "meeting" is instead a discussion on, say, an IRC channel, then as long as the participants are anonymous, there shouldn't be any reason for bias to occur (and even when they aren't anonymous, I'd hypothesize that - due to the lack of stimuli reinforcing those biases, like visual confirmation of race or gender - bias will be significantly diminished).

[BlackAura]

> not having the necessary information to make those biases could result in ideas actually being judged in a vacuum

Potentially, yes. It certainly can happen, but it can also go horribly wrong for a whole variety of reasons.

In online discussions, people's ideas tend to be judged based on how well the person proposing them conforms to the norms of the group. Which is part of the reason most online communities tend to develop a kind of hive mind - everyone who sticks around shares the same opinions as the group, because the group chases off anyone who dissents, either by making the environment unwelcoming, or outright harassing people.

It's part of the reason the hacker subculture isn't as egalitarian as it likes to believe. Even if everyone's anonymous (or at least using a pseudonym), it's still composed almost entirely of nerdy, reasonably well off straight white guys, mostly from the US. The reason for that is a reflection of external social forces which don't exactly exist inside hacker subculture, but strongly influenced who was able to participate in it. That creates an extremely homogenous group, which is reflected in the way hacker culture developed.

It's not deliberate, but it can feel like a hostile environment to outsiders. Which can make outsiders avoid it like the plague. Since there are no outsiders, members of the group never hear their perspective, nor do they ever realize that there's a problem, because they assume that they're being egalitarian.

That's not universal, and it's much less common in groups that have always been diverse from the very beginning. If you have a group with significant numbers of women, for example, they will tend to object (much more loudly than in real life) when someone says something sexist. The group culture that develops tends to be one that does not tolerate sexism.

In that kind of environment, you tend to be able to have discussions where everyone is listened to, and their ideas judged on merit, for precisely the reasons you suggest. It's all text based, and there's no stimuli to re-enforce your biases that you carried with you from the outside world.

However, that can only be done if you don't allow the group's culture to become a reflection of the outside world's culture. Which is what happens if you just ignore it.

[michaelbuddy]

> And yes, that does happen. A lot.

You don't seem to have a grasp of the real world here. What actually happens is that people will take credit or get credit from other's ideas regardless of gender. That's what happens a lot. It's only your own bias that you think it's noticeably women being the victims. Welcome to the world of equal opportunity.

[BlackAura]

And I should believe you, rather than the women to whom this happens all the time, because... why?

[skissane]

I just asked my partner if this ever happened to her. She told me that it did once, but it was a female colleague who did it to her, not a man. I asked her if a man ever did it to her, she said she couldn't remember that ever occurring.

[morpheous]

Drawing conclusions from a sample size of 1. Never a good practise

[skissane]

I didn't draw any conclusions, I just shared my partner's experiences without any further comment.

I don't doubt some women have had the experience BlackAura is referring to. But I don't believe it is universal either, since my partner does not report having that experience. As to what percentage of women have experienced this: I don't know, and no one in this conversation has produced an answer to that question.

[smallworld]

The fact that your partner does not report having that experience does not literally mean that she has not had that experience. There are several possible reasons for this, and I do not want you to think I am passing judgement, but your statement is not convincing on its own.

I have watched this happen to women who were oblivious - who behave as though men stealing women's ideas is the proper way of reality, and yet they will loudly voice an objection when a woman does the same.

[dropit_sphere]

A defense I'm not sure I believe, but one worth being aware of, at least:

Could this simply be people exercising Bayesian reasoning? If we postulate that men come up with more out-of-band good ideas (which I don't find hard to believe, as they come up with more out-of-band everything, including bad ideas), then people's priors will change to reflect that.

What I am saying is that this may in fact be rational, whatever your (or my) opinions on its rightness.

[BlackAura]

I suspect that would be a post-hoc rationalization. One of the ways we fool ourselves into believing that we're being rational, when we really aren't.

Men are more likely to pipe up with ideas - good or bad - because they are culturally encouraged to do so. Women are discouraged from sharing their ideas, and are frequently either ignored, or possibly even punished for it.

In addition, people tend to interpret the same behavior differently between men and women. For example, I saw a debate recently with a few men and one woman. After the debate, people (both men and women) were complaining about the woman, claiming the kept interrupting, and that she was rude, and wasn't listening.

Funny thing - she interrupted once, out of sheer desperation because her opponent wouldn't allow her to speak, was polite, and listened to everything her opponent had to say. Her opponent, on the other hand, had been praised for being more mature and rational, despite constantly interrupting, talking over the top of his opponent, and being extremely condescending.

These kinds of biases actually color our perceptions, without us realizing.

That's what's insidious about these kinds of rationalzations. They superficially seem reasonable, but they pretty much just reduce to either "men are just better than women at X", or "that's just the way things are, deal with it", and they do not hold up to scrutiny. However, they are intuitively rational-feeling enough to convince people that there's not a problem anymore. There is, but they just don't want to confront it.