Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

His arguments seem to fall into two categories to me:

- Women are cited less

- Women publish less.

Other people are addressing the first... and how his statistics aren't sufficient to show a lack of bias.

I think the second is on even weaker grounds. That could easily be the result of discrimination by professors, collaborators, reviewers, etc. in deciding who to work with, how early to try and get students work published, whether to accept or reject something for publication, etc. I have no real evidence for this, he has no real evidence against it.

If I was going to expect discrimination somewhere in the process. It would be professors and collaborators who actually see the person they are working with. And it would be by people reading papers many years later based on the reputation of the authors name instead of the content of the paper. Neither of which are disproven by any of his slides.

That said - I find the fanatical attacks from the side I am currently arguing for far worse than the work itself. Ignoring and punishing people for opinions isn't just wrong, it encourages them to hold the opinions more strongly in secret. Open discussion is key, and we should know that as a society by now

>That could easily be the result of discrimination by professors, collaborators, reviewers, etc.

Your go-to analysis of this data is that there's a grand conspiracy of misogynistic discrimination? I'm finding it really hard to imagine anyone deciding not to cite a paper on the sole basis that they saw a female name in the authorship.

Conspiracy implies co-operation and planning. The far stronger argument for this is pervasive unconscious bias.

Edit: You added your second sentence after I posted this (that's fine, I do the same sometimes)

And indeed, his slides agree with you. There appears to be no substantial bias towards citing recent work by women. So that doesn't really counter what I said except in the sub-case of older papers.

That sub-case could easily be explained by there being a bias towards citing older work of people considered to be the key people in a field (I would expect so), and a bias against considering women to be the key people in the field. That second bias could be explained by a bias against considering people with female names key people in the field, or it could be considered a bias against considering people with fewer papers (see data/previous arguments for this) key people in the field, or both.

This is a giant unsupported hypothesis. I don't pretend otherwise. It seems to be just as supported as the hypothesis that women are just worse at physics then men though.

pervasive unconscious bias towards...citing relevant facts in your peer-reviewed research papers?

In, unconciously, slecting these facts for your paper and ignoring others. And with facts being facts even peer-review only helps you so much. Also it was just a talk / presentation and no peer-reviewed paper. He's a physicist and not in social sciences after all.

Here's a useful list, in case you're interested:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~srugheimer/Women_in_STEM_Resour...

Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell, and Rosalind Franklin would like to have a word with you...

To be fair, only one of them still could.

Setting aside that the mere existence of unconscious bias is still a matter of debate on an universal level, it's baffling that people still think this accusation is a valid argument on an individual level. You have to prove it exists. The accused does not need to prove he or she is free of bias.

I work in a Psychology department that has some members who specialize in the study of various kinds of bias, and I can assure you that unconscious bias is very real, and measurable in ways that I honestly can't find any reasonable way to claim measure anything else.

Look up the Implicit Association Test for a good example of this. I've taken it, and while it wasn't exactly a shocker to me to discover that I have an unconscious bias against black people (I grew up in an area that had maybe 5 of them, and despite my very liberal upbringing, our society and culture still label black people as "other" and "dangerous"), it was eye-opening to be able to see the effect so clearly.

I had the same experience after moving to the US for the first time. I'd never had a personal interaction with somebody of color, and all my views had been shaped by what I'd seen on American TV (typically not flattering, in the 80s/90s).

IATs are a good example for the immaturity in this area. It's a test designed to create the desired results. Switch the good/bad/black/white categories with any other two categories and I will take the bet you will get the same results.

The Implicit Association Test is - shall we say, non-scientific. Because the results depend on the ordering of the associated categories[1]

Psychology has too long been a field where people draw a conclusion first and then create some experiment or hypothesis to support it. It is only now with the advent of analytics that we are shedding light on this quackery.

[1] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=22...

I posit that your bias is more likely due to you not being black rather than not being around them while growing up, and your reaction to a person of color is an a priori programming which simply tells you "not my tribe." Feelings following that, however, are what you as an individual and, to a lesser extent, what society dictate.

I'm not a fan of his talk, but I wanna be honest about its contents.

That's the kernels of coherency we can extract from his slides (found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...). In reality he literally argues "conservative theory vs cultural marxism." He reuses Damore's claim of "preferences" with a cite to a humanities paper from the 1800s (talk about a replication crisis), and uses this newish claim of σ=1.15 on an IQ distribution which is not faring well in peer review.

He does specifically try to argue that women are cited equally when they are listed contributors. This argument is of course plagued by historical evidence he doesn't really care to refute, let alone address.

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