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Comment by lenticular | Hacker News Reader

Subconscious gender/racial biases, which absolutely everyone has, are so devilish because they take conscious effort to overcome.

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Surely the effect is just as likely to flow in the complete opposite direction: male CEOs who perform better gain deeper voices, or there is a common factor affecting both; and of course, the effect is measured specifically among male CEOs.

I doubt it is anywhere near just as likely to flow in the opposite direction. It's not like masculine white males are favored just because of their voice pitch. That ideal as the ideal of power is deeply ingrained in our society.

More generally, humans will basically always show bias towards those in more dominant groups, because currying favor with such people is a far better winning strategy than being nice to low-status individuals. Whether the Hutus and Tutsis, white and black, masculine male vs effeminate, etc, it always is the same.

This is just an unfortunate thing about the human brain, but we can use our reasoning ability to correct it. But first, we have to accept hat it exists.

Why would it be unfortunate that masculine men are preferred in some roles to effeminate men? I don't see the moral issue of such a preference.

We're talking about employment here. Masculine vs. feminine has nothing to do with job performance except in maybe porn or something.

If masculine men are preferred, then that means everyone else isn't. It's an obvious avenue for discrimination against women and LGBT people.

I'm a very masculine gay man (I'm just stating that as a fact, I'm not better than anyone else for it). I do know many more effeminate gay men. Things really are more difficult in the workplace for them especially, not jut in my experience, but empirically. I'm glad I don't have that affect because it makes my life easier, but biases like this can creep in and will always be damaging.

> We're talking about employment here. Masculine vs. feminine has nothing to do with job performance except in maybe porn or something.

That seems like a baseless assertion to me, what makes you so certain that masculinity or correlated factors have no effect on job performance for male CEOs?

There's a ton of overt misogyny and sexism in the U.S., nothing "subconscious" about it.

For sure, but at least overt discrimination is much more easily remedied by social ostracism or legal means.

This is an uncharitable interpretation of the comment about sexism & racism. I’m African American, yet the last time I took an implicit association test it showed I’m biased against African Americans. Yeah there’s a lot of conscious bias in the U.S., but we live in a culture with deep seated misogyny and racism that can effect even well meaning people.

This is a really good point. Women also show tend to show bias towards men, and gay men often show bias towards straight men. It's kind of an instinctual thing to suck up to the powerful.

I agree, however I think it's important that we do not use "implicit bias" as a cover. Implicit bias seems very vague and allows people to evade responsibility. I think there's a lot of very explicit bias (in the form of sexist attitudes, discrimination, biased hiring practices, etc) that need to be tackled. The "implicit bias" narrative (that a lot of tech CEOs are a fan of) makes me uncomfortable because it depoliticizes the issue, chalking it up so something more innately human (our biases and mistakes) rather than sexist attitudes and policies.

Implicit bias tests are not valid at the individual level.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-as...

From what I've observed, there's far more overt misandry than misogyny.

The U.S. president has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. He has called women bitches, whores, fat pigs, ugly, etc. Multiple states in the south passed legislation effectively banning abortion, stripping women of their sexual and bodily autonomy. Where is there open, institutional misandry of this level?

Critiquing male power and men's sexist behavior towards women is not "misandry"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19906722

Please let's not do the generic gender flamewar thing.

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