It's quite bizarre - if they refuse to name the actual country where the study took place, then why compare it to the US? Why not to Russia or Brazil, or some other random country, drawn out of a hat?
Why even include "old boys' club", in the title, when that's a term mostly associated with the anglosphere? Wouldn't "Guanxi [1]: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap" be more appropriate, given that the study took place in Asia?
The fact that something is immensely difficult doesn't make success more likely, it makes it less likely. The parent comment is saying that the study didn't achieve success, which is supported by your claim that sociological work is up against tremendous challenges.
An analogy would be if someone claimed to invent a perpetual motion machine, and then responded to someone who was saying that their machine didn't work with, "you try building one, then."
A better analogy would be someone trying to debunk the theory of relativity by claiming it doesn't cover perpetual motion machines.
That's an overly generous interpretation of their comments. See deogeo's post with some questions about why many of these things are even mentioned in the paper. Where they were upfront has already been acknowledged--by me. My criticisms were where they implied, but did not support a comparison to US-based finance companies generally. Here they were 'upfront' but they shrank what should be several papers worth of arguments into a single word: 'similar'.
> A better analogy would be someone trying to debunk the theory of relativity by claiming it doesn't cover perpetual motion machines.
If you think this is a better analogy, you've missed the point entirely.
"the data necessary for the analysis, such as paygrades, demographics and manager assignments, are probably available for most large organizations. We hope this methodology will be applied to other firms, countries, and industries, which will help to generalize the findings and identify where these biases are more or less problematic"
If I sound that way to you, it's probably because of your own biases.
> The paper is very upfront that more studies should be done in other countries:
You aren't even addressing the part of the paper I criticized. You haven't even acknowledged it exists, but you expect to, what, convince me or others that I'm wrong by throwing random quotes my way and calling me names?
In the section 3.1 Institutional Context, the paper explicitly compares the bank and the country to firms in the United States and the United States respectively over a handful of values. There's no explanation given for why the United States specifically was compared against nor is rationale given for the selection or exclusion of points of comparison. A reader has to conclude that they felt these were the relevant points of comparison because these were the things likely to affect their results.
This necessarily implies generalization. Any other interpretation can only make sense if we disbelieve their results or find their comparison criteria between firms and countries lacking.
>Your comment suggests you don't really understand the immense challenge of doing sociological work in a way that's both ethical and useful.
The fact that it is immensely challenging does not make the assumptions any less liable to be false. Please re-read GP's comment and refrain from attacking him/her on a personal level.
The study still has value even if they didn't perfectly study 100% of the world. It provides a useful datapoint for other researchers to build upon.
If there's a study about differences between men and women, it will only be published if it can be spun such that the women are better.
In a sitcom, the husband will always be the dunce of the family, and the wife is always the steady, responsible one.
If there's a problem affecting genders differently, it'll always be presented as affecting the women more, while the men's suffering is simply ignored. This can reach absurd levels. E.g. Women's share of university degrees recently passed 60%. The media spin? "It's so terrible these women won't be able to find men educated enough to satisfy them."
The reason is simple. All these academics and journalists are under watch from cultural police. If any of them ever wrote something that indicated men were better in any way or context, or were victimized by women in any way, they'd be subjects to a brutal and likely cryptic personal destruction campaign by feminist activists.
While this sentiment is true in extreme cases, I think the problem is more subtle. What we are seeing is the momentum of decades of institutional bias in soft science academia. The current status quo is propped up by activist researchers who believe in what they're doing and are either unaware of the bias in their research or believe it is acceptable in consideration of the greater good.
So if you attempt to publish a paper against the political grain of your discipline, you may not be attacked by Twitter feminists, but you will likely see support from colleagues in your department wane, and your academic career could suffer as a result. This implicitly keeps people "in line".
It is even way more outspoken in media programing aimed at children where positive male rolemodels are almost completely absent.
in an era where news is constant and instantaneously accessible, it's easy to find an almost limitless source of examples to support basically any narrative - and humans have a tendency to prefer narratives in which their ingroup is the victim. the plural of anecdote often turns out to be a victim complex. I think it's important to try to avoid this tendency. Those who are truly intellectually honest know that there's no battle between the evil aggressors and the blameless victims, there's a bunch of shitty people and nice people doing nice things and shitty things and mostly responding to local incentives.
My purely anecdotal experience is that women (in both business and personal lives) are more likely to have protracted conflicts with other women at work than men.
I always wonder how that plays out / if it is even true.
I wonder if any culture has this differently.
s/a woman/an employee/
I’ve seen more male careers hampered by vindictive bosses than female.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm
Just by eyeballing this chart, I'd say that women outnumber men in at least a quarter of the categories, and I'd bet there are close to another quarter that are pretty close to 50/50, where inferences drawn from the behaviors of the genders wouldn't be wrong solely because of the distribution of men and women. And given that the total percentage of women employed is 46%, many of the male dominated fields have to be offset by female dominated fields or else it wouldn't be close to 50/50.
This isn't to say there is anything like perfect equality, but men outnumbering women in pretty much any industry is much too strong of a statement, in my opinion.
If we get into the level of jobs women work, it gets very different.
Possibly the visibility is somehow seen by some as a negative.
It's 45 pages so I can't read it until later, but maybe someone else can.
>We show that these manager effects are present only if the employee works in close proximity to the manager.
If remote male managers are equivalent to local female managers, it seems natural to phrase it as they have done.