Unconscious bias in media interviews with female top managers | Hacker News Reader

Unconscious bias in media interviews with female top managers

fgsglobal.com

67 pointsdoener76 comments

This is for German media. Does anyone know of good similar research on US media?

I first noticed sexism in the US business press around the start of dotcoms, in how Kim Polese was sometimes portrayed. I mentioned it in a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29062715

I even saw it around then with how a popular science education program treated a female colleague. For all the other scientists featured on the show, it was about the work, until they got to her, then they switched format, to having the show's host in practically a romantic candlelight dinner with the female scientist. (I think there's probably a place to affirm that people can do science and embrace whatever other aspects of human experience that they choose, but this particular show's context I think might've sent an unintended message to kids, that a woman's looks are more important than her work.)

I don't know of any.

I wonder if the German gap in unconscious bias between female executives and female entrepreneurs holds true in the US.

They are talking about media interviews, not job interviews (which may not be what you expect if you're seeing this on HN)

"What journalists has to do with job interviews??"

I don't really understand on what basis they're making the claim that these differences are due to unconscious biases. The entire thing seems to be completely made up.

I agree. I tried to dig into the methodology. Best I can tell they rated on 84 points and showed the handful that were different. Also ignored what the person being interviewed said. That seems like an odd omission given that they have a significant impact on where the interview goes.

Note that their website[1] depicts twice as many working women as men (more precisely 9 women and 5 men). Perhaps due to an unconscious bias?

[1] https://fgsglobal.com/what-we-do

> When interviewing female top managers, female journalists address private topics such as family or childhood more frequently than male journalists.

This is just a sign that male journalists are self-censoring when taking interviews, not that they are not interested. We do the same with job interviews, it is obvious when doing panel interviews and some interviewers are men and some are women: the women can ask anything they want, while for men it is considered inappropriate to ask some questions.

But why don't the women ask these questions to male managers then? It's clearly a bias.

Biology is biased. Basic stuff, pregnancy and lactation. Then there are emotional issues, the special bond between the mother and her infants, which can lead to life-long emotional disability issues, if not handled properly.

See e.g. https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-theory "This provided a clear indication that emotional attachment in infancy, gained through cuddling, affected the monkey’s later responses to stress and emotion regulation (Herman, 2012)."

Sadly, we run our society by Powerpoint, obsessively focusing on a handful of poorly measured metrics. We have trained entire generations to reflexively point out any differences in those metrics as "bias", with a very negative connotation. Edit: Consider using a less charged word, e.g. "difference".

It is only human to give women space to be women.

In the context of the thread you're in, are you trying to argue that men have no emotional attachment to family or childhood, or that they have no impact on the people around them?

I think he means, in general, that biological men cannot equivalently fill the role in an infant/child's life that biological women can.

> unconscious bias

How much unconscious in journalist's understanding that it'a a man or woman is in front?

From what I see, women usually talk differently with women than with men. Probably it's natural (or not?).

It also doesn't make sense as a claim.

Who's said it's unconscious?

It might not only be entirely conscious but desirable.

And men also talk differently with other men than with women. And that's completely natural and adequate and not something that has to be fixed.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted - it’s ABSOLUTELY true. And if you think it isn’t, ask yourself, would you rather see a female counselor or a male one? I personally prefer to talk about personal topics with women. I don’t feel as comfortable opening up on that stuff around men - even though I am one.

Is it really unconscious? Isn't it a given that how you come off would dictate how others interact with you? And isn't it obvious that women have different countenance than men?

I am not justifying it mind you, I am just pointing out that gender is not special in this rather explicit bias that you are expected to be a certain type if a person based on appearance.

I hope it isn't appropriate to say this but I would be interested to see how biased interviews are when the woman is a lesbian who wears masculines clothing (jeans or plaid shirt or a manly suit). Would they still ask about family and such?

I'm not surprised. People are different.

I've been part of studies throughout the game industry, the highest performing engineering teams are usually males of similar cultural background. But it's so unpc, we avoid hiring them directly. We usually hire them thru their consulting groups for the very difficult engine tasks

Where did you get that from the article?

It's not saying "women are different than men", it's saying "journalists treat female managers less professionally than male ones".

And also that "journalists treat female executives at established companies more critically than female founders" which is an interesting and perhaps somewhat counterintuitive point.

Probably wanted to push for this: “males of similar cultural background”. Cant even begin to imagine the toxicity of that place.

Having spent 20 years writing code, I have no idea how to measure “performance”.

Is it “lines of code written”?

Is it “technical debt addressed”?

Is it a measure of how many engineers grew in those roles?

Does it measure how many engineers burned out after a year?

Does it measure projects with reasonable starting estimates?

Does it focus only on the products that sold well, or does it also include games that bombed?

When it's industry specific it's easier to measure. Game engines are very specialized beasts that have a very high degree of math, physics, and algos for shortcuts. Then getting it working on very specific hardware.

> easier to measure

Still forgot to mention how it's measured?

And presumably if these were studies they were published?

> the highest performing engineering teams are usually males of similar cultural background.

So, in an industry that 95% of employees are men you find that the top performing are men? I recommend that you take a look at Bayes theorem. It explains your bias and how you are misinterpreting your observation.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

I have to say, I do think I have judged my female managers more harshly than I have my male ones. Maybe it was because it was easier to communicate with male ones. Anyone else retrospectively think they might have been unfair to their female managers?

Mixed bag. I had good ones and bad ones. However, the bad ones were worse than bad male managers. I noticed that they were exceptionally aggressive.

Perhaps I am better at enduring bad male managers than their female counterparts.

It's fairly common for women to come across as aggressive for doing exactly the same things a man would.

This is because historically aggressiveness is a male attribute, so when it is present in women it stands out and the perception is amplified. It is the same when a woman is as tall as a man, for example.

Is the reverse true too? Female attributes on a male is amplified?

It does seem like things are getting better, but certainly when I was growing up almost any behavior the slightest bit feminine in a male was called out as “gay”. The phrases “act like a man” or “real man” are often not just valorizing masculine traits but admonishing feminine ones. So, I’d say very yes.

Yes - you can look at the long history of feminine men getting bullied, no matter their age. Or the decision for eyeliner-wearing men to not wear it to work. (My spouse carried a polka-dot bag that I bought for a while: He, a man in his 40's, found that coworkers laughed. For a while afterwards, he carried it out of spite).

I think that’s because some women emulate part of what they view as male leadership (aggressive), without also having other aspects of male leaders.

I had a leader who thought it was acceptable to say things like, “hey losers let’s get this work done” through email from her office, trying to emulate a male leader who would say, “hey losers let’s get this work done” and then help physically do the work.

The same thing happens with male leaders who try to emulate the charismatic bully type of leadership too, but fail.

Now that I read it here, I think this is quite true.

When male managers are poor leaders and the workers rebel, valid criticism isn’t silenced with accusations of sexism.

My experience is that bad male leaders either change or move out of the role quickly.

There is often a problem between the feedback loop with men and women about leadership that results in a hostile work environment.

The biggest issue I had with female colleagues is not that they were worse than males in any way, but comment like yours. In fact I think on average females are better for the team. I remember I told once told few folks that one female member of the team is bad hire, and the immediate response I got was that I am saying this because she is a female. I might have a bias that I don't know about, but if someone specifically points a single or minority of females to be bad doesn't need to prove they are not sexist.

Isn’t the incentive of journalists to report an interesting story part of the blame, here?

Female execs are less common. So a journalist might be interested in sprucing up the narrative of their article by doing more background on “what it’s like to be a female executive in a male dominated field” (etc).

Journalists are not purely focused on objective, fact-based inquiry. They’re almost always trying to weave a story and if there’s something socially unusual (for a given context) about someone, they have incentive to ask about that. More clicks for a human interest story about a “woman in a man’s world” than yet another male executive.

I won’t make a value judgement about whether or not that’s appropriate here, but I think that’s a pretty important part of the equation if we’re going to consider this individual sexism or not (because it has to do with the incentives in journalism generally, not necessarily with individual journalists).

I’m sure the question “Have you experienced sexism in your workplace?” is more commonly asked of female executives.

Isn't this the risk of "free form" rather than pre structured interviews and something that is easily fixable by changing interview style?

Unconscious bias occurs everywhere, with all people, all the time. What of it?

What I see is a great example of how 'science' can serve political agendas; an example of an answer seeking a question.

If you study 'unconscious bias' with regard to women, or race, or age, or whatever other worthy cause, what do you think you will find?

The answer is baked into the question! I've no doubt you could also study unconscious bias from a Marxist perspective too, but how does this help us understand anything, except our own preconceived biases in undertaking the study?

"As communications experts, we can make an important contribution to an equally authentic and individual representation of women and men in their leadership positions by uncovering biases and creating awareness."

What exactly is bad about this agenda?

I think because it’s assuming an outcome before the results? I’d say everyone is for people of both genders being treated equally.

> I’d say everyone is for people of both genders being treated equally.

But this is not true, historically, and still today. Most people in (in some cultures) may be for treating genders equally in a lot of aspects, but I don't have to go very far on the web or IRL to find people who are not for equal treatment of genders.

But for everyone who does want to treat genders equally, learning about unconcious bias should be helpful. Learning about unconcious biases enables you to question your behaviour in order to actually treat genders equal instead of just agreeing that they should be.

What about people who, themselves, do not want to be treated equally? I have found that most women I interact with do not necessarily want to be treated equally, they want to be treated with dignity and respect. These are sometimes, but often not the same thing.

Sure if people want to be treated differently go ahead. But observing some women wanting to be treated differently (this step can go wrong!) and then applying that treatment to other women is a whole different thing.

I see plenty of examples where gender-blind treatment does not appear to be the goal of people.

Some of these are biased against women while others are biased in favor of them.

Is your name a Dishonored reference?

No; it’s simply my last name, which shares a common root word (“falcon”) and the end spelling (-v, -va, -ve vs -ff, -w) varies with past regional dialect (ff or w being the Germanized form).

Neat, thanks!

Because it's one-sided and unscientific.

The kind of feminist-infected soft fields that make up those terms and agendas (HR, "Communication Studies",...) only really care about women, and by 'caring' about women I really mean they care very much about how easy it's for women to be corporate drones while thinking it's "Empowering". Have you ever heard about "Unconscious Bias Against Men"? Of course not, nobody gives a shit about men.

It's unscientific because the conclusion is already formed before the data is gathered. Women get more questions about family than men? That must mean that the interviewers think women are baby factories unfit for work, SEXISM. Women get less questions about family than men? That must mean that the interviewers think career-driven women are barren and childless and without prospect for having a family of their own, SEXISM. No matter what happens, they have already made up their mind, women are oppressed. The "experiments" and the "data" is just a dress up game to make it look as if they're doing serious science.

I think you're close but missing some important info. An enormous amount of women have faced unfair (or worse) situations with negative (or worse) personal outcomes for just the fact of being women. We can fairly call that oppression I think.

The promoters of the disputed language, in light of the priors, mis-apply* probable reasoning such that for any case of a negative outcome for a woman, it must be oppression.

*in some cases intentionally, in some cases unintentionally

>An enormous amount of women have faced unfair (or worse) situations with negative (or worse) personal outcomes for just the fact of being women.

You can replace 'women' in this statment by any number of other group tags and still preserve the truth of the statment :

--------

An enormous amount of men have faced unfair (or worse) situations with negative (or worse) personal outcomes for just the fact of being men, like

- forced military service,

- genital mutilation (amusing fact : searching this term in google only turns up results about female genital mutilation in all pages),

- and child labor.

I leave it as an exercise to you how you can correctly apply the template to a random group label of your choosing.

--------

So 'Women Most Affected' sentiments like yours serve only to illustrate the curious asymmetry with which injustice against men and injustice against women are treated. An asymmetry that, while not created by feminism and allied ideologies, is certainly much exploited and streamlined and stroked by them.

>The promoters of the disputed language

Oh, but it isn't a problem of language. The inherent delusion of feminism is that women are especially oppressed, in ways that fundamentally differ quantitatively and qualitatively from men. Expressing this delusion in any language will output biased and dumb nonsense, lobbyism dressed up as 'fighting for justice'.

In other words, you can't say 'Women Most Affected' in more intelligent or naunced language. Every way of expressing a delusion will turn out to be ridicoulous and unfair and easily-detected.

>'Women Most Affected'

This is not my position. My position is "Some Women Affected". Some covers a very large group. I'm not making any quantitative or qualitative comparison to other groups; I think it's probably impossible.

>You can replace 'women' in this statment by any number of other group tags and still preserve the truth of the statment

I agree.

>genital mutilation

We seem to share the same position on this. I happen to be a victim.

> inherent delusion of feminism

I don't think assertions about what is or isn't inherent to feminism are possible. It's a term that identifies different sets of (often contradictory or opposite) beliefs depending on who you talk to. Most frequently, it's just moral cover for a person's own beliefs about what constitutes fairness, dignity, and respect.

I also observe that most people I meet who identify as feminist (or progressive) use the term equality to mean "fairness, dignity, and respect" which is confusing to people who engage rhetorically with them.

>This is not my position. My position is "Some Women Affected".

Ok. I think you're honest, but the people you're defending are not. If 'some' women are affected, then women deserve only 'some' of the collective attention of society. Therefore 'Unconcious Bias Against Men' should be a recurring headline in media as the other headline for women is. Therefore 'Male Genital Mutilation' should be an important and widespread topic of discussion and not an obscure piece of arcane trivia that google doesn't bother to index in the first 10 pages. Etc, etc, etc.

>I don't think assertions about what is or isn't inherent to feminism are possible.

Oh I think they are. Feminism is at its core a cluster of interlocking beliefs that women are fundamentally and deeply oppressed by men, that women are locked in an eternal conflict with men, and that this war can only be fought on the gender-wide level, with no room for compromise or exceptions unless those made by men. Show me a piece of feminist media\publication (time limit : 20 min), and I will show you those implicit claims in its (sub)text.

It's very easy to see if you know what to look for.

>It's a term that identifies different sets of (often contradictory or opposite) beliefs depending on who you talk to.

Which is exactly why it should be derided and avoided by all honest people, it's a vacuous identity. Vacuous identites are a tool for the dishonest to use the stupid.

>it's just moral cover for a person's own beliefs

I like this framing, specifically the term 'Moral Cover'. It encapsulates the cowardice inherent in Feminism: instead of coming right out and stating their values in reasonable (but debatable) definitions, moral cowards prefer to cover their beliefs inside vague rituals, cloudy language, and metaphysical confabulations about "Patriarchy", the invisible force that men supposedly have the power to deploy to harm and persecute women anywhere anytime.

>fairness, dignity, and respect

But wouldn't this be trivial ? Do you need an ideology to tell people you want to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect ? Do you need anything else besides the Golden Rule ? Do you need think tanks and Affirmative Action and UN committees ?

This is called a motte-and-bailey maneuver[1]. I'm not accusing you of engaging in it, just that you have fell for it.

Feminists have plenty of other claims and demands besides "fairness, dignity and respect", namely the cluster of beliefs that I summarized above. This is the "Bailey", a pleasant but indefensible territory\claim. As long as feminists are not pressed or forced to argue their case, they can occupy the Bailey. When under attack, however, feminists can retreat to the much more trivially trite "fairness, dignity and respect", this is the "Motte", a very well-defended fort but a useless place to live. They can hide behind those trivially defensible claims till the attack subsides, then they can return to their Bailey again. It's a useful pattern to be aware of.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

I will read more on the motte and bailey.

'Biases' is a poorly defined term. So is the goal of 'creating awareness. In most cases, given historical persecution of 'othered' identities, people understand that agenda as a positive thing and it certainly is.

However, it also gives cover to people to play power games, treat others like shit, and feel morally righteous about it. "I'm just expanding your awareness about your unconscious biases. I'm helping you."

The term "unconscious bias" is based on the (false) assumption that every group of human is exactly identical.

It is 100% a political term that is shoved at people to make them feel like a bad person for noticing differences where there actually are differences.

If you want to eliminate "unconscious bias" you are trying to create a society where women talk to men in the exact same way that they talk to other women, women act the exact same way around attractive men as they do around ugly men, adults talk to a 5 year old the same way that they would talk to a 95 year old.

i.e. a delusional utopia that is completely detached from nature and reality, and which has never existed in any society.

This guy gets it.

"Unconscious bias" is so embedded in corporate-speak today that nobody has stopped to actually challenge its existence or the proposed solutions. Plus the "evidence" for such bias is so shaky ("Bill said I'm raising my voice, but he only said that because I'm a woman") it can be "found" or "dismissed" very easily, depending on what political goals you have.

I find it odd that we attempt to somehow reshape the innate human psyche (which is constantly taking in information and making assumptions based on them), rather than just enforce workplace rules around how you treat people. Seems like a bit more direct, objective and actionable than diving into some deep conversation about "unconscious bias".

But regardless, the real answer why this is being discussed is: 1) HR is told it needs to be done [usually because some other company is doing it], 2) it provides cover again lawsuits if employees sue over workplace harassment and 3) it's a moneymaking business for the consultants that teach these class [a lot of money].

It’s also profitable for both companies and governments (income tax) to make women delay staying with a baby at home and focus on work instead in their most fertile and productive age (late 20s, early 30s). For men you don’t need extra motivation, as they are not making this choice anyways.

They can feed the lie of ,,having lots of time to have a baby later’’, and I’m seeing many women at age 40 realizing that no man wants to start making a baby with her at that age, because it’s just biologically not practical.

Acknowledging substantial differences in people is typically just left as an exercise for the reader, because everyone understands that part from their formative years, implicitly. The part people don't implicitly understand is how their powerful but imperfect approximation-machine brains lead them to treat others unfairly based on differences that are immaterial to a given context. That's why it's taught about.

I think maybe the term "unconscious bias" is misaligned with its use, because the fact is we have lots of biases we don't actively think about, and most of those are useful, not harmful. It's specifically the unconscious biases that are unfair to others that we need to beware.

Unconscious bias is innate to the way we think, it's real, and it's sort of measurable in a way. There's a test called an "implicit association test" where you categorize words as quickly as possible into one or the other group of categories. It attempts to measure the relatedness of categories within a group through the response time of the testee as they sort words. It's something a junior programmer can code up themselves in a day, and having taken the test in good faith and seen the results, I believe it does peak under the hood of how we think to some extent, revealing unconscious biases.

The whole point of science is to eliminate unconscious bias.

Eliminating unconscious wrong beliefs about the world is literally why science is a thing.

Sure, but many would argue that social science regularly fails to meet contemporaneous standards for epistemological rigor that physical sciences do.

Try to quantify or define unconscious bias. How many dimensions does it have?

Are there any provable social laws (in the sense of theorem::law, not lawyer::law)?

>> "Sure, but many would argue that social science regularly fails to meet contemporaneous standards for epistemological rigor that physical sciences do."

Many would argue, but what's their qualification? Where's the meta research implied in your comment that supports your view that social science regularly fails to meet contemporaneous standards for epistemological rigor that physical sciences do?

I don't have meta research. It is unnecessary given any individual can make the observations themselves by trying to answer the questions I asked. Physics, math, chemistry, they all obey laws and phenomena can rigorously proven (more or less). There are no identifiable social axioms.

Science is not about expert qualifications, it is about asking questions.

I hired my boss, she was the best boss ever.

What does this have to do with journalists' treatment of women executives and founders?

I'm not a journalist.

Yeah that's my point. Your comment doesn't have anything to do with the article.

I noticed something similar recently when watching women’s football during the Euros. The commentators - who by the way aren’t sexist, this isn’t a conscious thing - would make comments that they would _never_ make about a male player. My (least) favourite example, among many: “her mum is in the crowd tonight and would be so proud”.

I've definitely heard that said about a male player, I'm not sure why you think they wouldn't. I haven't even watched much football, only Euros and World Cups.

The wonderfully simple German language has a nuance with pronouns where you can use an article as a pronoun, which is something you might do when referring to an animal. I noticed commentators doing this a lot when referring to female athletes, but when they talk about male athletes they use normal pronouns. And a lot of comments in general that just make you think "WTF?".

Do you mean f.e. using "die" or "eine" instead of "sie"? If so then I can chip in with similiar observations down in Austria and southern Germany, though overwhelmingly with males, using "der" instead of "er".

Though of course I may have missunderstood what you are actualy referring to.

It’s extremely common in college (American) football to mention that a player’s family is attending and often cut to showing them. I’ve seen it in NFL and MLB games as well.

I'm watching a lot of football (live and on TV) and this is very normal comment in man's game.

The player's families are mentioned sometimes, but it happens quite often at big national team games (Euros, World Cup). E.g. Modric's wife and kids were shown many times at the 2018 World Cup. Eden Hazard's family, and his parent's history, was also mentioned multiple times at that same World Cup.

It was even more prominent with Kasper Schmeichel, the Danish goalkeeper, whose father is a former goalkeeper. The father was shown extremely frequently celebrating his son's saves, and after a penalty shootout where Kasper performed very well, the comments were exactly "look at how much his dad is celebrating, he must be really proud of his son".

This probably is an example of an unconscious bias, but not the one you think it is.

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