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Comment by bcgraham | Hacker News Reader

>At the 2012 American Academy of Nursing Conference, the expert panels were roughly 100% female. Is this prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications was being a woman?

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, because yes, I easily read that as prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications is being a woman. I think it's a great example of the filter being set upstream - men face hurdles when trying to become a nurse, and face bizarre challenges when practicing as a nurse (although I believe they are still favored for promotions and prestigious placing).

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I can't comprehend why you're arguing that these complex "upstream" cultural issues should force me to evaluate conference papers on any other grounds other than their technical merit -- something that would be the to the detriment of speakers, attendees, our industry, and my own sense of ethics and fairness to others.

Because studies have shown that people who think they are evaluating conference papers (or pretty much anything else ever) on technical merit alone often are not doing anything of the sort, and are reinforcing their existing gender biases through their selection process. Two quick examples off the top of my head: - http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...

It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.

> It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.

Your position also assumes that the parties performing evaluations have existing gender biases -- itself a form of stereotyping, discrimination, and bias.

Evaluating papers anonymously solves the problem you claim, while avoiding any issues with quotas or "man-hating reverse discrimination".

It only solves the problem if women submit papers at close to the same rate (or even a proportional rate) as men, which is not the case. That is, of course, ignoring the yardstick—who gets to decide what has merit?

The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.

> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.

What does this have to do with evaluating papers? Why would we divert ourselves from a technical mission to pick up an unrelated social cause?

> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.

The place to worry about correcting structural discrimination isn't at the point where it's already happened. That correction would be artificial and as such, detrimental to furtherance of our art and science.

The time to correct structural discrimination is long before anyone is submitting papers to present research they've already done.

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