Comment by aestra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aestra | Hacker News Reader

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One of the stupidest comments I've seen on HN.

The Nobel Prize is well known for being sexist.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women...

>Men have invented every major technological advance in history.

One counter example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

Actually http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_mathematic...

Sexism is still alive and well

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...

>But in a groundbreaking study published in PNAS last week by Corinne Moss-Racusin and colleagues, that is exactly what was done. On Wednesday, Sean Carroll blogged about and brought to light the research from Yale that had scientists presented with application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position and who intended to go on to graduate school. Half the scientists were given the application with a male name attached, and half were given the exact same application with a female name attached. Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, hireability, and whether the scientist would be willing to mentor the student. The scientists also offered lower starting salaries to the “female” applicants: $26,507.94 compared to $30,238.10.

We are not talking about equality of outcomes here; this result shows bias thwarts equality of opportunity.

Lol you do realize for every Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace chestnut you pull out of the back of the drawer I could literally name hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men who have done something similar? There's always a tiny few outliers in any study.

Once again I say look out your window. Everything invented and built by men.

And I used to agree with you in regards to institutionalized discrimination. But the more I thought about it....it's VERY VERY hard to believe that there's some sort of international century long conspiracy of white men that get's together and represses women in every industry, career,country,time frame and scientific field EVER.

I'm not arguing that women are inferior in any way.

I just think that women aren't as ambitious as men due to ease of resource acquisition that they have built in to their bodies and it's really that simple.

Keep in mind the ratio of women to men in homeless shelters is like .000001 percent.

it's VERY VERY hard to believe that there's some sort of international century long conspiracy of white men that get's together and represses women in every industry, career,country,time frame and scientific field EVER.

Looking about there are many and varied ones and they seem to have been going a lot longer than that, not all of them are run by light skinned folk though.

Quite often their leaders wear elaborate hats, you must have seen them on the telly. Is not all they do, but it does seem to be a theme.

You must have seen them, they have loads of pointy buildings everywhere, with slightly different styles to show which team they are on.

And each team has a book. You know.

It's also possible that the scientists correctly infer that, even conditional on having the same resume, female applicants were overall of a lower quality.

The study doesn't prove whether this disadvantage comes from people discriminating against women merely because they are women, or people correctly identifying that the women on average perform worse, even given the same resumes. It is still possible that given full information about the candidate, (not just the resume), women would not be disadvantaged.

people correctly identifying that the women on average perform worse, even given the same resumes.

Where exactly are you pulling this from?

I'm giving an alternative explanation for why the female named resumes are rated worse by the professors.

I'm "pulling it from" the same place you pulled your preferred explanation (that female performance conditional on the same resume is the same, and so the worse ratings were due to professors preferring males, even given the same performance, or incorrectly expecting worse performance from the females).

The issue with your interpretation of the study is your selective appeal to evidence.

You would like to provide evidence for the fact that worse outcomes for females are due to discrimination. But the evidence you provided is consistent with both explanations (discrimination vs actually worse performance from females)

Stop being a tosser, I haven't given a preferred explanation, I asked you where you sourced your assertion.

I asserted that both explanations are possible, which is an obvious fact to me, until it is shown that one of the explanations is wrong.

I didn't notice I was replying to you, not aestra, who implicitly explained the results of the study in the way I described, when they used that study as evidence that "sexism is alive and well". Even though in this particular study, the authors (incorrectly) ignored my alternate explanation, it is in fact often discussed in this context (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination).

And I am sick of your side of the argument swearing at your opponents while constantly playing the victim card. Fuck you.

You do know that there are more than two sides available, you poor precious snowflake.

You are clearly taking one side of a debate, whether you admit it or not, cunt.

I haven't said much here, barring taking the piss out of the magic man (he's crap at magic) and posting about Freeman Dyson doing his thing with the prisoners dilemma. There are always many perspectives you can take, to insist on binary debates is just forcing false choices. Calling me a cunt won't really change that.

As for why I asked you to stop being a tosser in the first place, I asked a question and immediately had you telling me what I supposedly think. That said, I really shouldn't have bothered asking you to stop, as to do that does seem to be something that is far wide of your abilities, given the evidence available here.

> It's also possible that the scientists correctly infer that, even conditional on having the same resume, female applicants were overall of a lower quality.

Somehow you missed the point that, in the experiment, only the names were changed -- the resumes were identical, the applicants were identical, the level of experience and education were identical. Only the names were changed. The reviewers therefore judged the applicants only on the basis of gender. That's both wrong and illegal.

> The study doesn't prove whether this disadvantage comes from people discriminating against women merely because they are women ...

That is exactly what the study proves. Exactly. As in all good science, only one element was changed -- the name of the applicant. The reviewers changed their evaluation based solely on the applicant's gender, nothing else.

Let me clarify the the alternate explanations for this study:

The researchers are aware that women on average perform worse than men, even given the same resume. As a general principal, this is not ridiculous, e.g. a female boxer will perform worse than a male boxer, even given the same height and weight. You personally might believe that a resume so perfectly captures the qualities of a person, that the person's gender is no longer relevant once you have seen the rest of the resume. But that is just your opinion.

So the professors are discriminating against women, but not for its own sake, but because they believe that statistically, even given the same resume, the woman would on average perform worse. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination_%28e...

This kind of discrimination does not actually make women on average worse off, in the sense that it only penalizes them for their actual inferior performance, not for being women per se.

On the legality, I don't know if it is legal or not. I'm guessing it is illegal but in my opinion those laws are wrong anyway.

> You personally might believe that a resume so perfectly captures the qualities of a person, that the person's gender is no longer relevant once you have seen the rest of the resume. But that is just your opinion.

Which part of this are you not getting? THE EXACT SAME RESUME WAS PRESENTED, ONLY THE NAME WAS CHANGED. Consequently, the test subject's responses measured sexism, nothing else.

> I'm guessing it is illegal but in my opinion those laws are wrong anyway.

At this point anyone can see what is wrong -- you don't understand the topic of discussion.

It really depends on your definition of sexism, which is an ambiguous term.

Suppose it were true that given a woman and man with the same resume, the woman tended to perform worse. It would them be rational to assume that, given two otherwise identical resumes, the one with the female name represented a worse candidate. To act on this information is statistical discrimination. I highly recommend you read the article.

> It really depends on your definition of sexism, which is an ambiguous term.

Sexism is very clearly defined, so clearly that it can and does appear in the law, laws that, under our constitution, cannot exist if they contain any ambiguity.

I can't believe you don't get this. Researchers take a resume and present it in two forms -- for example, in one resume the name is "Andrew Jones". In the other, the name is "Andrea Jones". NOTHING ELSE IS CHANGED. One letter of one word is changed, and suddenly the applicant is unqualified. That is sexism defined.

> I highly recommend you read the article.

I read the article, you very clearly did not. Above you believed that the resumes differed, that they actually described different people with different qualifications. That wouldn't be science. In science, for maximum effect, you change as little as possible and measure the outcome.

The study measured, not reality, but people's attitude toward reality.

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