Do women make better decisions under stress? | Hacker News Reader

Do women make better decisions under stress?

nytimes.com

31 pointssimonsarris26 comments

The problem with this kind of study is the double standard applied to how the evidence is interpreted.

Case 1: women are better at X

Interpretation: we need to have more women in roles requiring X. And no, this isn't sexist because it's based on objective facts.

Case 2: men are better at X.

Explanation: ability in X is deeply contextual and shaped by cultural factors. Therefore we can't naively apply this study to the real world. Using so called objective facts to reinforce gender stereotypes is wrong and ignorant. Instead, we should interpret the results of this study in the context of social studies of gender roles and discrimination. In this light, this study in fact suggests the opposite: women are better at X

I wholly agree.

How about this one:

Girls are doing worse than boys in school, they're not entering college at an equal rate and not graduating at an equal rate? Crisis. Misogyny. Patriarchy.

Fast forward to 2014. Girls are doing better than boys in school. They're entering college at a much higher rate than their male counterparts and graduating also. Crisis? Misandry? Matriarchy? No, this has been deemed success. A triumph. Something to be celebrated.

Somewhere along the line, the push for equality took a turn down a very wrong road. Would we be hearing about this study if its results suggested that men are better at handling risk under stress than women? I very, very much doubt so.

This study also stripped knowledge or skill from the decision making process, instead relying on a silly gambling game. I would like to see them take a game of skill, such as poker perhaps, and redo the test with say the world's highest ranking male players and female players, and then see the results.

Business, investing, relationships, things concerning the household such as family crisis, etc. are not at all akin to drawing cards from a deck, but that is what this article is likening it to with its inherent suggestions.

Politics and science are not a compatible couple.

Do not expect it to change, I remember watching a google funded talk about women in STEM where all the panelists were celebrating, because 65% of architecture graduates are now women.

Sorry, any citation on people saying that boys failing is a success? And this is "boys failing", not "girls succeeding". Two counter examples from NYT alone:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/the-boys-at-...

"The rise of women, however long overdue, does not require the fall of men."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=...

"At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does"

Here's another take on that:

case 1. men are better at X

reality: positions of influence, leadership, power and prestige regarding X are overwhelmingly populated by men.

case 2. women are better at X

reality: positions of influence, leadership, power and prestige regarding X are overwhelmingly populated by men.

Which has nothing at all to do with having a double-standard for research, and everything to do with the real world being almost entirely made up of outside factors that aren't covered by "ability" studies.

I'm really starting to tire of this narrative that we're constantly being fed.

Ok, we get it, women are fantastic and much better at men than everything. Let's change the laws so it's illegal for a man to work, and we'll all retire to being house husbands raising the kids.

Oh wait, the same narrative dictates that we're all worse with kids than women and that we're all potentially sexual predators to the same children.

Men are shit. All Hail Women. Here's to our relegation to sperm farms and/or genocide.

Does the above suffice? Are we happy now?

Congratulations! This was the slipperiest of all slippery slope arguments on HN today. Report to the nearest male genocide facility to claim your prize.

Your parent is certainly reacting strongly, but I think it's understandable to be upset & feel somewhat marginalized by the monoculture in the news on the subject.

I've looked at the Credit Suisse study, which looks at company performance from 2005 to 2011.

Choosing a suitable interval for selling company stocks is a standard device for professional bullshitters like Credit Suisse (professional bullshitters because they have to make up fairy tales to sell stock when nobody really can predict anything). If they had taken another interval, the results would have been different. I think this was even obvious from the charts they included in the study (it's been a while that I read it - anyway, I encourage everyone to do the same).

If the theory is correct and women take less risks, then presumably the climate between 2005 and 2011 favored less risk taking (bear market?). At other times, more risk taking might have been more beneficial.

It's actually well known that it's almost always possible to pick an interval on which any given stock shows a positive performance.

And there are of course the other possible explanations, for example that successful companies might have an easier time attracting women because they can afford special perks to lure them in.

It's amazing how often this Credit Suisse "study" has been cited by now. Many people just take it at face value because it suits their ideology.

I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

(I have nothing against female leaders, just against ideological fairy tales).

>Many people just take it at face value because it suits their ideology.

Summarising the relationship between politics and science succinctly.

I am amazed that the authors of this data mining study couldn’t do a better job. If you let me data mine to “prove” my desired conclusions I would be able to provide a much better job than this. It is almost as though they just picked the first data set that met their desired conclusion and couldn't be bothered rummaging through the data any further.

>I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

This is a very clever suggestion. The beauty of starting a "female-led" index fund is not that it would provide superior returns, but that you could pink-mail pension funds into investing in it. Pure genius.

My ideological fairy tale is that hiring the most qualified person leads to better outcomes.

My reading of this analysis is that they compared 100% male boards, to ones with at least one female (but still many males). And found under performance in the all male boards.

And anyway do boards run companies, or do they just hire the people who do, and vet large decisions?

Maybe a diverse board is better than a homogenous one, even if the individuals are less capable?

I don't think the conclusion that women are better on average is well supported by the Credit Suisse study.

> I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

I think a fund that invested in companies which made a reasonable attempt to hire the best people would out perform based on analysis I have seen.

In particular about 10% of hereditary company CEOs are significantly worse managers than the 10% worst hired CEOs. (I am sure that can be phrased better, sorry)

But let me guess...no study anywhere will ever find that men are, in general, better at women that anything (except negative things like killing each other).

I was going to point to spatial reasoning as the canonical example, but Wikipedia thinks people are starting to question this now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#...

Men will continue to dominate fitness events/sports for the conceivable future. There's good reasons why we have "women's sports", and not just "sports".

Is it always the case that behaving more conservatively under pressure is a good thing? The author implies that 'taking big risks' and 'making real progress' are mutually exclusive.

The first experiment they describe is one were taking more risks yielded the higher gains. Somehow they seem to have forgotten about their own experiment in the end.

The article does say "They found that the most stressed men drew 21 percent more cards from the risky decks than from the safe ones, compared to the most stressed women, losing more over all."

I took this to refer to both "games", although I can see its ambiguity could mean only the latter or both.

I refer to the balloon experiment.

The second to last paragraph missed the point entirely, in that the problem with the "glass cliff" is that dying companies tend to die, so associating women with dying companies will naturally associate them with epic failure that isn't really their fault individually or their fault as women, as the whole point of the earlier studies was decision making ability was about equal most of the time. Yahoo isn't basically dead man walking because they have a female leader, the have a female leader because they're dead man walking and that inaccurately associates female leadership with epic failure. Think HP for a historical example (sentence cut off by web interface? edited to: for a historical example of a terminally ill company where the female leader at least in folk terms became the "fall girl" for the companies implosion and irrelevancy, which isn't the fault of that woman or women in general)

That paragraph of the article instead ran off on a tangent about more women leaders would help before the crash, which isn't really very important for feminism (beyond mere metrics) and again misses the point that when times are good there was no particular difference in skill, such that a woman would drive the company off the road just as well as a man if given the chance, which is not perhaps the most politically correct thing to say, but...

The answer is some are and some aren’t and that some women will make better decisions in certain circumstance and make worse in other circumstances. In other words the predictive value of this “research” is zero.

They should have used a stressmachine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr9DI3YLOTA

[This offends me.]

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