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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

There are anecdotes of trans men (female to male transsexuals) noticing this. They are the same person mostly and do the same thing, yet they get treated much better.

There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister.

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It'd be interesting to see a blind comparison of his pre/post-transition articles.

I say this because I could _totally_ see making that transition to male representing a removal of a big chunk of subconscious stress about how he was "lying to the world" about his gender by presenting as female. This could translate into an improvement in the quality of his post-transition work.

Or it could be entirely gender-bias at play.

I would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship.

I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.

> I would want to see this experiment repeated trans females who (assuming the presented hypothesis) should see the inverse relationship.

Yep, there are ancedotes about trans women just as you predict:

> Joan Roughgarden is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Jonathan Roughgarden until her early fifties, and her experience was almost the mirror image of Barres’s. In her words, “men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise.” In an interview, Roughgarden also noted that if she questioned a mathematical idea, people assumed it was because she didn’t understand it.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...

> I suspect a better (and likely cheaper/easier) test is to take the same papers and present them under a male and female author name.

There have been published scientific papers looking at (sort of) this. Send out job applications for a lab manager, and randomly assign a male or female name. Same job application otherwise. Male applications get more job offers and more money.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201... http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474

We might give out to Creationists who don't want to accept reality about evolution, but well...

There have been many similar studies performed that showed materials with female names are ranked lower than those with male names[0]. Same thing with black vs white-sounding names[1].

0: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

1: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...

I believe the scientist you're talking about is Ben Barres at Stanford. I know people who have worked for him and he's a truly exceptional scientist and mentor. He's been pretty outspoken about his personal experience on how women are perceived in high-power science, I'd encourage a google for "Ben Barres Feminism" to see a few articles.

This article tells that anecdote: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...

That's a great example, reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Barres

"There was one trans man who is a scientist and has published under female and male names. Someone, who didn't know, remarked that he was much better than his sister." An alternative explanation: After the sex change he was no longer suicidal and was able to perform much better at the university. I'm not claiming to know which explanation is the correct one, but things aren't that simple.

Sure it's possible. However trans women scientistst report being treated worse[1], and studies show women are ranked less than men for identical job applications for science[2]. Which all adds up to "women being treated worse than men".

[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people... [2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people...

> They are the same person mostly and do the same thing

Well, they do have significantly more testosterone in their bodies than they did before...

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