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Comment by mwill | Hacker News Reader

This study was published in 1997 though. I'm not suggesting there is a bias problem for "political correctness" sake nowadays, but I think the people who would argue that there is wouldn't accept a study from 18 years ago as a counterargument.

It'd be interesting to see a similar study done in 2015, for this reason, and also just general comparison over time.

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Sure! However, I feel like the grand irony of these kind of studies is that the same kind of unconscious selection against orchestra members is probably also occurring in evidence acceptance. It feels like people are overwhelmingly critical towards evidence that women are treated unfairly in a way they aren't to other evidence. But hey, that could just be a feeling.

Isn't the exact opposite also possible? That there are all kinds of biases in the world, but studies are being selected for (a) showing a bias against women and (b) showing that women are objectively as good as or better than men?

Sure! But I'd think that based on history there's a fair chance that studies that show (a) are being selected for because they are factual. For example, zero women have been american presidents (although maybe that'll change soon) :). Also there is a lot of evidence that the historically assumed inverse of (b), that man are as good as or better than women, in almost every domain, has made the selection of (b) something that people immediately perceive as an anomaly, a bias. Really, it makes sense that women are better than men at some things on average, and that men are better than women at some things on average. The number of women in tech certainly shows that there's some things at least that women aren't being hired as much for. I'll have to see the data suggesting the selection of "facts" is now leaning entirely towards women, but I haven't.

To put it another way, the following article was posted, upvoted, and generated almost no discussion regarding its "methods" and the "evidence" it presented:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909954

Is it possible that this is a result of there being a bias against the evidence presented in pro-woman/anti-bias articles, while pro-man articles receive little attention? Have we sufficiently offset that bias?

It did generate some discussion before.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Is%20There%20Anything%20Good%2...

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