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Comment by run4yourlives | Hacker News Reader

Bias is not necessarily an "ism".

Saying "sexism" has with it the connotation that there is a fundamental wrong here which should be corrected for the betterment of our society. That it's a product of backwards thinking and known prejudices.

What you are seeing here though is much more than that. We're seeing that people conform to a pre-ordained bias. In this case, that all good writers are upper-crust white guys with distinguished names. This is a much deeper and subconscious display of human behaviour that all of us are bound to.

It is unlikely that all of this woman's readers feel women should be barefoot in the kitchen.

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> there is a fundamental wrong here which should be corrected for the betterment of our society

Women not being rewarded equally for equal work is a fundamental wrong which should be corrected for the betterment of our society. It's possible I'm misreading you but one can be sexist without being a cave, um, person.

She was free to pick a male sounding name. Problem solved. Also, it is just her story, it is not clear if she did "equal work" with her female name. She picked the name for something she did not want to be associated with - perhaps it simply was a different kind of writing that tends to pay better?

Well, I'll start by saying that I'm assuming the story is accurate, there's no point discussing it otherwise. She specifically mentions that she applied for identical jobs as both personas.

What if she had to meet a client face-to-face? Or even by phone?

Well I wouldn't assume the story is accurate - obviously she wants to make a good story. So applying for "identical jobs" might have some poetic freedom in it.

In any case, if she went to see the client face-to-face or by phone, all sorts of other things might have happened. She might have fared better on average than a man. There is no way to tell from her story.

It really is just a story, all sorts of other parameters could have affected the outcome. What sort of thing is she writing? Some subjects might be more readily associated with men, other with women.

The choice of names could have an effect in all sorts of ways, not only by signaling a gender.

Really, there is no substance here at all, I am sorry. If people want to get worked up about that story, it is because they want to get worked up about it, not because there is real substance.

For a better experiment, take the one with randomized CVs with randomized names, where black sounding names fared a lot worse than white sounding names. That is a proper experiment, because all other things besides the names were equal. This story here is not science. She herself is drawing a conclusion from her experience, but her subjective explanation doesn't really explain anything.

She could also be a pathological liar, secretly a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man or the Emir of Groovefunkistan. Once we start discounting the facts presented as fact by a principal in the article we might as well just switch to floral teapots in low earth orbit.

This story doesn't pretend to be science, why are we comparing it to randomized double-blind studies?

Why ask for science: because the story author and among others I think also you have started drawing conclusions from it ("society is still sexist", "women get paid less for equal work"). Where is the point in erecting this building of accusations if the foundations aren't sound? Unless it is just politics, which is OT on HN.

Speaking personally I don't think either of those conclusions can be drawn from this article, but nor do I think they're terribly controversial as broad generalizations.

I would love to see more and better science on the topic but I think there is still value in anecdotes and the discussions they result in.

"nor do I think they're terribly controversial as broad generalizations."

I do think they are controversial, as the statistics are usually very shallow. Apart from the "dumb" statistics (basically "on average, men earn more than women"), there are also lots of papers on how certain laws that are supposed to be helping women actually have the opposite effect, and other causes for the difference.

The "uncontroversial" bit is exactly what is standing in the way of finding a solution.

Anecdotes are OK, but don't generalize from them, please.

Those are my personal views and aren't related to nor generalized from the article.

> Women not being rewarded equally for equal work is a fundamental wrong which should be corrected for the betterment of our society.

And how do you propose we fix it?

No idea. Talking about it honestly is a good start.

Have you considered that it doesn't matter how honest the discussion is if we don't share the same assumptions. What if the real problem isn't the problem you see?

There is no obvious reason why a woman would be paid less for the same work, for example a rule saying "pay a woman $5 less than a man", or even an actual conspiracy that may be slightly less obvious but is still a clear problem. So therefore, "women getting paid less than man for the same work" is not really a description of the problem, it's just a symptom.

Yet it still happens. Before we can fix it, we need to know why, otherwise there's a good chance we'll be creating more problems.

I agree and I have explicitly not attempted to state a root cause (other than the tautological 'men and women are treated differently' of course) nor any suggested fixes.

I do not, however, agree that honest discussion can't benefit. Most of the problems I see in online conversations regarding sexism/gender/etc involve nearly everyone involved no matter their position flying straight through the actual words on screen into some higher dimension of rape culture vs the PC feminazis. It's insane, frustrating in the extreme and entirely counterproductive. There's a lot of baggage held by everyone and I think realizing that people can disagree and still converse on the subject would be an excellent first step both towards discerning a root cause and effecting a change.

That's behind my call for an honest discussion and I thank you wholeheartedly for participating.

involve nearly everyone involved no matter their position flying straight through the actual words on screen into some higher dimension...

Yes, I am frustrated by the same thing. That is exactly why I was disappointed by the article, because the comments about activism and 19th century stigmas lead directly down that path.

That was a fairly minor point in the article to me. I believe the concrete facts of the experience are far more valuable than the few lines devoted to an, as you say, simplistic description of the broader problem.

>Women not being rewarded equally for equal work is a fundamental wrong

Unless you're proposing communism in the absolute, I'm not sure how you can enforce what an audience (including many women) likes or doesn't like. The fact that what they think they like or not is in some way based on unconscious arguments to authority is not something you can legislate.

You can't of course. Why the jump to enforcement and legislation?

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