Hacker News Reader

Comment by T2_t2 | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: why are women so harsh to EACH OTHER? From the article:

> both men and women were significantly more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant with an identical record.

And from the linked studies: "Men only penalized female candidates for attempting to negotiate whereas women penalized both male and female candidates."

And the pay rates, and drops, from here http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html are both worse from female faculty - with sale offered from men 30K -> 29K vs 27K -> 25K for female faculty, and male faculty scored women higher in all categories than the female faculty.

View on HN

Also from the article: "These biases occur unconsciously and without intention or malice."

In my opinion, the origin of these biases is in the early, formative years: When children see mom stay at home and dad go to work, they learn that that's the way things are - without any conscious negative judgement and regardless of gender. It's the society they grew up in, so seeing something deviate from that can create a bias. It's naturally self-propagating as well, so it will take conscious effort (from everyone) over generations to overcome.

I highly recommend taking the Harvard Implicit Gender - Career Bias test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html). I found it extremely enlightening because I could actually FEEL my brain pulling me to answer incorrectly. It's timed, so there's mental pressure to make quick decisions - where the brain takes advantage of pattern matching that's been trained over a lifetime.

"Your data suggest a strong association of Female with Career and Male with Family compared to Male with Career and Female with Family."

I didn't expect that result at all. My family is balanced in term of gender composition, and my parents both work the same amount. But my mother still has a tendency to do more of the housework. I'm curious whether having to pass the test in my native language would have significantly influenced the outcome.

Side note: rereading a bit the descriptions of the tests, it seems these are targeted toward an American audience. Could it have an influence in the tests too ?

A few ideas come to mind

-1- Women have a lower salary, therefore their anchoring point is lower.

-2- There are few women in the department, therefore every woman feels threatened by every female applicant - they are fighting for a scarce resource.

-3- The push against sexism has resulted in men overvaluing women, while women themselves have no qualms about rating other women exactly what they think they are worth (which might still be less than they should, see 1).

-4- There may be a strong correlation in women who can succeed in a male-dominated environment for sociopathic psychological traits.

-5- There may very well be correlation (though no direct causation) between gender and expected performance, which combined with 3, results in women applying an unconscious bias.

Basically, you do not have an unbiased sample and can't make generalisations from just that article.

sexism is not something individual men perpetrate against individual women, it is a systemic set of biases built into the fabric of society. women are part of that fabric just as much as men are.

glib throwaway response: yeah, let's criticise women for being harsh to each other in an environment that is structurally biased against them! because they could use some extra criticism here!

(i mean, yeah, that might genuinely be an interesting question to look into, but surely that isn't at the top of our list of priorities, right?)

It's an important question because it helps to show that it's not only men discriminating against women, but also a bias shared generally by society. The way in which things break reveals a lot about how they work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com