One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought
In order to claim that our system 1's conclusions based on someone's sex, i.e., what you're calling "unconscious sexism", is indeed a bias you need to establish that it leads to false conclusions, as opposed to our system 1 merely noticing that a lot of things correlate with a person's sex. Nearly all discussions of "unconscious sexism", including the linked article, simply and falsely asserts that sex doesn't correlate with anything important. For example, the linked article says:
Increasingly, scientific evidence demonstrates that the sex of an individual can reliably predict some aspects of their career experience, i.e. there is evidence of systematic discrimination against women.
Observe that it doesn't even bother to mention the other explanation, that the sex of an individual correlates with traits, such as intelligence, relevant to his or her carrier. Despite the fact that we have good evidence that this correlation does exist.
My understanding is that the correlations in question persist, and are not small, when those other things are either controlled for or taken out of the picture. For example, here is an informal writeup of a PNAS article finding evidence of bias favouring male over female job applicants when everything about the applications was exactly the same apart from the name.
There are even clearer examples of gender bias on the unconscious level. The fact that women are hired at equal rates as men by orchestras if, and only if, the audition is behind a curtain and everyone enters barefoot so the hiring committee cant tell gender by footstep sounds is the most damning I can think of right now. Because that is a straight up test of competence at the only skill relevant for the job, and applicant genitalia still sway supposed experts unless extreme measures are taken to blind them to that factor. Basically, at this point there is such a huge pile of evidence that human beings are just completely incompetent at screening out utterly irrelevant factors that I would judge it sensible hiring policy in any field to have the job interview behind a curtain and a vocoder.
... Fuck it, I'm using that in a story. It fits right into a certain culture I'm building. ;)
when everything about the applications was exactly the same apart from the name.
Does that include e.g. the likelihood of the applicant going on maternity leave in the near future?
I wasn't merely arguing that if there were such a large difference everyone would admit it. I was also arguing that if there were such a large difference we'd all know it. Obviously this argument will be more persuasive to people who (like me) think it's clear from observation that there isn't so huge a difference between men and women, than to people who don't.
Just by way of reminder: we'd be looking for a difference large enough that, knowing
the difference between male and female suffices to make a difference to their estimated competence of 0.7 points on a 5-point scale. That would have to be either a really really enormous difference between men and women, or a really weird difference -- weird in that whatever it is somehow manages to make a big difference in competence without having any effect on academic performance, test scores, or reported faculty opinions. Which presumably would require it to be quite narrow in scope but, again, r...
Would that "everything" include things like [...]
They took the exact same application, sometimes with male-looking names and sometimes with female-looking names, and asked faculty for their opinions about them. The female versions were rated substantially (and significantly at the 0.001 level) worse for "competence", "hireability" and "willingness to mentor this student". The gap in estimated competence was about the same in size and significance as the gaps in the other metrics, which to me seems to indicate that differences in fear of a wrongful termination suit didn't contribute much if at all. (On looking at the relevant bit of the paper, the authors agree and have some statistical analysis that allegedly supports this view.)
When asked roughly what starting salary they'd offer the applicants, the "female" applications attracted ~12% lower figures.
(The details are all there at the other end of the link I gave.)
are you sure the other information was enough to completely screen that out?
I'm not completely sure of anything, ever. But: The information included: age, degree granted and university that granted it, GPA, GRE score...
I think that "microaggression" is a poor term, it adds negative connotation and restricted usage to standard, if subconsciously biased, human behaviors. The article uses another one, "implicit bias", which has exact same meaning but without the baggage.
In my experience, "implicit bias" and "microaggression" aren't used to refer to the exact same things — although I can see the analogy.
"Implicit bias" refers to a measurable unconscious tendency to favor one group over another, even when one doesn't have any explicit beliefs justifying that favoritism. For instance, if you ask someone, "Are green weasels scarier, stinkier, or otherwise less pleasant than blue weasels?" and they (honestly) say that they do not believe so ... but when you look at their behavior, on average they choose to sit further away from green weasels on the bus, that could be described as implicit bias. They claim that they are not repelled by green weasels, but they measurably act like they are.
We might link implicit bias to Gendler's concept of alief), or to Kahneman's concept of a System 1 response.
"Microaggression" describes a social exchange that — without deliberately attacking or insulting a group — reinforces negative stereotypes about that group, or an assumption that the group is lower-status or beneath consideration. A few examples:
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project?
Yep! I've been in the industry for fifteen years, and you've almost certainly benefited from stuff I've worked on. But you're acting hostile, so I don't care to give you any more stalker fodder.
As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I've worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a "heads down gotta look busy" attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.
Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can't ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don't ask questions when they should.
The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It's the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people's capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.
(Oh, and everyone's code has to be double-checked.)
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That's logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn't belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn't belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn't belong.
Looking at this comment section... wow. Yes, regularly encountering people who behave like Azathoth at work would be a level of (not really micro) aggression that could easily drive me out of a company, and I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin. Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence. Doesn't matter if she has a physics degree from Caltech, no, her professors probably just passed her out of sympathy. Doesn't matter if she's written good code in the past, no, her references must ...
I think the article makes a strawman:
Academics hold tightly to the view that progress in our system is meritocratic. Hiring, decisions about article publication, citation of the work of our peers, the awarding of research funds, raises, promotions and more are determined, we believe, rationally, as a result of the objective evaluation of clearly stated requirements for advancement.
I don't think most academics think that either hiring decisions, publication decisions or citation decisions are 100% based on explicit criteria. Indeed anybody who doesn't ...
it's reasonable to take that as strong evidence for bias in favour of men over women that isn't simply a proportionate response to actual differences in competence? I mean, it's just Bayes' theorem. How likely is that outcome if people do have such bias?
By the same logic you could say that someone who hires people with high SRT scores engages in SRT bias. Someone who hires based on SRT scores could simply reasonably believe that people with high SRT scores are more competent.
Google's HR department has a variety of factors on which it judges candidates. A few years afterwards they reevaluate their hiring decisions. They run a regression analysis and see which factors predict job performance at Google. They learn from that analysis and switch their hiring decision to hiring people which score highly on the factors that the regression analysis found predictive.
That's how making rational hiring decisions looks like. In the process they found that college marks aren't very relevant for predicting job performance. Being good at Fermi estimates unfortunately isn't as well, so those LW people who train Fermi estimates don't get benefits anymore when they want to get a job at Google.
Given current laws Google is not allowed to put values such as gender into the mix they use to make hiring decisions. That means that Google can't make the hiring decisions that maximize predicted job performance.
The politics of the issue also make it pretty bad PR for them to publish results about the effects of a model that includes gender if the correct value in the regression analysis would mean worse chances for woman getting a job. It's good PR for them if the correct value would mean to favor woman. No big company that does regression analysis on job performance published data that favoring in gender would mean hiring more woman. Factoring in gender into a regression analysis would mean that any bias against woman in subjective competence evaluations in interviews would be canceled by that factor.
Just imagine if a big company would find that by putting gender into their regression analysis they would hiring more women and get better average job performance as a result. Don't you think those companies would lobby Washington to allow them to put gender into hiring decisions? The silence on the issue speaks.
It could be that the silencing of feminists who want to prevent "privileged" from talking about the issue is strong enough that rational companies don't dare to speak about their need to change their hiring practices to hire more woman via making data driven arguments. If that's the case that says a lot about the concept of privilege and it's problem in shutting down rational arguments.
weird in that whatever it is somehow manages to make a big difference in competence without having any effect on academic performance, test scores, or reported faculty opinions
Imagine that academic performance has a really low value for predicting job performance. People that spend a lot of time preparing for tests get better academic marks. Woman spent more time than men preparing for academic tests. That means a woman of equal competence scores higher because she puts in more work. The test isn't anymore a strict measure of competence but a measure of effort at scoring highly of the test. In that scenario it makes sense to infer that a woman with the same test score as a man is likely less competent as the man as long as you are hiring for "competence" and not for "putting in effort to game the test".
I mean, it's just Bayes' theorem. How likely is that outcome if people do have such bias? How likely is it if they don't?
If you write down the math you see that it depends on your priors for the effect size of how gender correlates with job performance.
Imagine that academic performance has a really low value for predicting job performance. [...]
Sure. It is possible to construct possible worlds in which the behaviour of the academic faculty investigated in this study is rational and unbiased and sensible and good. The question is: How credible is it that our world is one of them?
If you think it is at all credible, then I invite you to show me the numbers. Tell me what you think the actual relationship is between gender, academic performance, job performance, etc. Tell me why you think the numbers you'v...
I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.
Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."
This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.
http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.
Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.