Possibly relevant:
"Gender Bias 101 for Mathematicians".
A few quotes (but really, read the whole thing) —
...The bottom line is, we are all biased. We all tend to think of women’s work as somewhat smaller, derivative, inferior. We do so unconsciously and involuntarily. We are not aware of it, nor do we notice it in others. That’s what all these studies are saying. It’s as if everyone is wearing glasses with the same tint. You’re wearing them even if you’re “open-minded” or “against discrimination”, even if you start your sentences with “I’m not against women, but…”
It is not, and never has been, only about a few individuals who forgot to catch up with the times. It’s not about trolls who say horrible things about women on unmoderated blogs. It’s about you, and me, and everyone we know. It’s about the nice, polite, progressive people who just wish that their female colleague down the hall didn’t try to be more ambitious than is good for her. (She’s clearly good, but does she really think she’s equal to X and Y? And she doesn’t have the same leadership quality, either.) It’s about that paper by two female authors that’s just not quite as groundbreaking as this other paper writt
Izabella Laba is great. She is in the unenviable position of being one of a tiny number of women in the math blogosphere, and I'm impressed she can keep writing stuff like this without wanting to strangle everyone.
Regarding the more specific issue of gender bias in academia, I seem to recall reading about a study where it was found that senior mathematicians writing recommendation letters for male junior mathematicians tended to praise their mathematical work, but when writing recommendation letters for female junior mathematicians tended to praise their personalities.
Here is a write-up on a pretty highly referenced study:
Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (January 01, 2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1, 33-43. (http://www.ask-force.org/web/Discourse/Monin-Moral-Credentials-Prejudice-2001.pdf)
Abstract: Three experiments supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express attitudes that could be viewed as prejudiced when their past behavior has established their credentials as non-prejudiced persons.
...One manifestation of people's anxiety about appearing prejudiced (to themselves or to others) is their hesitancy to act on non-egalitarian attitudes unless those attitudes can plausibly be attributed to something other than prejudice. (p33)
For example, the more a man has shown that he is not a sexist, the less he will fear that his current behavior might be attributed to sexism and the more comfortable he will be expressing a pro-male attitude. "Moral credentials" of this type are most available to individuals who customarily behave in a non-prejudiced fashion. However, even prejudiced individuals sometimes engage in ostensibly non-prejudiced behavior, if
I disagree connotationally with the "good deed" part.
Imagine two planets A and B. On planet A, green and blue people are equally skilled in doing X; but there are many people who for irrational reasons say that greens are better. On planet B, green people are better in doing X, but it is taboo to say so, and this taboo causes laws that blue people must also be employed to do X, which results in economical losses and dead babies.
On both planets saying that green people are better for X than blue people comes with a social cost. I would expect that on both planets people would signal their social skills; and when feeling that they have already signalled enough to be socially safe, they could express their actual preference for a green person getting the job. But only on planet A the social signalling is morally good (as in: harm-minimizing); on planet B it is morally evil.
The mere fact that people feel social pressure to do or say something, and after they did it, the pressure is much weaker, so they can do something else... does not mean that they did something good.
About the xkcd comic: I am not actually convinced that IS how it works.
The actual evidence is that beliefs about group differences tend to be highly accurate and proportional, see http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/socialperception.html
You mean an entire book's worth of citations, probably at least into the hundreds based on the summaries of chapters?
I suspect there's no one convenient location for them at all, gated or ungated...
Your general impression is about a hyper-politicized topic. 'Most stereotypes are accurate' is exactly the sort of technical claim which goes against political sacred cows I would expect researchers in a field to not play up and the few counter-examples get a great deal of press as proof of certain sacred cows. I see this all the time in intelligence-related stuff: a study claiming IQ gains or that IQ is not correlated with something gets publicized, while the studies showing the opposite get ignored or misinterpreted; hence you run into people who think that the general impression of the field is that IQ has been debunked, while it's never been in better shape and tied to more things and closer to being nailed down into specific aspects of the brain and genes.
Don't forget outgroup homogeneity bias. (Also, actor-observer should probably be grouped together with correspondence bias.)
I often catch myself thinking that a slow timid driver in front of me is "probably a woman". Which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption. I am also surprised when an aggressive driver behind me ends up being a female when I see them swerving past through the parking lane. Does this stereotyping make me sexist? Or just not blind to the realities of local driving? If this is a bias, which one is it?
Which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption. (...) If this is a bias, which one is it?
Acknowledging a mostly accurate predictor is not a bias. If that makes you "sexist", but also makes you more correct, then so be it. Or are we supposed to erase parts of our map for societal taboo reasons?
Observing that slow timid drivers are female is Bayesian evidence that slow timid drivers tend to be female. Observing that a group of people says things like "slow timid drivers tend to be female" is also Bayesian evidence that this group has misogynist tendencies. You don't have to erase parts of your map, but you also don't have to loudly describe parts of your map to everyone else in the car. This is another reason I agree with Michael Vassar that rationalists should be more comfortable with lying (at least by omission).
This is another reason I agree with Michael Vassar that rationalists should be more comfortable with lying (at least by omission).
I think rationalists should be more comfortable with the idea that not all conversations are truth seeking. However, I don't think we should be holding non-truthseeking discussions on LW because it poisons the point of this forum. Furthermore, while it is possible to be more or less tactful about truth seeking, truth seeking isn't compatible with what I think your suggesting for this conversation. I think LW as a forum should generally be willing to be truth-seeking even if the discussion and/or truth unpleasant to some people. I also think that when the cost of having a public truth seeking discussion is to high people should just not talk about it on LW, and should make the existence of this filter as well known to participants as is practically possible (see the policy on violence towards identifiable people for a decent example). I guess joke threads are ok in that they are clearly not about serious discussion.
I am female, and it's taken me years to come to terms with the fact that reality probably does has a gender bias, and that some intellectual differences between men and women are likely to have a biological basis. It is really unfair and really difficult to deal with the fact that (on average) being born female means one is less likely to be good at certain things.
Saying "I'm sorry reality offends you ma'am" sounds snide to me, and I don't think it would help anyone accept painful truths about gender differences.
Can't we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say "I'm sorry reality offends you, ma'am." :-)
We could certainly do that, but I think that would be rather counter to the goal of building a correct map while not incurring avoidable social costs.
Actually, I think that your analogy is apt. The only difference is that the priors on "someone says "four" whenever asked for a number" and "someone only says the word "four" are really low and the prior for "someone has some misogynist beliefs" is much higher.
(Note that I am definitely not saying that shminux is a misogynist.)
If you're actually right eighty percent of the time, it merely makes you accurate -- but beware of confirmation and hindsight bias here. I'm not sure I'd trust that kind of impression unless I'd asked someone to take notes for me or set up some kind of automated process; too many chances for things to go wrong otherwise.
When I've found myself being annoyed by slow and timid drivers I don't recall having any particular thoughts about their gender, but I have often thought that they're probably old. Which I also feel is confirmed more often than not -- but I'll be the first to admit that I might harbor some irrationalities regarding the elderly, and I think the priors are probably against me here. But it certainly fits the cultural script!
Oh, I'm sure there are some differences in driving habits. The question is whether those differences in habits are large enough to overwhelm the differences in base rate, and I'd expect to see a lot more young to middle-aged people on the road than elderly people -- particularly in the rush-hour traffic where I was putting in most of my driving hours.
I didn't feel that there were disproportionate numbers of slow and timid elderly drivers, after all, I felt that a randomly selected slow, timid driver was probably elderly -- and I'd take a bet that that isn't objectively the case, contrary to my subjective impressions.
"Is that a false dichotomy in your pocket, or are you just racist?"
-a (sadly deleted) @NeinQuarterly tweet.
For example, say a woman mentions that certain situations make her feel unsafe. From her perspective, she sees the situation as the cause of this: "Of course I'm nervous in enclosed spaces with men! I was roofied and sexually assualted at a college party!"
This is a poor example. That she was previously assulted is a fact about her, not at all a fact about the fact that a guy in the same lift as her has just asked if she wants coffee. It was a fact about another situation, but the only reason it's relevant to her reaction now is because of the ...
The situation is not the cause at all, or at least not in the way described, and she (if sufficiently reflexive) would agree with this.
Causes are a part of models of what happens. Only a finite number of conditions are modeled as having counterfactual possibilities, and the rest are left fixed as context.
The situation is "the cause", holding her emotional mappings fixed. Her emotional mapping are "the cause", holding the situation fixed. Clearly it's the interaction between her and the situation that causes the outcome.
Of course, we could also say that "the cause" was that she didn't take enough anxiolytics that day. Maybe "the cause" was that the elevator operator wasn't on duty.
The whole situation combined to produce the outcome. It's easy to find multiple factors that would have causally produced a different outcome.
An argument over what was "the cause" is just a conceptual confusion.
The argument is about blame and disapproval. Some people disapprove of a man who asks out a woman for coffee late at night, while alone together in an elevator. Others find nothing to disapprove of in his behavior, and instead find her emotional reactions unfortunate, and something she'd be better off working to change and control.
Nope, we're talking about the same thing. I only make the elevator more threatening in order to make her, situation-based, view more credible. Otherwise, it's clear the she is wrong - it is not the case that anyone would be nervous in such scenarios - and thus that the men judging her later are committing no fallacy.
I think there's a specific phenomenon that occurs when the consequences of something not-well-understood are so awful that System Justification and Just World Bias immediately kick in really hard and interfere with any actual understanding of the process. So the moment you ask "What if X doesn't really cause awful consequence Y?" then your whole community reacts with a weird combination of "What if you're wrong and Y happens to you? That is so unthinkable! Better not risk it!" and "Well why don't you TRY doing X and find out if y...
In the last LW Women post, it was mentioned, and I agree, that a two-way conversation is more productive, and presents varied viewpoints better than a one-way lecture. To that end, I am making this post an experiment in crowdsourcing research to LW. Instead of writing this topic up myself (more talking AT you), I want to see what happens if instead I leave a good prompt, along with some paths (search terms, journal articles) to start down for discussion. What information will a collectivist research project yield? In other words, instead of reading what I write below as the article, pretend you are helping to collaborate on an article.
The next post in the series will go back to LW Women's submissions.
Recommended Rules (because last LW Women post reached 1000+ comments, and we want to keep that as navigable as possible)
When possible, make/use parent comments when you are discussing a specific bias, so that multiple studies or lines of reasoning on the same bias can be grouped together.
When you post a summary of a study, make sure to read it first and give a decent rundown. If a study says "X sometimes, Y sometimes," do not just say "This study proves X!"
Put meta discussion HERE (e.g.- What do you think about crowdsourcing research on LW? What do you think about the LW Women series, etc.)
Prompt
What cognitive biases might effect various gender stereotypes and how people think about gender? Below are some starting points. The links are to the wikipedia articles. This list isn't the be-all, end-all. It's just somewhere to get started. Use it to get ideas, or not.
Fundamental Attribution Error- aka Correspondence Bias- Tendency to draw inferences about a person's unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.
Actor-Observer Bias - People are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the situation they are in, or the sequence of occurrences that have happened to them throughout their day. But, they see other people’s actions as solely a product of their overall personality, and they do not afford them the chance to explain their behavior as exclusively a result of a situational effect.
Just World Fallacy- human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences
System Justification- People have a motivation to defend and justify the status quo, even when it may be disadvantageous to certain people... they are motivated to see the status quo (or prevailing social, economic, and political norms) as good, legitimate, and desirable.
Availability Heuristic- people make judgments about the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples
List of Biases- help yourself to a bias!
Example Response
Below is an example response I wrote about the Ultimate Attribution Error and Availability Heuristic. I didn't use any studies. Do better than me! (Update: I decided I should also include an example of a study write-up, so made a comment with one HERE . Please DON'T just give a link and a single sentence!)
The first post on the LW Women series involved trying to minimize the inferential gap by sharing anecdotes of what it's like growing up as a "geek girl". When reading these submissions, I was struck by how it might seem like the Fundamental Attribution Bias (aka Correspondence Bias) is at play, but for whole groups. Turns out this is A Thing, and it's called Ultimate Attribution Error.
For example, say a woman mentions that she's bad with computers. From *her* perspective, she sees the situation as the cause of this: "Of course I'm not as good with computers! When I went to learn in a programming class, it was full of guys who stared at me the whole time and I was too uncomfortable to pay attention!" When women see other women with the same responses, they can empathize with the situational causes.
However, when men see women complaining about new technology, they are more likely to attribute these to factors about the women's personalities: "she's not good at computers."
We don't view *lack* of a negative as a factor in our personalities. For example, one is likely to realize that the reason they did badly in school is because their parents had a low socio-economic status and so they lacked opportunities. One *might* realize that one of the reasons they are good in school is because their parents have a high socio-economic status which gives them certain advantages and opportunities. But one is *unlikely* to realize that NOT having low socioeconomic parents is why you did NOT do badly in school.
Images from: PhD Comics and xkcd