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It also underscores why there's backlash against the concept of privilege. Lower-class men received the fewest job interviews of all four quadrants. Not only do

• hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
  Just wanted to say I agree with you, and that's why I think this is such a well done and fascinating study. Privilege does clearly exist in this study, but not necessarily in the patterns that are assumed.
• stefco_ 10y ago
  I think this is really important to acknowledge. Intersectionality (i.e. subtlety and hollistic thinking) is actually a great way to think about inequity. But a lot of people who are interested in intersectionality are blind to many struggles specific to poor white males (I say this as a relatively privileged person Far removed from that demographic). Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist, but that is largely in response to upbringing, poor education, and poor economic opportunities. It is a big blind spot in many otherwise very liberal people's thinking to exclude poor white males, and that exclusion breeds resentment from a potential ally in addressing problems of inequity (and it contributes to a vicious cycle of racism/sexism leading to exclusion leading to more racism/sexism). Not saying this is an easy fix, but many other liberal people I know seem shockingly uninterested in even treating this as a problem.
  • jordanb 10y ago
    I think it goes even deeper than that. I think for many people poor white men are one the category of people who it's still acceptable to hate. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
    • fasquoika 10y ago
      >There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time Damn that hits close to home
      • doktrin 10y ago
        > calling American football “sportsball” who does this, and why?
        • Fripplebubby 10y ago
          Those who wish to signal their disinterest - American football is often construed as nonintellectual and skews lower socioeconomically than, say, the "Hamilton" audience. So to feign a complete lack of familiarity with it puts you above those people who understand and enjoy it.
          • doktrin 10y ago
            Interesting. I'm not much of a football fan myself, as I'm apparently missing whatever part of the brain is required to enjoy watching team sports. However, I'd certainly encourage any sports fans who specifically dislike football to read what Hunter S. Thompson wrote on the subject. His passion has sold me on the merits of the game - even if it's still not my personal cup of tea.
          • 13of40 10y ago
            > feign a complete lack of familiarity with it Believe it or not, some of us are actually completely unfamiliar with it. I watched the Superbowl once about ten years ago, and that's literally the extent of my lifetime exposure to football.
  • briandear 10y ago
    "Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist.." [citation needed]
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      Not a native English speaker but I would take "might" in this setting to signal "this might or might not be true and I am not necessarily endorsing this view but..." or "one might argue that".
      • ralfd 10y ago
        I read this as "lets throw a "might" in to be less blatant, but this is what i believe".
        • jessaustin 10y ago
          Do you agree then with GGP that personal beliefs require citation?
          • deleted 10y ago
            [deleted]
        • Retric 10y ago
          Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist, but that is largely in response to upbringing, poor education, and poor economic opportunities. Might in that context is, a substitute for 'while it is true that' not a weasel word like probably.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    • Kequc 10y ago
      "White males" might skew more "sexist and racist", I can't believe this is still stated without a hint of irony. It was a blatant the first time I heard it, and it's still blatant today.
  • ykler 10y ago
    My experience is that sociologists are all like the woman who wrote this article: totally aware of the issues involved in dealing with multiple binary variables and a little embarrassed by the overly fancy and political word "intersectionality." Maybe you are right about other liberal people, but you will never meet a sociologist with this blindspot.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • stefco_ 10y ago
      It's decidedly harder to be intelectually lazy when your job depends on understanding nuance. I find that people who actually use these terms as part of their job (unsurprisingly) tend to have a much better understanding of them than laypeople who mainly want to sound like they have the correct political opinions for their social demographic.
• kolinko 10y ago
  There is a note underneath the chart that the difference between lower class women and men is not statistically significant - so we don't know if there is a difference between men and women there.
  • hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
    You can do the math here, https://abtestguide.com/calc/ https://abtestguide.com/calc/, and in any case it is at least very close to "statistical significance", depending on how you define it, that lower class men got fewer callbacks than lower class women. But the point is that lower class men DID receive a lot fewer callbacks than higher class men, so clearly it is a mistake to attribute "male privilege" equally to both groups.
    • red_admiral 10y ago
      "close to statistical significance" is one of those phrases I dislike because it's almost designed to deceive. To the trained statistician it means "not statistically significant" but to the average reader it suggests there's something more there than there should be. What we can safely say is that this study did NOT support the hypothesis that there is gender privilige for men within the lower classes in landing top law jobs, and that it would be interesting to repeat this study with a larger sample size.
      • hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
        While I agree with your conclusion, I have a problem that people think "statistically significant" is some sort of golden, binary rule, instead of "statistically significant at X% confidence level". It's not like 95% confidence level was ordained by God, and it leads to p-value hacking. I'd argue that if you come out at 94% or 96%, both of these warrant further study.
  • FT_intern 10y ago
    Note that it does not ever say that the difference between upper class women and upper class men was statistically significant. > The differences in callback rates for higher-class women, lower-class men and lower-class women were not statistically significant, but higher-class men received significantly more callbacks than all other categories It is very suspicious that the wording was "significantly more" instead of "statistically significant", especially when she specifically called out statistical significance for the other groups right before it. If the difference was not statistically significant, that fact is intentionally and malevolently obfuscated.
• lebanon_tn 10y ago
  I 100% agree and wish I could retweet this.
• ykler 10y ago
  I largely agree with you regarding the popular view, but I wanted to point out that this article focuses on the gender "twist" because that is what is new in the research. The author of the article cites near the beginning an acclaimed book she previously wrote apparently focusing solely on class (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10457.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10457.html).
• gaius 10y ago
  Not only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket as the higher-class men. That really is the elephant in the corner: the variations in privilege by gender for the white university-educated middle and upper-middle classes are barely a rounding error compared to the gulf in privilege between them and the working class, or the non-whites even of the middle class, which the framework of analysis used by their article glosses over. That is why, outside of their bubble, cries of "male privilege!" ring so hollow. Nobody likes to be lectured by someone who spends more on a coffee, than they earn in an hour. Or who drops a quarter-million dollars on a degree of no vocational use. I don't agree with most of Marx's conclusions, but he was absolutely right in that class is the lens through which to understand societies.
  • rayiner 10y ago
    But it's not a rounding error, is it? In the study, the difference between upper class men and upper class women was greater than the difference between upper class men and lower class applicants generally.
    • hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      Why do you say that? If you look at the graph in the article, that's not true at all.
      • rayiner 10y ago
        The comment I was responding to said that "the variations in privilege by gender for the white university-educated middle and upper-middle classes are barely a rounding error compared to the gulf in privilege between them and the working class." But that's not true. Men got 1.8x as many callbacks as women, and upper class candidates got 2.6x as many callbacks as lower class candidates. Even if the class divide as a somewhat greater impact, the gender divide is not a "rounding error." The other way to look at it is that the callback rate for upper class women was the same as the average callback rate for lower class applicants, and both rates are much lower than for upper class males.
• rayiner 10y ago
  > Not only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket as the higher-class men. What the study shows is that upper class men have a clear advantage, and everyone else is roughly in the same boat. (The callback rate among upper class women was the same as the callback rate among lower class applicants.) There is no reason that the concept of "privilege" cannot embrace economic privilege as well as gender and racial privilege (and it should, because discrimination is happening along all those dimensions). However, at a certain point the theory comes into conflict with political reality. The current trend in American politics is various marginalized groups (women, LGBT folks, racial and religious minorities) all congregating under the same tent, even though they otherwise don't have all that much in common. The notable exception is lower class white men, who (as a generalization) are very resistant to the idea of being a part of that tent. And they disproportionately vote against the interests of the other folks in that tent. So it appears to me that the exclusion is at least in part self-imposed.