6 ms·

The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously wh

The abstract doesn't say what you're saying. It says that the competence of men increased on average because the worst men got kicked out. Which is obviously what's going to happen. If you take a class of people and remove the bottom half, the average of the remaining people will necessarily be improved.

alkonaut 5y ago
Isn't that... exactly the point?
- Jensson 5y ago
  No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare. So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women. Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link). What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected). For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women. Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.
  - geofft 5y ago
    I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly. So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.
  - telesilla 5y ago
    Given time and resources, that group of women will gain experience to be as performant as the group of men who have had centuries to learn how to do politics. Should that mean we need to allow underperforming persons in government? No - but it does mean being aware of the metric we are using. Great insight on this here: https://www.euroscientist.com/a-ladder-made-for-men/ https://www.euroscientist.com/a-ladder-made-for-men/

alkonaut 5y ago

Isn't that... exactly the point?

Jensson 5y ago
No, the study doesn't even compare men and women. It compares men to men and women to women. It doesn't say anything at all about the competence of the newly added women compared to the competence of the kicked out men, since it has no absolute values of competence in the study. It just has deltas for men and deltas for women, so you can't compare. So all we learned is that reducing the amount of positions available to men will kick out the less competent men first. We didn't learn whether the total competence of the group got increased after gender quotas compared to before.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  You are absolutely right. It's not clear from the abstract whether there is a buried absolute comparison. The idea that the average of the group as a whole is raised seems so obvious I didn't even consider a reality where less competent men were replace by even less competent women. Edit (oh look a full text article, I didn't expect to see a link so I assumed it was just an abstract link). What it does say at least is that while the quota removed a fraction of men that turned out to be less competent than those that were removed, thereby improving the average competence of the remaining group of men, the added group of women did not have lower competence than the existing group (which would perhaps have been expected). For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women. Since men and women aren't compared in absolute terms, this doesn't mean there was an increase in competence either. But it does say that it wasn't a replacement of the group of low competence men (compared to their peers) with a group of low competence women (compared to their female peers). So that does suggest something (which the article does note), for example that the pool of competent women could be larger.
- geofft 5y ago
  I'm a little confused by the conventions of this article (this isn't my field), but I think Table 4 on page 2226 and Figure 4 on page 2228 (and the surrounding text) are in fact looking at the total competence of the group before and after gender quotas.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    The reason it is so strange is that it has different data for the men and women, they used among other things the military intelligence test which only men takes and income to measure competence. Income is definitely not a fair competence measure between men and women so you can't use that either, so it makes sense that they didn't compare competence directly. So I am pretty sure that graph assumed that men and women had the same competence before, as the measures they had weren't comparable at all between the groups.
- telesilla 5y ago
  Given time and resources, that group of women will gain experience to be as performant as the group of men who have had centuries to learn how to do politics. Should that mean we need to allow underperforming persons in government? No - but it does mean being aware of the metric we are using. Great insight on this here: https://www.euroscientist.com/a-ladder-made-for-men/ https://www.euroscientist.com/a-ladder-made-for-men/