3 ms·

What are your thoughts on the study GP linked to? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112

deleted 4y ago
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DSMan195276 4y ago
The thing about these statistics is that the size of the underlying groups are not the same, and there's a whole lot of factors that impact them in complicated ways. The article you linked even gives a direct explanation of why the data is hard to interpret and suggests that the solution is encouraging more females to apply, because females are likely to self-select out of the field unless they are very likely to go further: > [See SI Appendix for descriptions of other audits of actual hiring that accord with this view, some dating back to the 1980s. Many studies have argued (see ref. 14) that because only the very top women persist in math-intensive fields, their advantage in being hired is justified because they are more competent than the average male applicant. This is why an accurate evaluation of gender preference in hiring depends on data from an experiment in which competence is held constant.] Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings. The FA has the same thing going on, it says that females are 3-15 times more likely to be elected, but _also_ that they only make up 40% of elected members, so not even half. The only way that's possible is if significantly less of them are apply to begin with, and it's reasonable to assume there's some self-selecting going (or at the very least, since the groups are so different in size they're not directly comparable in terms of qualifications) on the same as the article you linked. The issue of men and women acceptance rates in college is even the exact example given on the Simpson's paradox Wikipedia page, because it's such a simple one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

DSMan195276 4y ago

The thing about these statistics is that the size of the underlying groups are not the same, and there's a whole lot of factors that impact them in complicated ways. The article you linked even gives a direct explanation of why the data is hard to interpret and suggests that the solution is encouraging more females to apply, because females are likely to self-select out of the field unless they are very likely to go further: > [See SI Appendix for descriptions of other audits of actual hiring that accord with this view, some dating back to the 1980s. Many studies have argued (see ref. 14) that because only the very top women persist in math-intensive fields, their advantage in being hired is justified because they are more competent than the average male applicant. This is why an accurate evaluation of gender preference in hiring depends on data from an experiment in which competence is held constant.] Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings. The FA has the same thing going on, it says that females are 3-15 times more likely to be elected, but _also_ that they only make up 40% of elected members, so not even half. The only way that's possible is if significantly less of them are apply to begin with, and it's reasonable to assume there's some self-selecting going (or at the very least, since the groups are so different in size they're not directly comparable in terms of qualifications) on the same as the article you linked. The issue of men and women acceptance rates in college is even the exact example given on the Simpson's paradox Wikipedia page, because it's such a simple one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox