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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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If you follow the links in your link, the article is here. It is behind a paywall, but note that the abstract does NOT say that bias is not a major contributor to discrepancies in leadership roles, and it does NOT say that differences in preferences is a larger contributor than bias. All it says is that differences in preferences contribute in some degree to the differences in leadership roles. Indeed, the finding, as stated in the abstract, is quite modest: "there is a small but significant gender difference in the predicted direction."

So, unless the body of the article says something more, it might be a bit premature to get that upset.

How dare you actually read the paper abstract instead of participating in the circle jerk? Hilarious that the one comment actually superficially discussing the content of the paper gets fewer upvotes than a half-dozen substanceless posts.

We need to do better.

Fair point. It does need to be noted that the authors found a 'small but significant difference'. The article said the influence of preference was 'Hedge's g = 0.22' and I don't know what that means. I'm not saying that bias is irrelevant, but it should not be the null hypothesis. The influence of status seeking behavior is natural and obvious enough that it should have been explored before bias was considered. The research should have started with this assumption; it should not be a surprise that is only revealed right now, which to me suggests that the researchers in this area are to some extent not starting from a point of indifference.

I don't want to risk overstating the role preference has here, but I don't know how to regard the phrase 'small but significant difference' and I don't know what Hedge's G is. But reading the Bloomberg article and how the author of the study commented on this, it seems that the influence of preference is prominent enough to necessitate a shift in thought.

The ultimate point here is that equity lenses lack the explanatory power they are alleged to have.

"Small but significant" usually means statistically significant, rather than practically significant.

Re Hedge's g, this says that a rule of thumb is "Small effect (cannot be discerned by the naked eye) = 0.2," so 0.22 sounds pretty small.

However, I obviously agree that the study implies that previous studies which did not control for preferences must have overstated the effect of bias somewhat. But that seems to me to be a much more modest claim than what was made originally.

So... Bias is supposed to be the null hypothesis for some reason?

? The OP's entire point is that the article supposedly disproves the bias argument.

His argument is that the people pushing for the bias hypothesis, didn't bother to check if it was something else. Your argument seems to be that they could still be right, because it wasn't positively proven that bias has absolutely no impact.

Not that it wasn't positively proven, but rather that it was not addressed by the study, one way or the other, at least based on the abstract. The study certainly implies that previous estimates of the effect of sexism are overstated, but there is no way to determine how much, based on the abstract.

It must be the null hypothesis if they hope to get through peer review.

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