
Researchers Find a Hiring Bias That Favors Women - jfaat
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/04/22/396672571/could-it-be-researchers-find-a-hiring-bias-that-favors-women
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blfr
Previously
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481)
(141 comments)

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thaumasiotes
related: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-
th...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-the-hallway/)

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dsfyu404ed
It's possible that after multiple decades of the louder parts of society (i.e.
the media, and groups with opinions that are far enough from mainstream for
the media to consider newsworthy) the rest of society has come to expect more
from white males. When comparing two equally qualified applicants, of which
one is a white male, people may tend to favor the other applicant based on a
perception of rarity. They may expect that if they ran the ad looking for
applicants again they'd get a few more white dudes just like the one they're
considering but aren't as likely to come across another woman with these
qualifications (which is true when you consider the gender makeup of the STEM
fields) so they select the woman based on that perception of rarity, rather
than by further comparing the applicants or tossing a coin.

On the other hand, diversity is one of those education buzzwords. Every
university wants to be "diverse" and none of them would be caught dead with an
all white male department group photo on their website. So if one wanted to
nit pick, the women do have an additional qualification that's important to
their employer, diversity.

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Karunamon
About time.

I say this because it's a long held suspicion of mine that any gender ratio
inequality is a thing that exists, not at the pay negotiation, not at the
application, not even at the education, but far before that.

I'm not even completely sure that it can be defined as a result of anything
other than "different people like different things".

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pyre
> "different people like different things"

This is not without influence though. If you grow up always seeing men as
doctors and women as nurses, when you decide that you want to go into medicine
it will set your expectations about what your should strive for. To say that
seeing something always be a "certain way" does not subtly influence people
ignores basic human nature.

If you (as a boy) see knitting as "something that girls do" you may suppress
your interest in it as a child because you don't want to be ridiculed. This
just further re-enforces the idea that only women are interested in knitting.
There may be the rare male that dares to not care what the prevailing social
winds are, but we can't necessarily rely on people always ignoring societal
pressures. Discouraging the societal pressures in the first place is much
better.

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Karunamon
We agree, but the problem is I see comparatively little effort being expended
to change those perceptions as I do effort expended on (and now apparently,
provably so) misdirected outrage at pay and candidate selection and such.

How does one even go about proving that the "social pressure" is or isn't more
than monkey-see-monkey-do? I think I understand the theory, but I definitely
don't understand what its logical basis is. The further I dig, the further I
see more subjective _a priori_ assumptions.

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subnaught
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372355)

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striking
Oftentimes when "previously" links are posted, what is linked actually has
discussion on it. That page is rather empty.

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crimsonalucard
Makes perfect sense. An engineering team full of sweaty dudes would definitely
favor a qualified girl over an equally qualified guy.

Men should start some sort of movement to fight this inequality and be
excessively loud about it.

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belorn
It won't work. First they will be "its all about equality, I assure you" but
then it just become about power and who can get privilege over someone else.

The sad truth is, people only want equality when it benefits themselves in
some way. The same person who self-identify as pro-equality will fight tooth-
over-nail to keep national laws that generate benefits for their gender.

~~~
Crito
In such a movement, the _lack_ of privilege would become a form of psuedo-
power. The people with genuine power (the rich celebrities with large social
followings) would dominate of course, but they would all argue they they were
less privileged than the others and that their voices should therefore be
given special status. They would use this psuedo-power to justify attempts to
silence "privileged" people who in fact lacked genuine power ( _personal_
wealth and social influence).

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Karunamon
_..they would use this psuedo-power to justify attempts to silence
"privileged" people who in fact lacked genuine power_

Would it surprise you all to know that's kind of what's happening right now?
Granted the actual impact usually isn't much more than a flimsy justification
to level personal attacks against people they don't agree with on the
internet, but the mindset definitely already exists.

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Crito
I think we're all on the same page here. I have found that talking about
things indirectly is a decent way to avoid annoying personal attacks (which,
in my case, have reached out beyond the internet in the past, albeit with
limited success.)

