
Do women make better decisions under stress? - simonsarris
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/opinion/sunday/are-women-better-decision-makers.html
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righttoremember
The problem with this kind of study is the double standard applied to how the
evidence is interpreted.

Case 1: women are better at X

Interpretation: we need to have more women in roles requiring X. And no, this
isn't sexist because it's based on objective facts.

Case 2: men are better at X.

Explanation: ability in X is deeply contextual and shaped by cultural factors.
Therefore we can't naively apply this study to the real world. Using so called
objective facts to reinforce gender stereotypes is wrong and ignorant.
Instead, we should interpret the results of this study in the context of
social studies of gender roles and discrimination. In this light, this study
in fact suggests the opposite: women are better at X

~~~
ripb
I wholly agree.

How about this one:

Girls are doing worse than boys in school, they're not entering college at an
equal rate and not graduating at an equal rate? Crisis. Misogyny. Patriarchy.

Fast forward to 2014. Girls are doing better than boys in school. They're
entering college at a much higher rate than their male counterparts and
graduating also. Crisis? Misandry? Matriarchy? No, this has been deemed
success. A triumph. Something to be celebrated.

Somewhere along the line, the push for equality took a turn down a very wrong
road. Would we be hearing about this study if its results suggested that men
are better at handling risk under stress than women? I very, very much doubt
so.

This study also stripped knowledge or skill from the decision making process,
instead relying on a silly gambling game. I would like to see them take a game
of skill, such as poker perhaps, and redo the test with say the world's
highest ranking male players and female players, and then see the results.

Business, investing, relationships, things concerning the household such as
family crisis, etc. are not at all akin to drawing cards from a deck, but that
is what this article is likening it to with its inherent suggestions.

~~~
untog
Sorry, any citation on people saying that boys failing is a success? And this
is "boys failing", not "girls succeeding". Two counter examples from NYT
alone:

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/the-boys-
at-...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/the-boys-at-the-back/)

"The rise of women, however long overdue, does not require the fall of men."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28kristof.html?_r=0)

"At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive
boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling
in schools? Of course it does"

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ripb
I'm really starting to tire of this narrative that we're constantly being fed.

Ok, we get it, women are fantastic and much better at men than everything.
Let's change the laws so it's illegal for a man to work, and we'll all retire
to being house husbands raising the kids.

Oh wait, the same narrative dictates that we're all worse with kids than women
and that we're all potentially sexual predators to the same children.

Men are shit. All Hail Women. Here's to our relegation to sperm farms and/or
genocide.

Does the above suffice? Are we happy now?

~~~
alex-g
Congratulations! This was the slipperiest of all slippery slope arguments on
HN today. Report to the nearest male genocide facility to claim your prize.

~~~
sliverstorm
Your parent is certainly reacting strongly, but I think it's understandable to
be upset & feel somewhat marginalized by the monoculture in the news on the
subject.

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facepalm
I've looked at the Credit Suisse study, which looks at company performance
from 2005 to 2011.

Choosing a suitable interval for selling company stocks is a standard device
for professional bullshitters like Credit Suisse (professional bullshitters
because they have to make up fairy tales to sell stock when nobody really can
predict anything). If they had taken another interval, the results would have
been different. I think this was even obvious from the charts they included in
the study (it's been a while that I read it - anyway, I encourage everyone to
do the same).

If the theory is correct and women take less risks, then presumably the
climate between 2005 and 2011 favored less risk taking (bear market?). At
other times, more risk taking might have been more beneficial.

It's actually well known that it's almost always possible to pick an interval
on which any given stock shows a positive performance.

And there are of course the other possible explanations, for example that
successful companies might have an easier time attracting women because they
can afford special perks to lure them in.

It's amazing how often this Credit Suisse "study" has been cited by now. Many
people just take it at face value because it suits their ideology.

I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or
start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

(I have nothing against female leaders, just against ideological fairy tales).

~~~
artsrc
My ideological fairy tale is that hiring the most qualified person leads to
better outcomes.

My reading of this analysis is that they compared 100% male boards, to ones
with at least one female (but still many males). And found under performance
in the all male boards.

And anyway do boards run companies, or do they just hire the people who do,
and vet large decisions?

Maybe a diverse board is better than a homogenous one, even if the individuals
are less capable?

I don't think the conclusion that women are better on average is well
supported by the Credit Suisse study.

> I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or
> start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

I think a fund that invested in companies which made a reasonable attempt to
hire the best people would out perform based on analysis I have seen.

In particular about 10% of hereditary company CEOs are significantly worse
managers than the 10% worst hired CEOs. (I am sure that can be phrased better,
sorry)

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smegel
But let me guess...no study anywhere will ever find that men are, in general,
better at women that anything (except negative things like killing each
other).

~~~
tbrownaw
I was going to point to spatial reasoning as the canonical example, but
Wikipedia thinks people are starting to question this now:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences)

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kelseywhelan
Is it always the case that behaving more conservatively under pressure is a
good thing? The author implies that 'taking big risks' and 'making real
progress' are mutually exclusive.

~~~
facepalm
The first experiment they describe is one were taking more risks yielded the
higher gains. Somehow they seem to have forgotten about their own experiment
in the end.

~~~
ripb
The article does say "They found that the most stressed men drew 21 percent
more cards from the risky decks than from the safe ones, compared to the most
stressed women, losing more over all."

I took this to refer to both "games", although I can see its ambiguity could
mean only the latter or both.

~~~
facepalm
I refer to the balloon experiment.

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VLM
The second to last paragraph missed the point entirely, in that the problem
with the "glass cliff" is that dying companies tend to die, so associating
women with dying companies will naturally associate them with epic failure
that isn't really their fault individually or their fault as women, as the
whole point of the earlier studies was decision making ability was about equal
most of the time. Yahoo isn't basically dead man walking because they have a
female leader, the have a female leader because they're dead man walking and
that inaccurately associates female leadership with epic failure. Think HP for
a historical example (sentence cut off by web interface? edited to: for a
historical example of a terminally ill company where the female leader at
least in folk terms became the "fall girl" for the companies implosion and
irrelevancy, which isn't the fault of that woman or women in general)

That paragraph of the article instead ran off on a tangent about more women
leaders would help before the crash, which isn't really very important for
feminism (beyond mere metrics) and again misses the point that when times are
good there was no particular difference in skill, such that a woman would
drive the company off the road just as well as a man if given the chance,
which is not perhaps the most politically correct thing to say, but...

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danieltillett
The answer is some are and some aren’t and that some women will make better
decisions in certain circumstance and make worse in other circumstances. In
other words the predictive value of this “research” is zero.

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cJ0th
They should have used a stressmachine:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr9DI3YLOTA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr9DI3YLOTA)

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Dewie
[This offends me.]

