
Scientific Bias in Favor of Studies Finding Gender Bias - Tomte
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201906/scientific-bias-in-favor-studies-finding-gender-bias
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PeterStuer
I've long since come to the conclusion that anything even just tangentially
touching on identity politics can not be sensibly discussed here, or anywhere
on the net. The tactics people that do not agree with you are prepared to
deploy are sadly making me retreat in disgust.

~~~
swebs
There are a few places where you can. There are three main conditions that are
necessary

1\. Complete anonymity so people can't dig up your comment history to attack
you or try to dox you.

2\. No voting system. These are commonly seen as "I agree" and "I disagree"
buttons. And once side of an argument reaches 51% of voters, the other 49%
quickly become buried and it snowballs from there.

3\. A light/hands-off moderation policy. Some moderation is necessary to
remove illegal content or spam, but moderators must not be able to ban people
for disagreeing with them.

~~~
imtringued
You will then suffer from selection bias because only people who have a
controversial opinion (no matter if it is right or wrong) will frequent those
places.

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jawns
In case anyone is interested in spot-checking whether this analysis captures
all of the pre-2016 studies that deal with gender bias in peer review, a
Google Scholar search is a good starting point:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gender+bias+peer+review...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gender+bias+peer+review&hl=en&as_yhi=2015)

Assuming the results are valid, and most of the studies that show bias toward
men have small sample sizes and most of the studies that show bias toward
women have larger sample sizes, I wonder whether it might be that bias is
affecting the makeup of the studies themselves.

For instance, if there is actually a bias against women in peer review, could
it be that the same forces that lead to a bias against women's research also
lead to a bias against studies that show there is a bias against women's
research? Keep in mind, the studies in this analysis represent only what got
through the gate of peer review; if that gate is biased, then we don't
necessarily know whether there is additional credible research that didn't get
through because of bias.

I'm not necessarily arguing that this is the case. But it would be an
interesting way for people who do believe the bias exists to respond to this
analysis.

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whitneyrzoller
"I then tallied the main result, the sample size and citation patterns for
each of the 10 studies, as reported here"

(Honest) stats question: Given that n=10 is itself a small sample size, how
does the computation of statistical power in meta studies differ from that of
the underlying studies?

Is there an accepted methodology? I couldn't remember doing this ages ago when
I took stats.

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0815test
This is really one instance of a much larger problem in the "soft" sciences,
where results that don't replicate are commonplace, and 'null' results that
don't appear to give "decisive" evidence for some effect are filed away and go
unpublished. It's a mistake to focus on "gender bias" alone, it's a funny
example but not really what's going on.

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TazeTSchnitzel
“Hard” sciences also have big replication issues.

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swebs
Do you have any examples?

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kstenerud
Isn't that to be expected? Studies that find X will receive more attention
than studies that don't find X.

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danieltillett
It is almost as though there is an entire profession who's livelihood is
dependent on finding bias where none exists.

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x3ro
Care to elaborate?

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BlackFly
It was probably an oblique reference to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair)
and more generally the idea that gender studies is actual more about taking
grievances at gender bias than neutrally studying them.

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wtdata
I don't think the real problem here is even this example of pro gender bias.
For me it is really the sham social sciences are, and always have been.

A big amount of their publication either follows political bias or, the
academic bias of the moment and this happens all because they aren't really
sciences. They don't follow the scientific method, they lack a criteria of
refutability. You can say whatever it is fancy at the moment, and if some
other study comes to contradict it, it doesn't matter.

In the end, I think, they are lengthy at fault for today's public opinion lack
of trust in science. Anti-vaxers, flat-earthers, and less extreme examples,
are enabled by the media presenting social science's findings as scientific
when in fact they are clearly not scientific in nature. And with that, we end
up taking credibility away from real sciences.

Every time we see the word "science" associated with this kind of practices,
the word "science" looses meaning for the ones that can't understand the clear
methodological difference between sociology and biology for instance.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Strong words and big generalisations, but let's assume you know what you're
talking about.

Take the social science I studied, linguistics. How does it lack
falsifiability? Theories of how languages evolved can be disproven by
contradictory evidence in the same way theories would be in any scientific
discipline. For example, we know English and German ultimately have a common
ancestor, because we can see the similarities between their modern and older
forms and explain them in terms of consistent sound changes, and we can
systematically explain the differences between the older forms of the two
languages such that we can reconstruct what we think is their precursor, and
then show in the same fashion that they are related to other European
languages. Now, if you believe English and German are in fact descended from
ancient Chinese, you can falsify the current theory by showing how they could
have evolved, but you can't, because any similarities are superficial and
can't be explained systematically.

Or did you mean only social sciences that you don't like? Which ones?

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tasuki
According to Wikipedia, science is "systematic enterprise that builds and
organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about
the universe".

 _Testable_ explanations _and_ predictions. Linguistics, interesting as it is,
isn't science. Neither is mathematics. Does that mean linguistics and
mathematics aren't worthwhile? Of course not!

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wtdata
Exactly. That's also something that is used as an argument, which is a
strawman: You are refuting the validity of a number of fields if you don't
accept them as sciences.

There are plenty of very valid disciplines of human knowledge that aren't
sciences (and they seem perfectly fine in not being sciences since they have a
clear aim and methodology for their work that, by impossibility of what they
do, just can't follow the scientific method). History is a clear example.

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Chris2048
> You are refuting the validity of a number of fields if you don't accept them
> as sciences.

It's refuting their validity _as sciences_. Science is often taken as more
authoritative and objective as other subjects, so the label matters.

I may be a perfectly good dentist, the fact I am not a neuro-surgeon doesn't
invalidate my worth as a dentist;

But If I claimed to be a neuro-surgeon I should be investigated before I cut
open any skulls.

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AstralStorm
Even a dentist is supposed to base their treatments in evidence based
medicine. It is a specialty thereof.

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raxxorrax
That isn't bias. It is called pity.

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dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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learnstats2
I would frame this article as: "The author cherry-picked 20 papers and
personally decided that 6 were biased in favour of women, compared to the
author's personal cherry-picked baseline."

I'm not sure why this is considered a sensible discussion for these pages.

