
Are Women Perceived as Less Able in Science? - timr
http://www.sciencefriday.com/blogs/10/10/2012/are-women-perceived-as-less-able-in-science.html?audience=4
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mnicole
This reminds me of a Portland Community College professor that repeatedly
stated (in a blog post on women in engineering) that he expected the females
in his class to do far worse in his courses than her male peers because he
believed women's brains weren't capable of such high-level thinking. When you
have this type of mindset on both sides of the fence, it's no wonder we have
so many discussions on why more women aren't involved in these fields.

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001sky
_One of the most interesting conclusions of the study was that the evaluator's
gender, specialization, or age, did not correlate with bias. An old male
physics professor was as likely as a young female biology professor to
discriminate against Jennifer._

This story is sort of old news, but this excerpt raising an interesting point.
Namely, the use and abuse of the word 'bias'. Forward looking expectations may
_rightly_ take into account expectations of future performance. It does not
follow that a resume of _past_ performance is gender-neutral for _future_
performance, even if it is exactly the same. In this respect, the bids for
future services may still be (statistically) _unbiased_ estimators. That is,
it may actually be less likely that (on average) the gender's will produce
over an entire career equal productivity. The more interesting question, is
thus: is this true? The study is not structured to actually address the real
issue. Furthemore, it appears to assume or imply the answer (viz _bias will
prevent such equal performance_ ). But this is intellectually questionable.

Provided a non-zero probability of, for example, curtailing a career to care
for children would be enough to produce the observed result, ordinally. Since
this assumption is trivially true, by observation, this supports the
hypothesis of merely (heterodox) forward looking expectations. This doesn't
leave a warm fuzzy feeling, admittedly, and arguably employment managment is
to blame for the underlying root causes. But if these issues are genuine
concerns that are to be 'fixed,' first they need to be understood.

That being said, it has been reported that academics have returned
questionaires ranking a (non-existent) law school as "middle of the pack," and
they did so based soley on its brand name. Whether this is bias or sloppy
thinking (hueristic vs expertise vs presitige bias), is also a good question.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle

