The trouble with that study (and just about any other study of outcome equality) is that there’s no control for the possibility of actual inequality in the inputs. By the time someone is at the “receiving recommendations from senior mathematicians” stage they’ve been exposed to at least a decade or two of a potentially gender-biased environment. There’s nothing in the experiment here which distinguishes the hypothesis “senior mathematicians write biased recommendations” from “junior mathematicians received biased educations” or “young children receive biased levels of encouragement from family” or even plain “girls aren’t good at math”.
Just because poor studies are suggestive of bias doesn’t mean that good studies wouldn’t be too, though. The best evidence for gender bias in academia I’ve seen is that double-blind testing also shows gender bias in academia. If this Moss-Racusin et. al. experiment is replicable (and there isn’t anything obviously suspicious about it), the results are pretty damning.
Point. Whether or not it was well-designed, I thought it was a good example of how bias can (potentially) manifest in a way that doesn’t feel biased from the inside.
The trouble with that study (and just about any other study of outcome equality) is that there’s no control for the possibility of actual inequality in the inputs. By the time someone is at the “receiving recommendations from senior mathematicians” stage they’ve been exposed to at least a decade or two of a potentially gender-biased environment. There’s nothing in the experiment here which distinguishes the hypothesis “senior mathematicians write biased recommendations” from “junior mathematicians received biased educations” or “young children receive biased levels of encouragement from family” or even plain “girls aren’t good at math”.
Just because poor studies are suggestive of bias doesn’t mean that good studies wouldn’t be too, though. The best evidence for gender bias in academia I’ve seen is that double-blind testing also shows gender bias in academia. If this Moss-Racusin et. al. experiment is replicable (and there isn’t anything obviously suspicious about it), the results are pretty damning.
Point. Whether or not it was well-designed, I thought it was a good example of how bias can (potentially) manifest in a way that doesn’t feel biased from the inside.