They took the exact same application, sometimes with male-looking names and sometimes with female-looking names, and asked faculty for their opinions about them. The female versions were rated substantially (and significantly at the 0.001 level) worse for “competence”, “hireability” and “willingness to mentor this student”. The gap in estimated competence was about the same in size and significance as the gaps in the other metrics, which to me seems to indicate that differences in fear of a wrongful termination suit didn’t contribute much if at all. (On looking at the relevant bit of the paper, the authors agree and have some statistical analysis that allegedly supports this view.)
When asked roughly what starting salary they’d offer the applicants, the “female” applications attracted ~12% lower figures.
(The details are all there at the other end of the link I gave.)
are you sure the other information was enough to completely screen that out?
I’m not completely sure of anything, ever. But: The information included: age, degree granted and university that granted it, GPA, GRE scores, extracts from application letter and faculty letters of recommendation, etc. If there’s any residual information to speak of in knowing whether the applicant was male or female, I’d be rather surprised; if there’s enough to justify the differences found in the study, I’d be flabbergasted.
[EDITED to add: While affirmative action may be “a thing in college admissions”, to the best of my knowledge it is not “a thing” in the awarding of college degrees, the calculation of GPAs, etc.]
If women are more likely to use maternity leave or otherwise devote more resources to family and less to the job than men are, and if they are more likely to sue for sexual harassment than men, then most of these assessments could be correct; seeing a female name actually does give information.
As I have said a few times already in this thread, the numbers make it look very much as if the dominating factor was an assessment that the “female” candidates were less competent than the “male” ones. Lack of commitment and increased lawsuit risk don’t seem to me like matters of competence and I would expect the faculty surveyed to share that opinion.
Do you have a rough estimate of (1) how much more likely women would have to be than men to do those things, in order to justify a difference in evaluation of the magnitude found by this study, and (2) how much more likely women actually are to do those things?
(Two remarks in regard to sexual harassment lawsuits. 1: I think the relevant figure isn’t how much more likely women are to file such suits but how much more likely they are to file them when no harassment has really occurred. But perhaps not: suppose women are more likely to be victims of sexual harassment sufficient to justify a lawsuit, and therefore more likely to file such lawsuits; then one possible position would be to consider women less desirable employees on those grounds and rate them as less competent. Personally, I think that would be odious, but I can imagine that some people might disagree. 2: My understanding is that actually such lawsuits are really rather rare, much too rare for rational consideration of their risk to yield the reported difference in evaluation even if (a) all such lawsuits are assumed groundless but successful and (b) the resulting losses in productivity and collegiality are assigned to lack of “competence” by the person filing the lawsuit. However, I don’t have extensive statistics on this and will be happy to be corrected if wrong.)
I think the relevant figure isn’t how much more likely women are to file such suits but how much more likely they are to file them when no harassment has really occurred.
The problem is that “whether sexual harassment has occurred” isn’t all that well-defined. You can of course define “sexual harassment” however you want but then you have to establish you it’s a bad thing. For example, from a briefing at the company I work at the examples of “sexual harassment” was:
1) a woman goes to work in somewhat provocative/revealing clothing and a male coworker complements her on her appearance.
2) a manager used the phrase “guys and gals”.
Frankly if these examples are typical of “sexual harassment”, I’d say sexual harassment isn’t a problem.
I don’t know, the presenter didn’t say. Although the fact that these were presented as examples of behaviors not to engage in, is telling. Also even if they don’t bring a lawsuit, the fact that they make an issue out of these kinds of things is not conducive to a good work environment.
Of course I wasn’t there. But it occurs to me that there are several reasons why “marginal” examples might actually be the most useful:
To define the region of (concept-)space a thing occupies, you might want to point to a few places on its boundary.
There’s little point telling people “raping your co-workers is bad; don’t do it” because anyone to whom that isn’t already obvious is probably a lost cause.
Marginal examples might be more likely to provoke useful discussion.
I’d put the examples you give in the category of (not typical examples of sexual harassment, but) things that are frequently harmless but (1) might cause easily-avoided annoyance or upset in some cases and so should maybe be avoided and (2) in some cases might indicate, or be thought to indicate, an underlying bad attitude (women in the workplace being seen primarily as eye candy; women being seen as lower-status and akin to children).
I repeat: of course I wasn’t there and don’t know exactly what your presenter said about these examples. If s/he said “these things are definitely harassment and you could get in serious trouble for doing them” then I’d regard that as unreasonable; if s/he said “these things may seem harmless, and often they are, but you should still avoid them”, I’d agree.
Anyway, I mention all this just in the interests of mutual understanding; it’s all kinda irrelevant to the question of whether “greater risk of sexual harassment lawsuits” is a good justification for rating an identically-described person as substantially more “competent” if they have a male name than a female name. Do you really think it is?
To define the region of (concept-)space a thing occupies, you might want to point to a few places on its boundary.
The problem is that it causes people to treat it as an archetypical example.
I’d put the examples you give in the category of (not typical examples of sexual harassment, but) things that are frequently harmless but (1) might cause easily-avoided annoyance or upset in some cases and so should maybe be avoided
I fail to see why it should be policy to cater to people who are clearly being unreasonable.
I fail to see why it should be policy to cater to people who are clearly being unreasonable.
For one thing, because being unreasonable is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where everyone is always reasonable. So if doing something predictably results in a bunch of people being upset, then it might be better to avoid it even if it would be better for everyone if they weren’t upset by it.
For another, because what’s “clearly unreasonable” to one person may be “clearly reasonable” to another. It may seem “clearly unreasonable” for a woman to have a problem with having her appearance complimented by her male colleagues. But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance, and never on their ideas, while the reverse happens to the men around her … why, then, I have some sympathy if she gets frustrated by yet another compliment on her appearance. (It might in some sense be better for her to focus not on the compliments on her appearance but on the absence of response to her work. But actual things that actually happen are easier to see and more psychologically salient than absences, even when the absence is the bigger underlying problem.)
The problem is that it causes people to treat it as an archetypical example.
Only people who are—how shall I put it? -- clearly being unreasonable. One might prefer not to make policy on the basis of people who are clearly being unreasonable :-).
Seriously: yes, I agree that that’s a potential problem. The obvious solution seems to me to be to make it as clear as you possibly can when you’re talking about central examples and when you’re sketching the boundaries. Unfortunately, I bet there will always be (clearly unreasonable) people who don’t take any notice and either mix the two up or pretend to. I’m not sure much can be done about that.
But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance
Well, complimenting people wearing attractive clothes is is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where no-one ever notices other people’s clothes. So if wearing certain clothes predictably results in a bunch of people commenting on your appearance (and it annoys you), then it might be better to wear more modest clothes yadda yadda yadda.
You say that like you expect me to disagree, but I don’t think I do. (But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work. I’m not terribly sure how much sense that makes, though.)
But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work.
It seems even more unreasonable to be to wear sexy clothes (how did “sexy” turn into “nice”?) and then object when someone comments on them. Frankly the only way I can explain the woman’s actions are that she was either insulted that the complementer was too low status or trolling for an excuse to accuse someone of sexual harassment.
I don’t think it did, exactly. I just didn’t assume that clothes that could be described as “somewhat provocative/revealing” necessarily belonged in the bucket labelled “sexy” rather than the one labelled “nice”.
To be more precise: (1) what is viewed as provocative or revealing is highly dependent on who’s doing the viewing (see, e.g., Victorian England or many Muslim-dominated places today; but similar variation occurs at the individual as well as the societal level), and (2) person A may wear clothes that person B finds “revealing” without the least intention of attracting sexual attention of any sort.
I have no quantitative data (and doubt whether any exist) but have more than once heard women complain that their choice of clothing was treated by a man as some sort of attempt to provoke when in fact they were just wearing something they felt comfortable in or liked the look of. (I have a feeling there is pretty decent scientific evidence that men tend to overestimate the extent to which women’s behaviour is intended to signal sexual availability or interest, but don’t have references to hand. It seems like a plausible hypothesis on the usual handwavy evo-psych grounds, for what little that’s worth.)
I don’t know what she was wearing, I heard it from the lawyer doing the briefing, but he did mention her undoing some buttons. In any case, if I came to work wearing a suite, we dress casually, I’d expect people to comment on it.
I was about to go ‘sweatshirts for example are comfortable but definitely not provocative’, then I remembered reading that when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
(Then again, being comfortable in the latter sense with wearing certain clothes but not with being complimented for them sounds weird to me.)
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another. Anecdotally, it seems that many women have the experience of being persistently treated (so to speak) as ornamental rather than functional, of having their male colleagues pay attention to their appearance while neglecting their work. Someone in that situation may not be glad of compliments to her appearance even if she has gone to some trouble to look good.
An analogy occurs to me. Let’s suppose that an important part of your employment is writing analytical reports of some kind. Stock market forecasts, competitive analysis of other companies’ products, software requirements, that sort of thing. You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.” or “I see you spelled ‘accommodate’ correctly, well done.” A single instance of this is harmless and you’d probably be glad of it. But it happens again and again, much more often than any substantive comment (positive or negative) on the actual content of the reports you’re writing. After a while, you might start taking these comments as indicating that your boss either thinks the content is no good, or for some reason simply doesn’t much care about the content. You might find that being complimented on your excellent use of quotation marks makes you feel bad, not good, about how valuable your carefully calculated and checked risk assessment is to the company.
And you might feel that way even if, as a matter of fact, you did put some care and skill into spelling and punctuating correctly and presenting the report attractively.
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another.
Now who’s making highly implausible theories and arguing that they’re “possible”?
You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.”
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font, I’d expect that reaction.
It doesn’t appear to me to be a highly implausible theory; it’s a thing many women actually complain about.
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font
My understanding is that quite a few women report male attention going disproportionately to their clothes and appearance even when they aren’t wearing anything very unusual.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them. Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
And there are even more employees who really want to be complimented on their use of quotation marks, but only from people with small noses. This unusual preference is something they don’t want to admit, so these other employees, when complimented by someone with a big nose, pretend to be like you and be offended because they are not being complimented on content, when that’s not true at all.
I think in an environment like that you should expect to get complimented on your punctuation quite a bit.
The problem with compliments isn’t so much that woman often don’t enjoy getting them. There are many cases where they don’t, but that’s not the central issue.
The problem is that it’s hard for a man to compliment a woman on her appearance and at the same time not let it influence how he treats the woman in their professional function. The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
The problem with the problem is that not everyone actually means that. And the ones who don’t mean it end up reducing the credibility of the people who say it and really mean it.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them.
Sure. But after a couple times I compliment on your punctuation and you don’t take it well, I should get the hint and realize that you aren’t one of those people. (And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses¹ than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it, at least until I can afford a rhinoplasty.)
Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
I was about to go ‘but there’s a large difference between writing in a formal standard grammatically correct way and writing in a way that fishes for compliments!’, then I remembered that that’s probably much less the case in the America than where I am (see e.g. [1], [2]; by comparison where I am you can just wear canvas sneakers or tennis shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt or a sweater, and that’s not necessarily considered sexy but not necessarily slovenly either, regardless of your gender), so never mind.
“Native speakers” would be a less silly allegory, BTW.
And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it,
Using your analogy of native speakers, people want to be complimented on their punctuation by native speakers only. When complimented by anyone who doesn’t speak well enough, they lie and say “I don’t like it because you’re not complimenting me on the quality of my work”, when they’re really just using it as a cover for an implied insult of “I hate people with your accent”. This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then you come along, and you really want to be complimented on the quality of your work. You’re going to be mistaken for those other guys quite a bit.
Doesn’t change my point. If you are predictably annoyed when I compliment on your punctuation and I know it, I’d better stop it if I don’t want to be a dick, regardless of why it annoys you.
I don’t believe that. For instance, if you are white, I am not, and you are offended by compliments because you are offended whenever a non-white person talks to you or even sit next to you, it’s not me that’s being a dick by offending you, it’s you who’s being one by being offended by things that you have no right to be offended by.
That’s essentially what’s going on here—some people who are offended are offended for a reason that doesn’t deserve to be respected (they dont like someone’s accent/they don’t want to be complimented by someone low status), and they lie and pretend they are offended for a reason that does deserve to be respected (they don’t want shallow compliments).
Not wanting to be complimented for being sexy by unsexy people doesn’t deserve to be respected? WTF? Would you be okay with it if someone you’re not only not attracted to in the slightest but perhaps even repulsed by said something to the effect that they would like to bang you (even though not with those words)?
I might want to restrict such things to being said only by someone who I’m in a relationship with, but that’s different from restricting such things to only being said by all beautiful people.
This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then it’s not a lie. That’s not how natural languages work. If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology. There’s no stone tablet in the sky that specifies what X actually means regardless of when people actually say X and when they don’t. (Or would you say that someone saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” in absence of domestic carnivorans falling down from clouds is lying?)
And if of the possible ways of wording a complaint someone chooses the one least likely to hurt my feelings, why should I hold it against them, rather than being grateful for that?
If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology.
Hold on. I’m not arguing that X doesn’t mean Y. I’m arguing that X does mean Y, and that explains why people treat Y as X. (X=I don’t want to be complimented by ugly/low status people, Y=I don’t want to be complimented based on superficial attributes, by anyone).
when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
I meant “comfortable” as an attribute of the social situation in that comment, not of the clothes I’d be wearing in it. If I were wearing sweatpants to a wedding, for example, I’d likely find them comfortable but I wouldn’t be comfortable.
I thought that was what I was suggesting is best—at least if it happens that the women in question can actually avoid having the men focus on their appearance by making changes in clothing. I can’t help suspecting (though I have no actual evidence) that in such cases their options are actually “get unwanted compliments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas” and “get unwanted critical comments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas”, with perhaps a little middle ground where they get both positive and negative comments on their appearance and still have their work overlooked.
While lawsuits may be rare, they are expensive, and people are risk-averse.
Also, the range of behavior that has to be avoided to avoid an unjustified lawsuit is much wider than the range of behavior that has to be avoided to avoid a justified lawsuit, and since even unjustified lawsuits are expensive, the former category is what really matters.
Your second paragraph seems to be agreeing with the first of my parenthetical points, but it sounds as if it’s intended to be a point of disagreement. I mention this just in case it turns out that one of us has misunderstood the other.
Unjustified lawsuits are probably cheaper—you’re more likely to win them, more likely to win them quickly, and more likely (in jurisdictions where this is a real distinction) to have the plaintiff have to pay your legal costs.
Your second paragraph seems to be agreeing with the first of my parenthetical points, but it sounds as if it’s intended to be a point of disagreement.
It was disagreeing with your second point, “much too rare for rational consideration of their risk to yield the reported difference in evaluation”. If the person is risk-averse, then it’s not too rare for rational consideration of the risk to yield the difference. (Don’t assume that risk aversion is inherently iirational. It’s not.)
I don’t understand. It was your first paragraph that was pointing out risk aversion. The second paragraph was the one about unjustified versus justified lawsuits. (Let me try to bridge one possible inferential gap by remarking that I think unjustified sexual harassment lawsuits are also very rare.)
So is your claim that the scores on a single GRE test completely capture everything about an applicant relevant to job performance?
I find your question absolutely bewildering, given that the very sentence I wrote that mentioned GRE scores mentioned them only as part of a list of things.
Yes and when I pointed out the problems with all the other things in the list your reply basically amounted to “you haven’t made any objections to GRE scores”.
You didn’t point out the problems with all the other things in the list, you made a claim about one thing in the list. My reply did not (as I have already pointed out) amount to “you haven’t made any objections to GRE scores”.
Regardless, no metric is perfect, and no one has been claiming otherwise. Accordingly, it is possible in principle (as I have already said more than once in this discussion) that there might be male/female differences that are either really huge, or highly relevant to scientific competence but startlingly uncorrelated with all the information provided to the faculty in this study, and that render the assessments they made rational given the information they had.
However, it seems pretty unlikely to me.
What do you think? Is the best explanation for these very different assessment of identical applications from differently-named candidates, in your opinion, that the faculty making the assessment are aware of such huge differences between men and women and have weighed them roughly correctly (not necessarily consciously and explicitly) to arrive at the results that have? If so, could you sketch for me roughly what these differences are and how they lead to that result? Because I’m having real trouble thinking of any hypothesis of this sort that’s consistent with what I think I’ve observed of the relative abilities of men and women.
Accordingly, it is possible in principle (as I have already said more than once in this discussion) that there might be male/female differences that are either really huge, or highly relevant to scientific competence but startlingly uncorrelated with all the information provided to the faculty in this study
Do I believe that Americans are generally more intelligent than Europeans? No, I don’t. At the same time in the LW census the average American has somthing like a 10 point higher IQ. In the data set there a strong correlation.
I think the intuition that the factor of the name should be zero is wrong even if there no causal effect because gender simply interacts in complex ways with many other things. I’m not sure in what direction the factor is going to correct, which might also be different in different situations but assuming that it contains no information at all doesn’t seem to be right.
I just grabbed the latest LW survey data I could find, selected (1) rows with “United States” as country and something other than a null for IQ and (2) all rows with something other than a null for IQ. (Note that this doesn’t include any sort of selection on the basis of reliability of IQ score.) I got means of 138.3 for the larger dataset (472 numbers, stddev=13.6) and 140.7 for the smaller (249 numbers, stddev=13.5). I wouldn’t call that “something like a 10 point higher IQ”.
the intuition that the factor of the name should be zero
What intuition that it should be zero? The question is whether it should be very large, not whether it should be exactly zero.
I’ve already explained why the difference would need to be very large for these results to be correctly explained by saying that the rating faculty made accurate allowance for real male/female competence differences. If you missed that, or you think I got it wrong, or it didn’t make sense, do let me know.
If so, could you sketch for me roughly what these differences are and how they lead to that result?
Let’s see: there are numerous ones the most relevant are: women have less variation in intelligence then men and so there fewer unusually smart women. Women are worse at taking criticism. There is also a lot of stuff about the kind of hierarchies men and women tend to form.
Because I’m having real trouble thinking of any hypothesis of this sort that’s consistent with what I think I’ve observed of the relative abilities of men and women.
Have you actually been observing the relative abilities between men and women, or is your reaction whenever you notice a woman doing something badly or acting emotionally to hit yourself for having a “sexist” thought?
women have less variation in intelligence than men
That could indeed (if the numbers work out) explain a difference in success at the very highest levels in the absence of prejudice. But this sort of effect is far weaker away from the very tails of the distribution, and the particular study we’re taking as an example in this discussion is not concerned with the very tails of the distribution. Further, my understanding is that GRE scores correlate somewhat better with intelligence than they do with job performance (see, e.g., this post which has a few references to the primary literature), and I would expect them to do a pretty good job of screening off differences in raw intelligence in this case.
Women are worse at taking criticism.
Evidence? (I have to say it looks to me as if people are bad at taking criticism, and I haven’t noticed a big difference between men and women; but I’ve not studied this and will be glad to learn.)
a lot of stuff about the kind of hierarchies men and women tend to form.
I’m afraid that’s not specific enough for me to form any idea of how it would justify a drastically lower assessment of the likely competence of a woman than an identically-credentialed man as a scientific lab manager.
Have you actually been observing the relative abilities
Relative abilities as such are pretty much unobservable. I’ve been observing the relative performance. But only casually and qualitatively; if you have a pile of useful data then by all means point me at it.
is your reaction [...] to hit yourself for having a “sexist” thought?
No, not at all. I notice both men and women doing things badly and acting emotionally all the time, and feel no particular impulse to self-punishment when I do so. -- Is it your usual practice to assume that people who disagree with you are off their heads, or have I said something to give you that impression particularly strongly in my case?
(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am assuming that you didn’t mean “hit yourself” literally; of course if you did then it’s an even weirder thing to think I might do.)
They took the exact same application, sometimes with male-looking names and sometimes with female-looking names, and asked faculty for their opinions about them. The female versions were rated substantially (and significantly at the 0.001 level) worse for “competence”, “hireability” and “willingness to mentor this student”. The gap in estimated competence was about the same in size and significance as the gaps in the other metrics, which to me seems to indicate that differences in fear of a wrongful termination suit didn’t contribute much if at all. (On looking at the relevant bit of the paper, the authors agree and have some statistical analysis that allegedly supports this view.)
When asked roughly what starting salary they’d offer the applicants, the “female” applications attracted ~12% lower figures.
(The details are all there at the other end of the link I gave.)
I’m not completely sure of anything, ever. But: The information included: age, degree granted and university that granted it, GPA, GRE scores, extracts from application letter and faculty letters of recommendation, etc. If there’s any residual information to speak of in knowing whether the applicant was male or female, I’d be rather surprised; if there’s enough to justify the differences found in the study, I’d be flabbergasted.
[EDITED to add: While affirmative action may be “a thing in college admissions”, to the best of my knowledge it is not “a thing” in the awarding of college degrees, the calculation of GPAs, etc.]
If women are more likely to use maternity leave or otherwise devote more resources to family and less to the job than men are, and if they are more likely to sue for sexual harassment than men, then most of these assessments could be correct; seeing a female name actually does give information.
As I have said a few times already in this thread, the numbers make it look very much as if the dominating factor was an assessment that the “female” candidates were less competent than the “male” ones. Lack of commitment and increased lawsuit risk don’t seem to me like matters of competence and I would expect the faculty surveyed to share that opinion.
Do you have a rough estimate of (1) how much more likely women would have to be than men to do those things, in order to justify a difference in evaluation of the magnitude found by this study, and (2) how much more likely women actually are to do those things?
(Two remarks in regard to sexual harassment lawsuits. 1: I think the relevant figure isn’t how much more likely women are to file such suits but how much more likely they are to file them when no harassment has really occurred. But perhaps not: suppose women are more likely to be victims of sexual harassment sufficient to justify a lawsuit, and therefore more likely to file such lawsuits; then one possible position would be to consider women less desirable employees on those grounds and rate them as less competent. Personally, I think that would be odious, but I can imagine that some people might disagree. 2: My understanding is that actually such lawsuits are really rather rare, much too rare for rational consideration of their risk to yield the reported difference in evaluation even if (a) all such lawsuits are assumed groundless but successful and (b) the resulting losses in productivity and collegiality are assigned to lack of “competence” by the person filing the lawsuit. However, I don’t have extensive statistics on this and will be happy to be corrected if wrong.)
The problem is that “whether sexual harassment has occurred” isn’t all that well-defined. You can of course define “sexual harassment” however you want but then you have to establish you it’s a bad thing. For example, from a briefing at the company I work at the examples of “sexual harassment” was:
1) a woman goes to work in somewhat provocative/revealing clothing and a male coworker complements her on her appearance.
2) a manager used the phrase “guys and gals”.
Frankly if these examples are typical of “sexual harassment”, I’d say sexual harassment isn’t a problem.
Did either of these examples result in lawsuits?
I don’t know, the presenter didn’t say. Although the fact that these were presented as examples of behaviors not to engage in, is telling. Also even if they don’t bring a lawsuit, the fact that they make an issue out of these kinds of things is not conducive to a good work environment.
Of course I wasn’t there. But it occurs to me that there are several reasons why “marginal” examples might actually be the most useful:
To define the region of (concept-)space a thing occupies, you might want to point to a few places on its boundary.
There’s little point telling people “raping your co-workers is bad; don’t do it” because anyone to whom that isn’t already obvious is probably a lost cause.
Marginal examples might be more likely to provoke useful discussion.
I’d put the examples you give in the category of (not typical examples of sexual harassment, but) things that are frequently harmless but (1) might cause easily-avoided annoyance or upset in some cases and so should maybe be avoided and (2) in some cases might indicate, or be thought to indicate, an underlying bad attitude (women in the workplace being seen primarily as eye candy; women being seen as lower-status and akin to children).
I repeat: of course I wasn’t there and don’t know exactly what your presenter said about these examples. If s/he said “these things are definitely harassment and you could get in serious trouble for doing them” then I’d regard that as unreasonable; if s/he said “these things may seem harmless, and often they are, but you should still avoid them”, I’d agree.
Anyway, I mention all this just in the interests of mutual understanding; it’s all kinda irrelevant to the question of whether “greater risk of sexual harassment lawsuits” is a good justification for rating an identically-described person as substantially more “competent” if they have a male name than a female name. Do you really think it is?
The problem is that it causes people to treat it as an archetypical example.
I fail to see why it should be policy to cater to people who are clearly being unreasonable.
For one thing, because being unreasonable is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where everyone is always reasonable. So if doing something predictably results in a bunch of people being upset, then it might be better to avoid it even if it would be better for everyone if they weren’t upset by it.
For another, because what’s “clearly unreasonable” to one person may be “clearly reasonable” to another. It may seem “clearly unreasonable” for a woman to have a problem with having her appearance complimented by her male colleagues. But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance, and never on their ideas, while the reverse happens to the men around her … why, then, I have some sympathy if she gets frustrated by yet another compliment on her appearance. (It might in some sense be better for her to focus not on the compliments on her appearance but on the absence of response to her work. But actual things that actually happen are easier to see and more psychologically salient than absences, even when the absence is the bigger underlying problem.)
Only people who are—how shall I put it? -- clearly being unreasonable. One might prefer not to make policy on the basis of people who are clearly being unreasonable :-).
Seriously: yes, I agree that that’s a potential problem. The obvious solution seems to me to be to make it as clear as you possibly can when you’re talking about central examples and when you’re sketching the boundaries. Unfortunately, I bet there will always be (clearly unreasonable) people who don’t take any notice and either mix the two up or pretend to. I’m not sure much can be done about that.
I mostly agree (and upvoted), but...
Well, complimenting people wearing attractive clothes is is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where no-one ever notices other people’s clothes. So if wearing certain clothes predictably results in a bunch of people commenting on your appearance (and it annoys you), then it might be better to wear more modest clothes yadda yadda yadda.
;-)
You say that like you expect me to disagree, but I don’t think I do. (But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work. I’m not terribly sure how much sense that makes, though.)
It seems even more unreasonable to be to wear sexy clothes (how did “sexy” turn into “nice”?) and then object when someone comments on them. Frankly the only way I can explain the woman’s actions are that she was either insulted that the complementer was too low status or trolling for an excuse to accuse someone of sexual harassment.
I don’t think it did, exactly. I just didn’t assume that clothes that could be described as “somewhat provocative/revealing” necessarily belonged in the bucket labelled “sexy” rather than the one labelled “nice”.
To be more precise: (1) what is viewed as provocative or revealing is highly dependent on who’s doing the viewing (see, e.g., Victorian England or many Muslim-dominated places today; but similar variation occurs at the individual as well as the societal level), and (2) person A may wear clothes that person B finds “revealing” without the least intention of attracting sexual attention of any sort.
I have no quantitative data (and doubt whether any exist) but have more than once heard women complain that their choice of clothing was treated by a man as some sort of attempt to provoke when in fact they were just wearing something they felt comfortable in or liked the look of. (I have a feeling there is pretty decent scientific evidence that men tend to overestimate the extent to which women’s behaviour is intended to signal sexual availability or interest, but don’t have references to hand. It seems like a plausible hypothesis on the usual handwavy evo-psych grounds, for what little that’s worth.)
I don’t know what she was wearing, I heard it from the lawyer doing the briefing, but he did mention her undoing some buttons. In any case, if I came to work wearing a suite, we dress casually, I’d expect people to comment on it.
I was about to go ‘sweatshirts for example are comfortable but definitely not provocative’, then I remembered reading that when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
(Then again, being comfortable in the latter sense with wearing certain clothes but not with being complimented for them sounds weird to me.)
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another. Anecdotally, it seems that many women have the experience of being persistently treated (so to speak) as ornamental rather than functional, of having their male colleagues pay attention to their appearance while neglecting their work. Someone in that situation may not be glad of compliments to her appearance even if she has gone to some trouble to look good.
An analogy occurs to me. Let’s suppose that an important part of your employment is writing analytical reports of some kind. Stock market forecasts, competitive analysis of other companies’ products, software requirements, that sort of thing. You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.” or “I see you spelled ‘accommodate’ correctly, well done.” A single instance of this is harmless and you’d probably be glad of it. But it happens again and again, much more often than any substantive comment (positive or negative) on the actual content of the reports you’re writing. After a while, you might start taking these comments as indicating that your boss either thinks the content is no good, or for some reason simply doesn’t much care about the content. You might find that being complimented on your excellent use of quotation marks makes you feel bad, not good, about how valuable your carefully calculated and checked risk assessment is to the company.
And you might feel that way even if, as a matter of fact, you did put some care and skill into spelling and punctuating correctly and presenting the report attractively.
Now who’s making highly implausible theories and arguing that they’re “possible”?
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font, I’d expect that reaction.
It doesn’t appear to me to be a highly implausible theory; it’s a thing many women actually complain about.
My understanding is that quite a few women report male attention going disproportionately to their clothes and appearance even when they aren’t wearing anything very unusual.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them. Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
And there are even more employees who really want to be complimented on their use of quotation marks, but only from people with small noses. This unusual preference is something they don’t want to admit, so these other employees, when complimented by someone with a big nose, pretend to be like you and be offended because they are not being complimented on content, when that’s not true at all.
I think in an environment like that you should expect to get complimented on your punctuation quite a bit.
The problem with compliments isn’t so much that woman often don’t enjoy getting them. There are many cases where they don’t, but that’s not the central issue.
The problem is that it’s hard for a man to compliment a woman on her appearance and at the same time not let it influence how he treats the woman in their professional function. The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
On the other hand the halo effect also exists.
The problem with the problem is that not everyone actually means that. And the ones who don’t mean it end up reducing the credibility of the people who say it and really mean it.
Sure. But after a couple times I compliment on your punctuation and you don’t take it well, I should get the hint and realize that you aren’t one of those people. (And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses¹ than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it, at least until I can afford a rhinoplasty.)
I was about to go ‘but there’s a large difference between writing in a formal standard grammatically correct way and writing in a way that fishes for compliments!’, then I remembered that that’s probably much less the case in the America than where I am (see e.g. [1], [2]; by comparison where I am you can just wear canvas sneakers or tennis shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt or a sweater, and that’s not necessarily considered sexy but not necessarily slovenly either, regardless of your gender), so never mind.
“Native speakers” would be a less silly allegory, BTW.
Using your analogy of native speakers, people want to be complimented on their punctuation by native speakers only. When complimented by anyone who doesn’t speak well enough, they lie and say “I don’t like it because you’re not complimenting me on the quality of my work”, when they’re really just using it as a cover for an implied insult of “I hate people with your accent”. This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then you come along, and you really want to be complimented on the quality of your work. You’re going to be mistaken for those other guys quite a bit.
Doesn’t change my point. If you are predictably annoyed when I compliment on your punctuation and I know it, I’d better stop it if I don’t want to be a dick, regardless of why it annoys you.
I don’t believe that. For instance, if you are white, I am not, and you are offended by compliments because you are offended whenever a non-white person talks to you or even sit next to you, it’s not me that’s being a dick by offending you, it’s you who’s being one by being offended by things that you have no right to be offended by.
That’s essentially what’s going on here—some people who are offended are offended for a reason that doesn’t deserve to be respected (they dont like someone’s accent/they don’t want to be complimented by someone low status), and they lie and pretend they are offended for a reason that does deserve to be respected (they don’t want shallow compliments).
Not wanting to be complimented for being sexy by unsexy people doesn’t deserve to be respected? WTF? Would you be okay with it if someone you’re not only not attracted to in the slightest but perhaps even repulsed by said something to the effect that they would like to bang you (even though not with those words)?
I might want to restrict such things to being said only by someone who I’m in a relationship with, but that’s different from restricting such things to only being said by all beautiful people.
Then it’s not a lie. That’s not how natural languages work. If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology. There’s no stone tablet in the sky that specifies what X actually means regardless of when people actually say X and when they don’t. (Or would you say that someone saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” in absence of domestic carnivorans falling down from clouds is lying?)
And if of the possible ways of wording a complaint someone chooses the one least likely to hurt my feelings, why should I hold it against them, rather than being grateful for that?
Hold on. I’m not arguing that X doesn’t mean Y. I’m arguing that X does mean Y, and that explains why people treat Y as X. (X=I don’t want to be complimented by ugly/low status people, Y=I don’t want to be complimented based on superficial attributes, by anyone).
Tapping out.
I meant “comfortable” as an attribute of the social situation in that comment, not of the clothes I’d be wearing in it. If I were wearing sweatpants to a wedding, for example, I’d likely find them comfortable but I wouldn’t be comfortable.
(I’m a guy.)
Well, that’s not obvious to me, anyway...
Well, these aren’t mutually exclusive. Can’t we do both? Postel’s law, anyone?
Postel’s law would mean not throwing a fit when someone complements your clothing.
Yes, that too.
I thought that was what I was suggesting is best—at least if it happens that the women in question can actually avoid having the men focus on their appearance by making changes in clothing. I can’t help suspecting (though I have no actual evidence) that in such cases their options are actually “get unwanted compliments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas” and “get unwanted critical comments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas”, with perhaps a little middle ground where they get both positive and negative comments on their appearance and still have their work overlooked.
While lawsuits may be rare, they are expensive, and people are risk-averse.
Also, the range of behavior that has to be avoided to avoid an unjustified lawsuit is much wider than the range of behavior that has to be avoided to avoid a justified lawsuit, and since even unjustified lawsuits are expensive, the former category is what really matters.
Your second paragraph seems to be agreeing with the first of my parenthetical points, but it sounds as if it’s intended to be a point of disagreement. I mention this just in case it turns out that one of us has misunderstood the other.
Unjustified lawsuits are probably cheaper—you’re more likely to win them, more likely to win them quickly, and more likely (in jurisdictions where this is a real distinction) to have the plaintiff have to pay your legal costs.
It was disagreeing with your second point, “much too rare for rational consideration of their risk to yield the reported difference in evaluation”. If the person is risk-averse, then it’s not too rare for rational consideration of the risk to yield the difference. (Don’t assume that risk aversion is inherently iirational. It’s not.)
I don’t understand. It was your first paragraph that was pointing out risk aversion. The second paragraph was the one about unjustified versus justified lawsuits. (Let me try to bridge one possible inferential gap by remarking that I think unjustified sexual harassment lawsuits are also very rare.)
For a lot of colleges the hard part is getting in, and getting the degree isn’t that hard conditional on getting in.
That would be why the application also included the applicant’s GPA. And also both GRE scores. And a bunch of other things.
GPA is meaningless without knowing how hard the classes the applicant took were.
So is your claim that the scores on a single GRE test completely capture everything about an applicant relevant to job performance?
I find your question absolutely bewildering, given that the very sentence I wrote that mentioned GRE scores mentioned them only as part of a list of things.
Yes and when I pointed out the problems with all the other things in the list your reply basically amounted to “you haven’t made any objections to GRE scores”.
You didn’t point out the problems with all the other things in the list, you made a claim about one thing in the list. My reply did not (as I have already pointed out) amount to “you haven’t made any objections to GRE scores”.
Regardless, no metric is perfect, and no one has been claiming otherwise. Accordingly, it is possible in principle (as I have already said more than once in this discussion) that there might be male/female differences that are either really huge, or highly relevant to scientific competence but startlingly uncorrelated with all the information provided to the faculty in this study, and that render the assessments they made rational given the information they had.
However, it seems pretty unlikely to me.
What do you think? Is the best explanation for these very different assessment of identical applications from differently-named candidates, in your opinion, that the faculty making the assessment are aware of such huge differences between men and women and have weighed them roughly correctly (not necessarily consciously and explicitly) to arrive at the results that have? If so, could you sketch for me roughly what these differences are and how they lead to that result? Because I’m having real trouble thinking of any hypothesis of this sort that’s consistent with what I think I’ve observed of the relative abilities of men and women.
Do I believe that Americans are generally more intelligent than Europeans? No, I don’t. At the same time in the LW census the average American has somthing like a 10 point higher IQ. In the data set there a strong correlation.
I think the intuition that the factor of the name should be zero is wrong even if there no causal effect because gender simply interacts in complex ways with many other things. I’m not sure in what direction the factor is going to correct, which might also be different in different situations but assuming that it contains no information at all doesn’t seem to be right.
I just grabbed the latest LW survey data I could find, selected (1) rows with “United States” as country and something other than a null for IQ and (2) all rows with something other than a null for IQ. (Note that this doesn’t include any sort of selection on the basis of reliability of IQ score.) I got means of 138.3 for the larger dataset (472 numbers, stddev=13.6) and 140.7 for the smaller (249 numbers, stddev=13.5). I wouldn’t call that “something like a 10 point higher IQ”.
What intuition that it should be zero? The question is whether it should be very large, not whether it should be exactly zero.
I’ve already explained why the difference would need to be very large for these results to be correctly explained by saying that the rating faculty made accurate allowance for real male/female competence differences. If you missed that, or you think I got it wrong, or it didn’t make sense, do let me know.
Let’s see: there are numerous ones the most relevant are: women have less variation in intelligence then men and so there fewer unusually smart women. Women are worse at taking criticism. There is also a lot of stuff about the kind of hierarchies men and women tend to form.
Have you actually been observing the relative abilities between men and women, or is your reaction whenever you notice a woman doing something badly or acting emotionally to hit yourself for having a “sexist” thought?
That could indeed (if the numbers work out) explain a difference in success at the very highest levels in the absence of prejudice. But this sort of effect is far weaker away from the very tails of the distribution, and the particular study we’re taking as an example in this discussion is not concerned with the very tails of the distribution. Further, my understanding is that GRE scores correlate somewhat better with intelligence than they do with job performance (see, e.g., this post which has a few references to the primary literature), and I would expect them to do a pretty good job of screening off differences in raw intelligence in this case.
Evidence? (I have to say it looks to me as if people are bad at taking criticism, and I haven’t noticed a big difference between men and women; but I’ve not studied this and will be glad to learn.)
I’m afraid that’s not specific enough for me to form any idea of how it would justify a drastically lower assessment of the likely competence of a woman than an identically-credentialed man as a scientific lab manager.
Relative abilities as such are pretty much unobservable. I’ve been observing the relative performance. But only casually and qualitatively; if you have a pile of useful data then by all means point me at it.
No, not at all. I notice both men and women doing things badly and acting emotionally all the time, and feel no particular impulse to self-punishment when I do so. -- Is it your usual practice to assume that people who disagree with you are off their heads, or have I said something to give you that impression particularly strongly in my case?
(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am assuming that you didn’t mean “hit yourself” literally; of course if you did then it’s an even weirder thing to think I might do.)