I wasn’t merely arguing that if there were such a large difference everyone would admit it. I was also arguing that if there were such a large difference we’d all know it.
It’s not entirely clear that these are two different things. Admitting a highly politically incorrect opinion publicly and admitting it to oneself or one’s friends aren’t really completely separate. People tend to believe what they profess, and what they hear others profess.
That would have to be either a really really enormous difference between men and women, or a really weird difference—weird in that whatever it is somehow manages to make a big difference in competence without having any effect on academic performance, test scores, or reported faculty opinions. Which presumably would require it to be quite narrow in scope but, again, really really enormous in size.
I suspect one source of the disagreement between us may be that you’re assigning a high predictive ability to academic performance, while I don’t even assign it a very high correlation. This may be because my intuition is trained on different academic fields. I don’t have any experience with scientific lab managers (the job the study’s resumes applied for). I do have experience with programmers and other related fields, mostly below the doctoral level.
And it seems about as obvious to me that there isn’t such a difference as that (say) there isn’t a difference of 20cm in typical heights between men and women. Not just because if there were then it would be widely admitted (maybe it would, maybe not) but because it would be obvious.
When I first read that I thought: but there is about a 20cm difference in the average heights of men and women! Is gjm arguing the opposite point from what I thought, or maybe being sarcastic?
So I checked the average height differences between the sexes, and the male:female ratio is typically between 1.07-1.09. This translates to 8-15 cm of difference. So while it’s not as much as 20cm, it’s “only” a 2x difference from my prediction. Maybe I’m just bad at translating what I see into centimeters and this difference is much more obvious to you than it is to me.
But is it really too much to suggest that when the exact same job application gets radically different evaluations depending on whether the candidate’s name is “John” or “Jennifer” it’s reasonable to take that as strong evidence for bias in favour of men over women that isn’t simply a proportionate response to actual differences in competence?
I don’t disagree with this. I just think the cultural power of “politically correct” thinking is strong enough to make people ignore truths of the magnitude of this being counterfactually wrong and stick to accepted explanations.
So I checked the average height differences between the sexes, and the male:female ratio is typically between 1.07-1.09. This translates to 8-15 cm of difference. So while it’s not as much as 20cm, it’s “only” a 2x difference from my prediction. Maybe I’m just bad at translating what I see into centimeters and this difference is much more obvious to you than it is to me.
Maybe gjm’s System 1 automatically compensates for the difference—I know that unless I’m deliberately paying attentìon to people’s height I’m much less likely to notice it if a man is six feet tall than if a woman is six feet tall, and for all we know the same might apply to gjm.
Yeah, I know, people consider my barely basic¹ cooking skills exceptional merely because I happen to have a Y chromosome. That’s male privilege for ya.
At least that’s what my System 1 tells me, and I can’t think of a way to find out whether the impostor syndrome applies short of having someone who doesn’t know my gender taste what I cook.
you’re assigning a high predictive ability to academic performance, while I don’t even assign it a very high correlation.
Academic performance is one of the things known to the faculty (and the same between the “male” and “female” conditions); it is not the only one. The relevant question is: How much predictive power does the totality of the information provided have, and conditioned on that how much predictive power does the sex of the applicant have? It looks to me as if the answers, on any account of sex differences that I find credible, are “quite a bit” and “scarcely any”.
By “academic performance” I was referring to all of these bullet points:
what degree a person got from what institution
what their grade point average was
what their GRE scores are
what was written about them by a faculty member writing a letter of recommendation
Which (from your summary) I understand is pretty much all of the information in the application letter.
I’m not claiming that sex differences have predictive power; I’m claiming that academic performance doesn’t have as much power as we’d like and recruiters have to look for more info.
For sure. My apologies if I somehow gave the impression of disagreeing with that. The second half of what I called the “relevant question” above is of course the real key here, and it sounds as if maybe we agree about that.
It’s not entirely clear that these are two different things. Admitting a highly politically incorrect opinion publicly and admitting it to oneself or one’s friends aren’t really completely separate. People tend to believe what they profess, and what they hear others profess.
I suspect one source of the disagreement between us may be that you’re assigning a high predictive ability to academic performance, while I don’t even assign it a very high correlation. This may be because my intuition is trained on different academic fields. I don’t have any experience with scientific lab managers (the job the study’s resumes applied for). I do have experience with programmers and other related fields, mostly below the doctoral level.
When I first read that I thought: but there is about a 20cm difference in the average heights of men and women! Is gjm arguing the opposite point from what I thought, or maybe being sarcastic?
So I checked the average height differences between the sexes, and the male:female ratio is typically between 1.07-1.09. This translates to 8-15 cm of difference. So while it’s not as much as 20cm, it’s “only” a 2x difference from my prediction. Maybe I’m just bad at translating what I see into centimeters and this difference is much more obvious to you than it is to me.
I don’t disagree with this. I just think the cultural power of “politically correct” thinking is strong enough to make people ignore truths of the magnitude of this being counterfactually wrong and stick to accepted explanations.
Maybe gjm’s System 1 automatically compensates for the difference—I know that unless I’m deliberately paying attentìon to people’s height I’m much less likely to notice it if a man is six feet tall than if a woman is six feet tall, and for all we know the same might apply to gjm.
I’m guessing this effect doesn’t just apply to height.
Yeah, I know, people consider my barely basic¹ cooking skills exceptional merely because I happen to have a Y chromosome. That’s male privilege for ya.
At least that’s what my System 1 tells me, and I can’t think of a way to find out whether the impostor syndrome applies short of having someone who doesn’t know my gender taste what I cook.
Academic performance is one of the things known to the faculty (and the same between the “male” and “female” conditions); it is not the only one. The relevant question is: How much predictive power does the totality of the information provided have, and conditioned on that how much predictive power does the sex of the applicant have? It looks to me as if the answers, on any account of sex differences that I find credible, are “quite a bit” and “scarcely any”.
By “academic performance” I was referring to all of these bullet points:
Which (from your summary) I understand is pretty much all of the information in the application letter.
I’m not claiming that sex differences have predictive power; I’m claiming that academic performance doesn’t have as much power as we’d like and recruiters have to look for more info.
For sure. My apologies if I somehow gave the impression of disagreeing with that. The second half of what I called the “relevant question” above is of course the real key here, and it sounds as if maybe we agree about that.