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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science

We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning.

It's amusing that one of the categories where women are disadvantaged is also one of the least important categories (who cares about teaching ratings? especially at an R1 institute), and the category where women are most advantaged, hiring, happens to be the most important one - being hired in the first place is the necessary precondition for being able to compete in any of the other categories at all! Salary can't be said to be wholly unimportant, but, most people aren't going into academia for the money anyway.

The discussion related specifically to hiring is in the "Evaluation Context 1: tenure-track hiring" section. For example:

In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"? How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead? It seems to me that the existing ideology is so entrenched that it could only be overcome with a Kuhnian paradigm shift - no matter how much the actual empirical facts change, ideology will only (possibly) catch up after a generational shift and a changing of the guard.

Not that I think it's appropriate to just say flat out "women are privileged" of course, as a simple pure reversal of the leftist claim of pervasive male privilege - reality is obviously much more complex than that. But, as this paper suggests, the last several decades of feminist activism has obviously succeeded in securing certain concrete privileges for women.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"?

You cannot make someone understand something when their livelihood, status, identity, and sense of self-worth depend on not understanding it.

This is not a shocking result. Unfair hiring practices discriminating against men have been the norm in quite a few white collar professions for a while now. The data has been there for a long time. It doesn't matter. Men are axiomatically assumed to be advantaged. As others have pointed out: evidence of male disadvantage is always proof of female disadvantage. At best, it's the patriarchy hurting men, too. The solution to the latter is, of course, more feminism, which translates into more female advantages - which aren't really advantages because...

I know people who are personally involved in creating hiring practices that discriminate against men and they are immune to viewing this as such. At best, it is compensating for a (real or imagined) female "disadvantage" somewhere else. There are more men three rungs up the ladder? There you go, discriminating against men is just. Which of course makes it non-discriminatory. If not, more male CEOs in unrelated fields or in politics will suffice as a justification. If all else fails, there is always the Hail Mary of historical injustice. You see, every single woman was personally oppressed for tens of thousands of years. Now it's their turn and turnabout for the next couple of centuries or so is dandy.

It's a supremacist movement and completely immunised to reason.

Edit: A good point of comparison is perhaps the claim that women earn significantly less for equal work. The evidence for this being wrong has been out since the 90s, I believe. It was still used as a cudgel to justify anti-male policies way into the 2010s. Hell, it is still used as the bailey of the gender pay gap narrative.

You nail this 100%. I see it play out at my woke tech company. I find it incredibly tiresome and annoying, and while I'm sympathetic to people who've had a shitty experience, and I think everyone should be judged on their own merits, the constant whining without evidence is so tedious, and I have no patience for it.

: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"?

Until everything in the world is exactly 50M:50F, I wouldn't hold my breath. 0M:100F would also suffice.

The underlining axiom is that humans are free spirits accidentally attached to a body. The goal of the new religion is to liberate the soul from the constraints imposed on it by being attached to a body. Men and women are just spiritual essences that ended up in different bodies. The difference in outcome can never not be explained by oppression, and this problem will never actually be fixed. Most groundbreaking research will be conducted by men for biological reasons, which will ensure that affirmative action will always be required.

Wokeness is the natural conclusion of civil rights, assuming that humans have no innate qualities. During civil rights it was assumed that as long as opportunities are equal outcomes will be equal. When the reality of genetic differences struck they had to debug the problem and find new forms of oppression to explain the differences in outcome.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"?

I suspect none, because it was never evidence-based to begin with; the "evidence" in favour, such as it was, was just to reinforce existing biases. Everything that doesn't confirm the conclusion that is desired will be ignored.

How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead?

The limit does not exist.

This is the same mistake people make in discussions about Affirmative Action or diversity quotas or whatever have you; these movements and advocates aren't actually out for equality, they're supremacist movements looking to loot as many spoils as they can for their in-group, and the language of equality is useful for them insofar as it moves towards that goal. Men are defined as an Oppressor Class; and as an Oppressor Class they can never be oppressed, it's just axiomatically impossible. Even when the gaslighting girlboss in chief grinds the entrails of the last male CEO into the oval office carpet, it will be impossible for men to be oppressed, because they are defined as an Oppressor Class.

A big part of it is really just hypergamy, it allows them to become extremely choosy. I've met so many young liberal men who are displeased with modern feminism. I do believe that decades of affirmative action and the expansion of the dating pool for women via dating apps has finally taken its toll, and as more men become partnerless or end up with a less desirable partner, they're going to agree that society has had "enough feminism". I do not see a solution to this, even if we were actively working towards pushing for policy designs to raise the TFR like "three child policy" and improve male SMV through "masculinity training" like China is currently doing, I'm not optimistic about their scale of impact.

There’s plenty of handwringing about ‘not enough men in college’, on the contrary.

There is occasional hand-wringing, but no actual changes to, e.g. scholarships. And they can always find a few majors that are mostly men, and hold that up as a reason to keep discriminating.

From anyone in a position of influence or power? Anything actually being done about it?

Where are the scholarships? Where are the outreach programs? Why was none of the gender uplift social architecture ever designed to work in the general case and not just the specific cases where women were disadvantaged?

It's almost always framed in how it's bad for women though, typically 'college graduated women can't find husbands (because they will never marry down).'

Indeed, journalistic standards are loose enough that absolutely anything can be framed to make men look inferior or women victimized.

  • "Men are discriminated against in college admission" -> "Men aren't applying themselves in school"

  • "Women are saved first in emergencies" -> "Men treat women as weak and lacking agency"

  • "Women are admired for their beauty" -> "Women are objectified"

  • "Men commit violence more" -> "Men commit violence more" (no dissonance here!)

  • "Men are more often the victims of violence" -> "Women feel less safe than ever, study finds"

  • "Men die in wars" -> "Women lose their fathers, husbands, sons"

  • "Men commit suicide more" -> "Women attempt suicide more"

  • "Men literally die younger" -> "Women are forced to pay more for health insurance" (honestly, I've admired the twisted brilliance of this framing ever since the Obamacare debates)

"Men commit suicide more" -> "Women attempt suicide more"

One of the reasons men are more likely to complete suicide attempts than women is that men tend to use more lethal methods like guns and hanging which tend to result in a disfigured corpse, whereas women tend to want to leave behind an open casket-worthy corpse and hence use methods like overdosing which tend not to disfigure the corpse. One of the hottest takes I've ever seen is a tweet in which a woman argued that the reason men are more likely to commit suicide is because, unlike women, they don't care about traumatising their loved ones by spattering blood and brains all over their kitchen.

That's right: men committing suicide more than women is proof that women are more empathetic.

Seems plausible enough to me, but I guess your point is that it's in tension with the overall progressive stance that suicides are helpless victims.

I mean you're dead right. In some cases, the response to the cognitive dissonance-inducing reality of male suicide has been simply to deny it wholesale.

Oh wow, that article has yet another brilliant bit of statistical legerdemain.

The report found that suicides are responsible for half of all violent deaths in men and 71% of violent deaths in women.

The second number is higher, so clearly it's Women Most Affected! ...Except, of course, that the base rates are completely different. Slicing the data this way means that the more men die violently, then the more this makes women look victimized.

And when I see articles like this, I can't help but wonder. I usually assume that journalists are stupid rather than actively malicious. But the author had to have done some research to get the stats she's playing with, right? I'm sure she's living in a bubble, but even so it seems hard to imagine that she's never encountered the fact that suicide rates are actually higher for men. The article so carefully tap-dances around this fact, it seems like it has to be a purposeful omission ... which is just so damn evil. It makes me sad.

Alternative being that men are choosing more lethal means because they don’t anticipate a last minute rescue. I’ve known a woman with mental illness who’s attempted suicide several times — and every time she did it, she’d call someone or attempt in such a way that she’d be discovered quickly. In other words, the attempt isn’t exactly an attempt, it’s a cry for help and attention. People who want to die will die.

I’ve known a woman with mental illness who’s attempted suicide several times — and every time she did it, she’d call someone or attempt in such a way that she’d be discovered quickly.

I know a borderline woman meeting this description exactly. It's gotten to the point where when a mutual friend receives a text from her, she flinches because she assumes there's some new crisis afoot. It's terribly sad.

Great list. Also:

  • Men compose the majority of the homeless -> homelessness is a women’s issue

  • Male journalists are more often killed than female journalists -> STOP TARGETING WOMEN JOURNALISTS

  • Working husbands tend to die earlier than their stay-at-home wives -> Suddenly these poor widows have to perform the uncompensated physical and emotional labor of managing a bunch of boring bank, brokerage, and retirement accounts that their stupid husbands left behind

I once got into an argument with a feminist, and when I brought up the homelessness thing, she countered that female homelessness tends to be less "visible" as it more often takes the form of couchsurfing than actual rough sleeping.

In other words: if you're a woman and you become homeless, friends and family will let you stay with them temporarily. If you're a man, you're on your own.

Amazing. The kind of argument that a PCM orange Emily could better conjure than I ever could for satirical purposes.

If you managed a straight face, you deserve an Emmy or Oscar.

It's like inadvertent horse-shoeing with the manosphere, dirtbag left, or dissident right. Women have automatic Wonderfulness, social value, and social legitimacy, so there is a floor as to how bad things can get for women relative to men on average.

Directionally, being a man comes with a high risk/ high reward profile.

To make things more fair, feminist societies decided to give women the same rewards with none of the risks.

From leftist sources? Do you have any examples?

You misunderstand. That women are advantaged so is proof they are systematically disadvantaged because they won't be able to find partners that make as much as them. Look up "golden penis syndrome" (no I'm not making this up).

Ideas do not die when they are proven wrong but when their spirit is broken. So long as it is convenient to believe the ills that befall men are caused by the metaphysical conspiracy of Patriarchy, the only cure for the lapse in morale will be subsequent beatings.

We most likely have decades or centuries more of this kind of thinking to suffer in the West until the pendulum swings back so you better get used to it.

"Men increasingly alienated from an education credentialist complex that hates them; women and their hypergamous impulses hardest hit."

Also related is polygyny, with Merited Impossibility to boot. Ugh, young women definitely don't prefer being a side-chick to a Chad than the main-chick of a Brad, but if they do it's only because male shittiness creates female-dominated environments, so young women are the true victims here in having no choice but to be polygynous.

Polygnyous hypergamy takes some bizarre forms in academia, e.g. I knew of a famous academic who looks like Buddy Holly, with an astounding lack of either normal social graces or the ability to (successfully) imitate WASP norms, but who had two model-level grad students he was screwing (with their knowledge, but with their hope that "he'll choose me eventually") one of whom was semi-openly cucking her Gigachad-looking husband. And they were just the women I knew about.

Oh, and that's with a skin condition that means he can't use deoderant/cologne, plus (according to one of those beautiful women) a notably small penis.

Sort of encouraging, if you're academically successful and don't look like Gigachad.

And shit like this is why the HBD/IQ fetishists are wrong and the entire institution of academia needs to be nuked from orbit. (it's the only way to be sure)

Don't envy him: according to the Daily Mail, a Golden Penis Syndrome report says that he might feel "unduly in demand":

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10152727/How-golden-penis-syndrome-ruining-modern-dating.html

But, speaking as an academic... I can't disagree with what you say.

shit like this is why the HBD/IQ fetishists are wrong

I don’t understand what this has to do with the post you replied to.

The professor and both the grad students are presumably high IQ, but their high IQ does not protect them from wretched choices. The standard "HBD/IQ fetishist" argument is that high-IQ people are just straight-up better in every way that matters. This is an example of how that is not true, how intelligence does not equate to wisdom or good character.

A lack of competition has led these men to develop “golden penis syndrome” — an arrogance that stems from the assumption that a steady supply of females will be sexually interested in them.

So it's the inverted version of the cock carousel, except showing up on medium, Daily Mail and New York Post as opposed to /pol/ or /r9k/.

The naivete of some of these writers is fantastic:

So, you could easily say that there is a Golden Vagina Syndrome, but it’s interesting that no one writes articles about it. Perhaps because we are so familiar with and accustomed to women celebrating their bodies and exercising their ability to choose.

This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"? How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead?

Does it? Is that question all that natural in this context? Is the question "how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of 'immaculate conception' or 'transubstantiation' to Catholics?" a natural one? The idea of "male privilege" as it's used in practice in sociopolitical contexts, much like all "[x] privilege" in the context of modern identity politics, is inherently non-empirical*. In practice, when "[x] privilege" is used to justify certain policies or narratives or such, it posits, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, an all-encompassing force that unjustly nudges social interactions in the favor of [x]. This is an intrinsically something that's impossible to measure, not without measurement tools with near omniscience that border on literal godhood, and there's furthermore no rigorous scale by which to measure whose favor these interactions point to, and how much. There is no empiricism taking place here, and so empirical evidence fundamentally can't overturn the concept. It's the wrong tool for the job.

* Interestingly enough, it's not inherently but in practice is anti-empirical due to how it supports arguments attacking the concept of empiricism and rigorous science as being tools of privileged men and whites who value those things higher than the rest of us.

But feminists claim it is empirical and until today I too was pretty sure you'd cop at least a warning if you didn't at least imply their mountains of studies on the issue could possibly be empirical. And in that case yes, that is a very natural question to raise, much as it would have been for a medieval monk questioning the claimed factual nature of the immaculate conception.

Mary's Immaculate Conception wasn't actually defined as a dogma until 1854. During the medieval period it was very much a subject of debate, with prominent religious orders on both sides, although they didn't have much in the way of empirical evidence available.

Good note, cheers, although the point remains.

I was trying to avoid waging the culture war or building consensus. So I at least tried to pose it as a question rather than an assertion.

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