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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28354 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"?

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.

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

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.

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