Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study…

Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to me – Hacker News had figured a lot of it out before I even woke up this morning – but I think it’ll at least be helpful to collect all the information in one easily linkable place.

The study is Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men. It’s a pretty neat idea: “pull requests” are discrete units of contribution to an open source project which are either accepted or rejected by the community, so just check which ones are submitted by men vs. women and whether one gender gets a higher acceptance rate than the other. This is a little harder than it sounds – people on GitHub use nicks that don’t always give gender cues – but the researchers wrote a program to automatically link contributor emails to Google Plus pages so they could figure out users’ genders.

This alone can’t rule out that one gender is genuinely doing something differently than another, so they had another neat trick: they wrote another program that automatically scored accounts on obvious gender cues: for example, somebody whose nickname was JaneSmith01, or somebody who had a photo of themselves on their profile. By comparing obviously gendered participants with non-obviously gendered participants whom the researchers had nevertheless been able to find the gender of, they should be able to tell whether there’s gender bias in request acceptances.

Because GitHub is big and their study is automated, they manage to get a really nice sample size – about 2.5 million pull requests by men and 150,000 by women.

They find that women get more (!) requests accepted than men for all of the top ten programming languages. They check some possible confounders – whether women make smaller changes (easier to get accepted) or whether their changes are more likely to serve an immediate project need (again, easier to get accepted) and in fact find the opposite – women’s changes are larger and less likely to serve project needs. That makes their better performance extra impressive.

So the big question is whether this changes based on obviousness of gender. The paper doesn’t give a lot of the analyses I want to see, and doesn’t make its data public, so we’ll have to go with the limited information they provide. They do not provide an analysis of the population as a whole (!) but they do give us a subgroup analysis by “insider status”, ie whether the person has contributed to that project before.

Among insiders, women do the same as men when gender is hidden, but better than men when gender is revealed. In other words, if you know somebody’s a woman, you’re more likely to approve her request than you would be on the merits alone. We can’t quantify exactly how much this is, because the paper doesn’t provide numbers, just graphs. Eyeballing the graph, it looks like being a woman gives you about a 1% advantage. I don’t see any discussion of this result, even though it’s half the study, and as far as I can tell the more statistically significant half.

Among outsiders, women do the same as/better than men when gender is hidden, and the same as/worse than men when gender is revealed. I can’t be more specific than this because the study doesn’t give numbers and I’m trying to eyeball confidence intervals on graphs. The study itself say that women do worse than men when gender is revealed, so since the researchers presumably have access to their real numbers data, that might mean the confidence intervals don’t overlap. From eyeballing the graph, it looks like the difference is 1% – ie, men get their requests approved 64% of the time, and women 63% of the time. Once again, it’s hard to tell by graph-eyeballing whether these two numbers are within each other’s confidence intervals.

The paper concludes that “for insiders…we see little evidence of bias…for outsiders, we see evidence of gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong.”

In other words, they conclude there is gender bias among outsiders because obvious-women do worse than gender-anonymized-women. They admit that obvious-men also do worse than gender-anonymized men, but they ignore this effect because it’s smaller. They do not report doing a test of statistical significance on whether it is really smaller or not.

So:

1. Among insiders, women get more requests accepted than men.

2. Among insiders, people are biased towards women, that is, revealing genders gives women an advantage over men above and beyond the case where genders are hidden.

3. Among outsiders, women still get more requests accepted than men.

4. Among outsiders, revealing genders appears to show a bias against women. It’s not clear if this is statistically significant.

5. When all genders are revealed among outsiders, men appear to have their requests accepted at a rate of 64%, and women of 63%. The study does not provide enough information to determine whether this is statistically significant. Eyeballing it it looks like it might be, just barely.

6. The study describes its main finding as being that women have fewer requests approved when their gender is known. It hides on page 16 that men also have fewer requests approved when their gender is known. It describes the effect for women as larger, but does not report the size of the male effects, nor whether the difference is statistically significant. Eyeballing it, it looks about 2/3 the size of the female effect, and maybe?

7. The study has no hypothesis for why both sexes have fewer requests approved when their gender is known, without which it seems kind of hard to speculate about the significance of the phenomenon for one gender in particular. For example, suppose that the reason revealing gender decreases acceptance rates is because corporate contributors tend to use their (gendered) real names and non-corporate contributors tend to use handles like 133T_HAXX0R. And suppose that the best people of all genders go to work at corporations, but a bigger percent of men go there than women. Then being non-gendered would be a higher sign of quality in a man than in a woman. This is obviously a silly just-so story, but my point is that without knowing why all genders show a decline after unblinding, it’s premature to speculate about why their declines are of different magnitudes – and it doesn’t take much to get so small a difference.

8. There’s no study-wide analysis, and no description of how many different subgroup analyses the study tried before settling on Insiders vs. Outsiders (nor how many different definitions of Insider vs. Outsider they tried). Remember, for every subgroup you try, you need to do a Bonferroni correction. This study does not do any Bonferroni corrections; given its already ambiguous confidence intervals, a proper correction would almost certainly destroy the finding.

9. We still have that result from before that women’s changes are larger and less likely to serve immediate needs, both of which make them less likely to be accepted. No attempt was made to control for this.

“Science” “journalism”, care to give a completely proportionate and reasonable response to this study?

Here’s Business Insider: Sexism Is Rampant Among Programmers On GitHub, Research Finds. “A new research report shows just how ridiculously tough it can be to be a woman programmer, especially in the very male-dominated world of open-source software….it also shows that women face a giant hurdle of “gender bias” when others assess their work. This research also helps explain the bigger problem: why so many women who do enter tech don’t stick around in it, and often move on to other industries within 10 years. Why bang your head against the wall for longer than a decade?” [EDIT: the title has since been changed]

Here’s Tech Times: Women Code Better Than Men But Only If They Hide Their Gender: “Interestingly enough, among users who were not well known in the coding community, coding suggestions from those whose profiles clearly stated that the users were women had a far lower acceptance rate than suggestions from those who did not make their gender known. What this means is that there is a bias against women in the coding world.” (Note the proportionate and reasonable use of the term “far lower acceptance rate” to refer to a female vs. male acceptance rate of, in the worst case, 63% vs. 64%.)

Here’s Vice.com: Women Are Better At Coding Than Men: “If feminism has taught us anything, it’s that almost all men are sexist. As this GitHub data shows, whether or not bros think that they view women as equals, women’s work is not being judged impartially. On the web, a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

This is normally the part at which I would question how a study got through peer review, but luckily this time there is a very simple answer: it didn’t. If you read the study, you may notice the giant red “NOT PEER-REVIEWED” sign on the top of every page. The paper was uploaded to a pre-peer-review site asking for comments. The authors appear to be undergraduate students.

I don’t blame the authors for doing a neat study and uploading it to a website. I do blame the entire world media up to and including the BBC for swallowing it uncritically. Note that two of the three news sources above failed to report that it is not peer-reviewed.

Oh, one more thing. A commenter on the paper’s pre-print asked for a breakdown by approver gender, and the authors mentioned that “Our analysis (not in this paper — we’ve cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

Depending on what this means – since it was cut out of the paper to “keep it crisp”, we can’t be sure – it sounds like the effect is mainly from women rejecting other women’s contributions, and men being pretty accepting of them. Given the way the media predictably spun this paper, it is hard for me to conceive of a level of crispness which justifies not providing this information.

So, let’s review. A non-peer-reviewed paper shows that women get more requests accepted than men. In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage. When gender is unblinded, both men and women do worse; it’s unclear if there are statistically significant differences in this regard. Only one of the study’s subgroups showed lower acceptance for women than men, and the size of the difference was 63% vs. 64%, which may or may not be statistically significant. This may or may not be related to the fact, demonstrated in the study, that women propose bigger and less-immediately-useful changes on average; no attempt was made to control for this. This tiny amount of discrimination against women seems to be mostly from other women, not from men.

The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.

[EDIT: I don’t have much of a quarrel with the authors, who seem to have done an interesting study and are doing the correct thing by submitting it for peer review. I have a big quarrel with “science” “journalists” for the way they reported it. If any of the authors read this and want my peer review suggestions, I would recommend:

1. Report gender-unblinding results for the entire population before you get into the insiders-vs.-outsiders dichotomy.
2. Give all numbers represented on graphs as actual numbers too.
3. Declare how many different subgroup groupings you tried, and do appropriate Bonferroni corrections.
4. Report the magnitude of the male drop vs. the female drop after gender-unblinding, test if they’re different, and report the test results.
5. Add the part about men being harder on men and vice versa, give numbers, and do significance tests.
6. Try to find an explanation for why both groups’ rates dropped with gender-unblinding. If you can’t, at least say so in the Discussion and propose some possibilities.
7. Fix the way you present “Women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable”, at the very least by adding the comparable numbers about the similar drop for men in the same sentence. Otherwise this will be the heading for every single news article about the study and nobody will acknowledge that the drop for men exists at all. This will happen anyway no matter what you do, but at least it won’t be your fault.
8. If possible, control for your finding that women’s changes are larger and less-needed and see how that affects results. If this sounds complicated, I bet you could find people here who are willing to help you.
9. Please release an anonymized version of the data; it should be okay if you delete all identifiable information.]

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878 Responses to Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study…

  1. E. Harding says:

    Because GitHub is big and their study is automated, they manage to get a really nice sample size – about 2.5 million pull requests by men and 150,000 by women.

    -This is the impressive part. Only 6% of pull requests are by women. I bet there’s some selection effect going on here, with the result being that women in tech on average make better programmers than men in tech, but would be much worse programmers were there as many women as men in tech.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes, the authors agree that selection effects are probably important.

    • Nadja says:

      Wait, why would women in tech be much worse programmers if there were as many women as men in tech?

      • Pku says:

        Because you’re assuming that only the top women are posting on GitHub, and just about have even skill with the men; more women would be weaker and drop their level.

        • Nadja says:

          Is there any support for that assumption?

          Also, are we saying that A) top women from among the pool of women programmers are posting on github or B) top women from the pool of all women go into programming.

          I interpreted the original comment to mean something closer to B: only top women go into programming. Otherwise how could we think that if there were as many women as men in tech, then women would be much worse programmers?

          Either way, is there any support for either a or b?

          • E. Harding says:

            I was assuming B. Evidence for such a thing should exist, but I have no clue where to find it.

          • Max says:

            Bell curves for gender IQ. Programming is one those jobs where being smarter helps a lot (just like STEM in general). Assuming you need 2std dev + to be good programmer pool of available women is smaller than mens.
            And that before even considering that intelligent women has many more options than programming.

          • Nadja says:

            Thanks for bringing that up, Max. I agree that the gender/IQ effect will likely be there. In fact, if the original commenter’s claim had been that we could expect male programmers to be slightly more intelligent, which might translate into male programmers being somewhat better than female programmers on average, then I wouldn’t have questioned it. But the actual statement was that “women in tech would be much worse programmers if there were as many women as men in tech.” Much worse? I think that’s a strong statement that needs some better evidence than what we have seen here so far.

            First of all, how much of an IQ difference would there be? If the majority of programmers were in fact in the 2+ sigma IQ range, then perhaps we’d have a little bit more of an argument here. But that doesn’t seem to be true. Googling for IQ by profession yields a graph showing the 90th percentile IQ for “computer professions” to be just under 130. (If anyone has better IQ data for programmers, that might help.) Also, I’m not really familiar with the gender/IQ research, but I always thought there will many more men than women in the 2+ sigma range, and even more in the 3+ sigma range, but that’s not where the vast majority of programmers seem to be on the curve. So, given that, how much of an average IQ advantage could we actually expect?

            Then, there’s the question of how much of a job performance advantage would the (slight?) IQ advantage translate into. Non-cognitive skills are often as important as (or even more important than) IQ in determining various types of performance. SAT scores aren’t as good at predicting college success as GPAs are, for example. Isn’t it plausible that women might have other skills that would compensate for their slightly lower IQ and make them (almost) as good at their programming jobs as their more intelligent male counterparts?

            Intuitively, high IQ would be very important for the rare lone wolf type programmers (or elite teams) dealing with difficult problems such as, idk, writing game theory optimal solvers for poker, but that’s not what most programmers do. I used to work on a big software development team once and the favorite part of my job was listening to 2 sigma IQ programmers bitching about the “overly complicated” code of one of our 3 sigma IQ programmers. It was highly amusing. Yeah, I know, in an ideal world the smartest coders would produce code that would dazzle everyone with its stunning brilliance and clarity, but we live in the real world. In the real world the really smart kids often procrastinate, then hack something together at the last moment, creating a bunch of maintenance nightmares, and then move on to doing what they really want to be doing like studying their 13th language or, idk, commenting on SSC.

            So, in summary, I don’t think we have enough evidence to claim that if there were as many women in tech as there are men in tech, the women would be *much* worse programmers. First of all, programmers are not that intelligent on average, so we can’t expect that much of a male IQ advantage, and secondly, the male intelligence advantage might not translate very well into superior job performance. There’s also the somewhat separate question of whether programming currently attracts “top women” which I don’t think is true.

          • Chalid says:

            If you assume B, then either women in the industry should be better paid than men on average, or you there is anti-woman gender bias in pay, or as the Max/Nadja discussion shows, you have to make implausible assumptions about the cognitive requirements of the profession.

            (I wouldn’t assume B.)

          • ryan says:

            Think about it this way:

            If there were more white people in the NBA the overall quality of white players would go down.

          • Nadja says:

            Yes, Ryan, that’s assuming NBA currently attracts top talent, which is probably somewhat of a reasonable assumption. It’s reasonable because of both access and willingness. Access is there because many kids are given the opportunity to play in school, and the really tall athletic kids are going to be encouraged to try it, etc etc. Willingness is there because NBA is high status and very appealing to a great fraction of the population.

            The assumption that tech currently attracts top women is not reasonable. Access is probably there but willingness is not. As I said previously, smart women have what they perceive to be better options.

          • Nathan W says:

            More men study computer programming. Doesn’t have to mean women are worse by nature.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          That seems really speculative – the distribution for women could be the same as men, but the people who participate could be selected from a more elite portion of the distribution.

      • James Picone says:

        I think he means on average.

        Assume women and men have the same distribution of programming ability.

        Say that only women who are 99th-percentile programmers end up working in tech for whatever reason only 6% of commits were from women (the general view that it’s a ‘male field’, systemic discrimination, they have better options, whatever).

        Then for there to be more men in tech, they must draw from lower percentiles in programming ability – can’t be arsed doing the actual maths assuming normal curves – so the programming ability of an average male in the sample will be lower than the programming ability of the average woman in the sample, even though women and men were assumed to have the same distribution of programming ability.

        • Nadja says:

          Thanks for the explanation. So, I’m wondering if there’s any support for the claim that only top women go into tech. In my experience, tech is not seen as a very glamorous option, so if a woman is intelligent/skilled enough to do something else, she will likely choose to do something else. Actually, the same is true for many guys I went to school with. Being a pogrammer just wasn’t something that the most successful people aspired to. They wanted to be investment bankers, management consultants, lawyers, portfolio managers at hedge funds, entrepreneurs, politicians, etc, etc.

          • weareastrangemonkey says:

            Nadja, I think you nail it. They are making very strong assumptions about people’s outside options, that the outside options don’t improve at a faster rate than the option of programming with some arbitrary innate ability measure.

            Even if you grant them this assumption there is still a big problem with their analysis. They are making an appeal to the greater IQ variability hypothesis to get the differing ratios. But in order to get the 10:1 ratio we see in this data we would have to be over 3 standard deviations into the distribution. I am pretty damn certain that the lower bound for tech guys is no where near 3 SDs out from the average.

            That’s not to say that there isn’t need for concern about the selection issue. But I think you are right that it does not automatically follow that the women in tech are just the crem de la crem.

          • Svejk says:

            I would speculate that rather than tech, the top-percentile STEM women gravitate toward academia – particularly the biosciences, and consulting. There are a lot of talented female bioinformaticists and data scientists who do not see programming as their primary vocation, but have made important contributions to scientific programming products. These tend to be in-house efforts requiring significant domain expertise that do not appear on GitHub, or are only migrated to GitHub after reaching a certain level of maturity. Consulting is often equally remunerative to tech for top entry-level candidates, with fewer geographical constraints at the top tier, and is perceived as more welcoming to women with more attractive lifestyle benefits. Women are sought-after consultants in part because even ‘nerdy’ women are assumed to have the soft skills adequate to handle client interaction and personal presentation. The pipeline for women from a biology, chemistry, or statistics BA/PhD to McKinsey is probably significantly less ‘leaky’ than the academic or tech pipeline.
            I would further speculate that women participate in GitHub projects at a lower rate than men partially for the same reasons they tend to post blog comments at a lower rate than men, including a lower general tendency to self-advertise.

          • James Picone says:

            To be clear I’m not saying that’s true. I have very little personal experience with female programmers and haven’t looked into any data on it. More explaining what I saw as the thought process.

            Even if you grant them this assumption there is still a big problem with their analysis. They are making an appeal to the greater IQ variability hypothesis to get the differing ratios. But in order to get the 10:1 ratio we see in this data we would have to be over 3 standard deviations into the distribution. I am pretty damn certain that the lower bound for tech guys is no where near 3 SDs out from the average.

            I wasn’t relying on IQ variability; when I said “assume women and men have the same distribution of programming ability” I did mean it. I am assuming that whatever it is that results in less women in programming funges against less-skilled women. For example, if it’s systemic discrimination, presumably women who see programming as a calling are going to be more likely to tough it out and end up programmers, and they’re also going to be more likely to be good programmers.

            In my experience, tech is not seen as a very glamorous option, so if a woman is intelligent/skilled enough to do something else, she will likely choose to do something else

            In my experience there’s a significant subgroup of people who get into programming because they find it fascinating and fun. Those people also tend to be really good programmers. If I were to try and construct a srs biz explanation, it’d be that female programmers are almost exclusively drawn from that group, and male programmers draws from that group but also people who are in it for the career.

          • Nadja says:

            @wearestrangemonkey @Svejk
            Yes! Thanks for the comments.

            @James
            Oh, yes, I know you weren’t saying it was true. And I like your thoughts on why people get into programming.

      • Anonymous says:

        Bell curves.

    • Deiseach says:

      If we’re going to argue about “sexism in tech”, the fact that there is a ratio of 2.5 million to 150,000 sounds very pertinent; either men make very many more suggestions for fixes than women do, or there are a lot more men in the field than there are women.

      Which then brings us back to “why are there very many more men than women in the field?” and the hair-pulling over sexism can commence.

      I think the “insider/outsider” thing could be as easily explained by insiders knowing “Oh, this is by Sally? I know Sally, she does good work” whereas for an outsider it’s “Who the hell is Jane? Is she any good?”

      • onyomi says:

        I think the “insider/outsider” thing could be as easily explained by insiders knowing “Oh, this is by Sally? I know Sally, she does good work” whereas for an outsider it’s “Who the hell is Jane? Is she any good?”

        This could explain outsider women doing worse: women are less likely to be programmers in the first place, so one might be less willing to accept a woman as a competent programmer until she proves herself.

        But this doesn’t explain why the insider women do better than the insider men. My guess is that insider men feel competitive with other insider men, but have a soft spot for insider women, perhaps, in part, precisely because of their relatively small number, and also, probably, in part, because the male instinct to be protective of women doesn’t cease to function across cyberspace.

        • Anthony says:

          Less so for the Github context. It’s more “Sally|Eric|fqubr007 has submitted good patches; this one is likely to be good, too.”

          Open source programming isn’t pure meritocracy – if you submit a patch that’s not keeping with the general direction the project leader wants to go in, it will be rejected no matter how technically good it is. But people smart enough to program well are generally smart enough to figure out whether their patch fits those requirements which aren’t purely technical.

      • Thomas says:

        “Which then brings us back to “why are there very many more men than women in the field?” and the hair-pulling over sexism can commence.”

        Not saying this is your argument, but this is lazy thinking.
        Because there’s a disproportionate amount of X versus Y gender != sexism.
        Because there’s a disproportionate amount of X versus Y race != racism.

        Along the same lines, the NBA is 70% black, yet black people are 13% of the population.
        Females make up ~90% of nurses, yet 50% of the population.
        Jews comprise 0.2% of the population, yet 22% of Nobel laureates are Jewish.

        Point is: Statistical disparity != discrimination.

        • The Nybbler says:

          It’s not lazy thinking; the Social Justice groups have put a LOT of thought into turning a statistical disparity into proof of sexism. Step one, of course, is to place the burden of proof on those denying sexism. “We’ve got a disparity in outcome. This means sexism unless you’ve got some better idea”. Step two is to systematically eliminate all the other possible explanations on the grounds that either they indicate sexism too, or that using that explanation is itself sexist.

          So, propose that men are simply better at programming than women… you’ll be run out of town on a rail for being a sexist.

          Propose that women are less interested in programming than men… you’ll be told that this is because of sexism.

          Propose that women are less interested in programming because they prefer fields with more human interaction… you’ll be told that this preference is social conditioning and therefore sexism.

          Propose this preference is actually biologically determine… you’re a sexist.

          Propose that women don’t enter the field because they find the men in the field now weird and unattractive… this too is sexism. On the part of the men already in the field.

          Propose that it’s not the duty of the men currently in the field to change to become less weird… you’re a sexist.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      Assuming these are public Open Source projects, this is mainly the work of hobbyists and professionals contributing on the side.

      There is extremely good work being done in some of these projects, but on average it is not where the best programmers are. They work paid jobs.

      • orangecat says:

        Although today it’s not uncommon to get paid to write open source code; in many cases the “insiders” may be doing it as part of their day jobs. Which could explain the relatively greater proportion of women among insiders, given the reasonable assumption that women are much less likely than men to be involved in open source projects in their non-work time.

      • Nonnamous says:

        I’ve been in this industry for fifteen years and I suspect the opposite, i.e., the median open source contributor will dance in circles around the median SWE working a paid job, when it comes to programming ability.

        • Jason Miller says:

          You took the words right out of my mixed closed / open source mouth. The massive attention paid to the implementation of open source projects tends to demand a higher code quality than the outcome-driven nature of closed-source. Open-Source also allows for collaboration on architecture, which is bound to lead to better results than one person’s brainchild.

        • Squirrel of Doom says:

          Perhaps. It would be an interesting thing to study.

          For the major infrastructure projects you and I use daily, I’d believe it more than for the average project.

          Still, my point is that this field is mostly not where people have their professional careers, so it’s not that relevant for the question of if women are welcome in there.

        • noge_sako says:

          Thankfully, the CS industry has adamantly refused to try and create standardized tests of knowledge and competence* (unlike the rest of engineering), so anyone can spew whatever they think!

          *http://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/

        • Marc Whipple says:

          I don’t know about dancing in circles, but IME their routine will almost certainly be noticeably better, yes. (I was employed for a long time by a company that made heavy use of OS materials. The best programmers were usually the biggest OS proponents as well.)

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Working with ~50 open source libraries in my own job… yep.

          Open Source is, by and large, barely-maintained garbage. Releases are rarely backwards-compatible, releases often (but don’t always) update dependencies which also aren’t backwards-compatible, projects often include horrendous numbers of dependencies for single easily-coded functions, architecture is generally epileptic and inconsistent (too many chefs in the kitchen), basic functionalities are often left untested, any given open source project is likely to be orphaned within a year or two, and the majority of the code, when examined, was either written by an inebriated zebra mashing random keys with its hooves, or are completely and illegibly “clever”. (If a novice programmer can’t immediately identify what your code is doing, you’re a shit coder spreading shit practices, and this is doubly true for open source.) Also, quit spawning threads because I have to account for all of those and then fix the deadlocks they inevitably fall into, and also I’m one of two people I’ve ever met who knows how to multithread safely.

          That said – I use a lot of open source libraries, so I am pretty dependent on open source coders (I have maintained open source in cases I couldn’t work around, I do not consider myself an author of it). The fact that most of them do terrible work is not to detract from the fact that the work they do is often (usually?) far more valuable than most of what I do. A given piece of code I write is likely to be used by one or two companies, as opposed to dozens or hundreds.

          So they do valuable work. It’s just a pity most of them are incredibly bad at it.

    • Darwin says:

      How does ‘but would be much worse’ follow from the argument of a selection bias making current women programmers better? Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious just to assume that the difference disappears?

  2. Anon. says:

    Why do you choose to only state the name of the publication instead of the author and their editor? If you’re looking to effect any change, surely naming names would result in a bit more “oomph”.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      The paper has a bunch of authors, and I’m not out to shame anybody here.

      • Anon. says:

        I meant the articles, not the paper.

        • zensunni couch-potato says:

          My guess is that it’s still basically the same reason; the bad media coverage had a bunch of people responsible for it, and he’s not out to shame anybody here.

          It *might* have more oomph to name and shame the authors and editors, but that oomph might be outweighed by the elevated chance of a hate-mob if the issues spreads to the wrong corridors.

          • Jon says:

            It’s wrong to shame people. Unless they’ve done something really terrible. Scott — any chance we can get you to do one on this NYT article about a dude who got shot for going to the ER during a manic episode?

          • Deiseach says:

            Yeah, if they’re only students, it’s not fair to get them into a mauling. Let the bad “science” journalism do that- there is going to be more than enough claiming and counter-claiming stirred up by that.

            Reporting like this is why I’d advise you all to be very skeptical about anything involving religion reporting; a lot of media are dropping specialist religion-beat reporters and so you tend to get terms like “fundamentalist” thrown around without any real meaning (never mind the perennial “A woman has just been ordained a Roman Catholic priest” cheerleading pieces that pop up every so often. Short answer: no, a woman has not been ordained a Roman Catholic priest, any more than I could run an election on here, get you all to vote for me, and then declare myself President of the United States based on that).

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Yeah, it’s not “science” journalism per se, or that Scott has identified some cluster of Especially Bad Journalists (as Scott seems to be pointing out himself.)

            It’s that all journalism is terribly unreliable. We just only notice it when it deals with people/incidents/topics we’re actually informed about. Murray Gell-Mann amnesia, as it’s occasionally called.

          • Anthony says:

            Not all journalism. Just journalism about subjects which require more intelligence than typical journalists possess to understand. Sports generally doesn’t require a lot of brains to participate in or understand, so most sports journalism is pretty good. (Though figuring out *why* the GM made that trade sometimes escapes journalists, because GMs are generally smart people.)

          • Simon says:

            I would say sports journalism is one of the few places where there’s still some proper reporting skills required and that, rather than it being particularly simple, is why it retains some quality.

            So much else is supplied via PR and political briefing and published almost without any critical process at all. In addition the big breaking stories are often handled by non-science journalists leading to even more uncritical errors.

          • My snarky but possibly true hypothesis is that you can tell what people care about by where they give up irrational discrimination*. There’s less discrimination in the US in entertainment than in banking, and I believe that’s because people care more about whether they’re entertained than whether money gets handled sensibly.

            For the specific case, it’s quite plausible that people care more about sports than they do about science or religion (especially other people’s religions).

            *There’s a common (Marxist?) idea that people discriminate because they can get richer by discriminating. While this happens, I think discrimination is at least as likely to be a luxury that people engage in when they think they can afford it.

          • Adam says:

            Also, for people who are interested in these things, they acquire knowledge of science by studying science under actual scientists and acquire knowledge of religion from whatever form of priesthood that religion offers. Sports fans largely gain knowledge of sports through sports journalism. Sportswriters are the priests.

          • Tom Richards says:

            Mainstream sports journalism, with the possible, partial exception of cricket, is atrocious. Most consumers of it are interested in emotional narrative, not actual analysis, so that’s what they get. I don’t think it’s much different to anything else: there are niche websites doing good work for a hardcore audience that seeks them out, but what you read on ESPN or SkySports or the Telegraph or whatever is almost all unmitigated tripe.

          • Jonas says:

            My snarky but possibly true hypothesis is that you can tell what people care about by where they give up irrational discrimination.

            My highly snarky applications is that SJWs by that logic really don’t care about gender/racial/etc. equality.

  3. John Schilling says:

    By far the most significant result in that paper is the one where an unknown programmer revealing their gender leads to a ~10% relative drop in the acceptance rate. Once that appeared in the data, it should have been the focus of the subsequent analysis, the key takeaway from the abstract, incorporated into the paper’s name, and the only thing “science” journalists could take from it without knowing they were deceiving themselves and their audience. Everything else, being a percent or two of difference here or there, is trivia.

    Which suggests that everyone involved was so focused on the task of “proving” a gender bias they “knew” was there, as to be completely oblivious to the genuinely interesting thing they walked right into.

    • The Smoke says:

      It would be interesting to know if that effect has to do with gender or rather with personal identity: Maybe it doesn’t matter if the gender is perceivable but more if the user name seems to be the real name of the person (which might lead to one being perceived as more interested in status).

      • Anonymous says:

        Speaking from personal experience (purely anecdotally), there are two reasons programmers are on github: passion for the craft and resume building.

        Most people there are interested in both but people that are more interested in the second reason are more likely to link their profile to other social media and use their real name, they are also more likely to make crappy PRs.

        • Error says:

          That’s interesting. I use my legal name on GH for resume-building purposes, but I find that it makes me pay more attention to doing quality work, not less. On introspection, the implicit assumption is that anybody who actually looks at my GH code is likely going to be 1. able to recognize good code, and 2. able to dent my career if they don’t like it.

          (on the other hand, I don’t link my profile to other social media — because I have no other social media and if I did it would be HR’s anti-business. YMMV.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Error:
            I think the correlation would work more like so. People on GitHub/open source to build resume are a) people who are more likely to need to build resume, and b) people who are less likely to be passionate about the particular open source project they are contributing to.

            There is also a special brand of a) that is trying to play a certain kind of resume game that leads to management and then to C-level jobs at small companies. Not sure whether they are large enough in number to be meaningful though.

      • Deiseach says:

        I would definitely be going for the personal identity angle, given that men also had a drop in acceptance rate once their gender was revealed. How else do you explain it? Somebody knows Susie and has an (accurate or not) assessment of her work, they will or won’t accept a fix suggested by Susie. They don’t know Anne, they’re as likely to go for Joe’s fix – or given the huge discrepancy between 2.5 million and 150,000, they might not even get to Anne’s suggestion in the middle of all the suggestions from Bill, Tom, Mike, Fred, etc.

      • Daniel Speyer says:

        I would guess that lack of genderability is a proxy for hacker acculturation.

        We tend to shorten our names to three initials (DMR, RMS) or first initial / last name (bstroustrup). I’m not sure where this tradition came from. Possibly a mix of begrudging every keystroke and hating inelegant collision handling. Things like firstname.lastname have a vague not-what-we-do feel.

        And putting a photo of myself on github just feels *wrong*. That doesn’t belong there. Like taking a dependency on X in a printer driver.

        I suspect that along with these hacker customs, people pick up hacker values (like paranoia in testing and separation of components) which lead to genuinely better code.

        Why this effect would be stronger in women I don’t know.

        • John Schilling says:

          firstinitial / lastname and lastname / firstinitial were the traditional defaults for user names and email addresses in the dark ages where every byte had to count, and often continue in that role to this day. I have one colleague who goes by lastnamefirstinitial (an easily-pronounceable monosyllable) in all but the most formal real-world contexts, from the email address he was assigned as an undergraduate.

    • Anonymous says:

      What did they do about names that may imply one gender but are actually unisex? Lynn, Tracy, and Ash are the first four that come to mind.

    • Michael Watts says:

      There’s a related question which has been the subject of study:

      Some black people in the US have names marked for blackness, like “LaDarius”. As far as I can tell from the discussion, they are “marked for blackness” in that they’re innovative, and it’s overwhelmingly black people do that. (related comedy bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gODZzSOelss )

      People with such names tend to have remarkably poor life outcomes, relative to the rest of the United States. The question is, are the names causing those poor outcomes, or is the problem that their parents were the kind of people who thought a name like that was a good idea?

      I believe there is some research to the effect that, after controlling for personal quality, there is not a residual effect of overt name blackness on life outcomes (this has pretty strong implications for those other studies with the methodology “we sent out matched pairs of resumes with one white name and one black name, and the black names got significantly fewer callbacks”). Similarly, it’s quite possible that people who go to the effort of making sure you can tell what sex they are differ systematically from people who don’t do that.

    • 4bpp says:

      Wording it like that sounds like a repetition of much of the same mistakes the media reporting committed, though – all they found is that the programmers who revealed their gender in the past had a 10% lower acceptance rate. I would guess that a significantly higher percentage of people who regularly wear jackets with elbow patches are working academics than of those people who don’t, but one (probably) wouldn’t suggest that someone put on elbow patches to increase their chances of getting that postdoc position.

    • Darwin says:

      I’m a bit confused by your logic – I agree that they should have talked more about the interaction effect, but that 10% *is what proves* the gender bias they are talking about.

      • Loquat says:

        How does the drop prove gender bias when it occurs for *both* genders?

        • Darwin says:

          It’s an interaction effect – there’s a drop for both genders when their gender is revealed, but the drop is about 5% for men and about 10% for women. So we can assume that about 5% of that drop is due to factors that affect both genders, and about 5% is due to factors that affect only women when their gender is revealed (the most likely of which, until someone advances a plausible alternative, would be a gender bias among reviewers).

          • Jonas says:

            the most likely of which, until someone advances a plausible alternative, would be a gender bias among reviewers

            Help me out here—why would that be the most likely?

    • Greg says:

      That would be data mining though.

      I think the way social science papers normally work is that you formulate a hypothesis and test the hypothesis.

      The way significance tests are structured assumes this. They ask, “If there was no actual effect and just random data, what are the chances that you’d see something as extreme as this?” If you get less than 5% or ideally less than 1%, then you start getting some support for your hypothesis.

      On the other hand, with millions of pieces of data, there are nearly an infinite number of hypotheses that can be tested. Simply by chance, countless hypotheses will appear statistically significant. Unless you actually hypothesized these things a priori, the tests break.

      If this effect was actually deemed interesting and worth further study, I think you’d use this data to formulate a hypothesis about insider-outsider status. Then, you’d take a completely new set of data and test that.

      • Luke Somers says:

        Problem: where do you get another GitHub?

        • Kyle says:

          You could glean similar data off older/smaller sites like Sourceforge, Google Code, BitBucket, etc. Or you could look at a single large project like Chromium or Linux.

          Problem is this study didn’t even gather their own data. They used data others (GHTorrent) had already collected and then fished around in it for any interesting conclusions.

        • Adam says:

          They had enough observations that they easily could have broken it into training and test sets and done all of the data mining and hypothesis formulation only on the training data.

  4. Matthew Russotto says:

    (Note: I ordinarily post here under a different nym, but since I’ve made this point elsewhere under my real name doing so would “out” that nym)

    One conclusion I can make from those charts, plus the overall point that women have their pull requests accepted more often than men (along with the numbers), is that a greater proportion of women are “insiders” on the projects they contribute to.

  5. piercedmind says:

    It seems that there are large incentives to conduct and publish studies like these that, very charitably, are honest but very unsuccessful attempts at conducting science. While I don’t want to attack any particular author, especially not the undergraduates here, I am baffled that nobody is questioning how it’s possible that eminent scientists publish extremely shoddy research without much negative backlash in academia.

    As it stands, writing an article about “SJW-ish” issues gives you great chances to be picked up by major news, which in turn increases name recognition and thus chances at promotion or grant money, so it’s not surprising that scientists do publish these studies. It’s even more hopeless to expect the press to adopt higher journalistic-scientific standards.

    The only negative incentives are long and polite rebuttals from other scientists, which do not appear to be a strong demotivating factor. Maybe it might be a good idea to actually call out this behaviour the way it is: fraudulent and dishonest. I understand that sceintists despise using that language, and I am uncomfortable suggesting using it, but I am still fairly certain that it’s fitting. There is a reason the authors did not conduct a signifance test on the actual difference, and that’s probably the same reason why they did not include the gender of the approver, and that reason is very likely not just an honest mistake.

    If incentives to publish this kind of research are so high, then maybe the counter incentives are too weak and need to be ramped up.

    • Theo Jones says:

      I don’t think there is much blameworthy that the authors did. The paper is a non-peer reviewed article by some undergrads. The problem here are non-scientists in the popular media that 1) amplified very weak and contingent results beyond their merits, 2) misrepresented the actual details of the study.

      • Anonymous says:

        “I don’t think there is much blameworthy that the authors did”

        They set out to prove a prejudice (programmers are sexist pigs) and when the data did not cooperate they engaged into p-hacking until they found something that proved their prejudice. They are either incompetent and, given how much p-hacking is at the center of attention, living under a rock or they are disonest.

        • Theo Jones says:

          Really, I don’t see that in my read through. I see some sloppyness and misuse of statistical tools in the paper (namely no adjustment for multiple tests ran on the same dataset). But when you consider that the authors are undergrad comp sci majors and seem to have no experimental science background that is to a degree forgivable.

          Remember that this was a draft that wasn’t even submitted for publication yet. It was released for comment on PeerJ Preprints — a service designed to allow researchers to solicit feedback on their drafts. Here is how the PeerJ people describe their service https://peerj.com/preprints/
          A PeerJ PrePrint is a draft of an article, abstract, or poster that has not yet been peer-reviewed for formal publication. …… Establish precedent. Solicit feedback. Publish updates.

          The paper had a large header on each page reading “PEERJ PREPRINT NOT PEER REVIEWED” and on the abstract webpage for it it had a text in bold font and red color reading “NOT PEER-REVIEWED. This is a rapid communication before peer review”. So, this should of been reasonably obvious to any reader.

          And the authors added the following note:

          https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/#annotation-2002
          This report has not yet been peer-reviewed, and thus the findings should be considered preliminary. Before citing this paper, please check for an updated version here: http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/pubs.html

          The press took that draft and treated it like a final publication. Without even bothering to note some of the issues.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          They set out to write a paper as an undergrad. Undergrads have only a faint notion of all of the things the don’t know, and an even fainter notion of all of the things they don’t know they don’t know.

          We should expect that any paper they write should have many flaws before going through peer review. And frankly, the odds that a paper from undergrads make it all the way throuh peer review and into a journal are very small. That paper likely was not even accepted for peer review by any journals, hence it appearing on an “open” peer review site.

          They has the right of it here.

        • Deiseach says:

          No, this is the kind of paper that a good supervisor will take apart (as Scott did) and tell them what was wrong with it and how to improve it.

          It was, unfortunately, the kind of headline media outlets love. It’s not about the “science” in the “science reporting”, it’s about the “get this story read and talked about for hits to sell advertising”. STEM is a trendy subject right now, with the political push everywhere to “get more kids/women/minorities into STEM fields”, “STEM work is going to be the engine of the economy and the jobs of the future”, and “sexism in X” is always going to be a winner.

          Put the two together and you have an irresistible subject for opinion writing, columnists, editorialising, etc. that stirs up enough controversy to get attention for the particular organ writing the piece.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            This seems like it was done in good faith and with a decent knowledge of how to conduct some basic studies. Professors love it when their students have ideas and follow them out like this. Sure, there are some major issues but that’s stuff to teach the students about so they can fix them and do better next time!

            It’s not coming from a terrible misunderstanding of basic principles like the undergrad “McDonalds could give an X raise to their employees by only raising prices by Y” paper that was bandied about a few years back. It’s a solid first attempt by a group of undergrads. IT’s just a shame that science news is governed by the worst set of incentives known to man.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Sorry, no. I thought perhaps they were innocent at first, but after a few readings I noticed that they have a heading “Is a woman’s pull request accepted more often because she appears to be a woman?”

        Then they go on to say “While acceptance rate results so far have been robust to differences between insiders (people who are owners or collaborators of a project) versus outsiders (everyone else), for this analysis, there is a substantial difference between the two, so we treat each separately.”

        They do this without ever presenting the numbers considering the two conditions together. This is basically a magicians trick. “Now watch carefully as we demonstrate sexism by comparing masked and unmasked participants… but that’s too easy, let’s make this a little harder, first we’ll split them into two groups…”

    • Samedi says:

      In my view the problem here is not the topic of the study but the credence given to single studies themselves. A single study is scientifically worthless. The findings in a single study may be invalid for any number of reasons: methodological error, unintentional mistakes, bias, fraud, etc. Only when the findings have be reproduced by different people over time does the likelihood of accuracy increase.

      A single study may be catalytic, in the sense that it inspires others to research the topic, but on its own it counts for little to nothing.

  6. Alex says:

    The zoomed-in scales exaggerate the magnitudes of the effects in play here.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I have mixed feelings on this. Truncating the y-axis is potentially deceptive, but if the y-axis went all the way from 0 to 100, the difference between 63 and 64 would be invisible and the graph would be useless. At least this way you can see what they’re trying to show.

      • Said Achmiz says:

        But the problem is: the fact that the scale is zoomed-in is not clearly indicated. The axis labels. The y-axis is truncated, and this fact is easily missed, which makes the graph very deceptive.

        There is a known and well-established solution to this: axis breaks (illustrated here). (I would recommend the following: 1. Break the axis; 2. Make the labels at zero, just before the axis break, just after the axis break, and at the top of the graph bigger and bolder, to make them stand out.)

        (An alternative solution is two versions of the graph, one of which is a “zoomed-in” version of the other — but that may be infeasible given space constraints.)

        Effective data graphics aren’t rocket science. They take effort, but they aren’t some esoteric unsolved problem.

        • Alex says:

          Exactly.

          Some of this could be chalked up to undergrads, but there’s at least one faculty author on this paper. They should have pointed that out.

      • Alphaceph says:

        > the difference between 63 and 64 would be invisible and the graph would be useless.

        i.e. the study is useless. If the difference is so small that you can’t see it on a graph, that’s a clue that the effect is irrelevant.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          This is incorrect, because there is no reason to expect the axis range of a data graphic to have any kind of straightforward correlation with the scale of practical consequences of any aspect of the data that the data graphic is displaying.

    • Darwin says:

      This is a knee-jerk response that we’ve learned to use to discredit papers, but it’s not really applicable here. With over 2 million data points in the study, small percentage differences are likely to be statistically significant; and in a complex social context like gender bias in the tech industry, they’re also likely to have large effects on final outcomes. Zooming in to make the graphs clearer is reasonable in a case where the differences are ‘small’ relative to the full possible range of the scale, but very significant and important (and large with respect to the actual *used* range of the scale for the phenomenon in general).

      Think about flipping a coin; if you flip it 2 million times and it comes up heads 51% of the time, it is *definitely* not a fair coin. It wouldn’t be misleading or improper in this case to zoom in on your bar graph so readers can see that 1% difference.

      • Patrick says:

        “With over 2 million data points in the study, small percentage differences are likely to be statistically significant; and in a complex social context like gender bias in the tech industry, they’re also likely to have large effects on final outcomes.”

        Why.

        The second part, not the first. I understand how using an astronomically high sample size can allow you to detect statistically significant differences even if those differences are too small to noticeably affect the lived experiences of anyone in the groups.

        I don’t understand how that isn’t a refutation of the second half of the sentence.

        • Darwin says:

          Ok, if your question is why do I think a 4% bias against women could have a big affect on their lives, the answer has to do with long-run outcomes of complex systems; it’s related to the reason why chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

          If 4% more men than women get good mentorship and encouragement in college CompSci programs, and then of the ones that finish that, 4% more men than women get accepted to good Graduate programs, and of those graduates 4% more men get glowing recommendations from their advisors to put in their job applications, and of those applications 4% more from men are offered interviews than women, and in those interview they hire 4% more men than women, and so on for performance reviews and raises and promotions and invitations to speak at tech conferences and etc etc etc… that 4% compounds over a lifetime in ways that end up with huge differences in outcomes which can distort the fabric of an industry. That’s how minute differences lead to big changes in complex dynamic systems – by applying their effect repeatedly, in a cumulative manner, to *many different interactions* within the system, over time.

          • Jason K. says:

            In order for compounding to work like that, it has to be the same 4% getting benefits/discriminated against each time, which seems rather unlikely.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            That depends on whether it’s a 4% chance of experiencing any discrimination, or a 4% worse outcome – which in turn depends on whether something consists of a lot of little interactions or one big one. On job interviews, the effect would be small; but you would expect it to be larger on job *choices*, for example.

          • Jason K. says:

            “That depends on whether it’s a 4% chance of experiencing any discrimination, or a 4% worse outcome ”

            Most barriers (when it comes to employment) are binary, or fairly discreet. You either got something or you didn’t. You were either hired or not. Promoted or not. Accepted or not. It would be difficult to write a 4% less glowing recommendation. Treating as ‘chance of experiencing discrimination’ is probably going to be more reflective of people’s lived experiences than ‘4% worse outcome’, even though the averages are the same.

          • Patrick says:

            Or, all of those minute differences compound over time to yield the 4% you measure at the end. Or, all of those 4% differences affect different people in different amounts, and don’t compound at all. Or, once the difference has occurs, the populations are no longer the same and this 4% rule we’re presuming applies everywhere no longer applies at all. Or, all of those 4% differences aren’t in black and white issues that have meaningful effects on people’s lives. To use the obvious example, the difference in submission acceptance is unlikely to have a significant impact on the lives of even the subset of people who are differentially affected, AND, that difference occurs long after the chain started, not at the beginning.

      • Kaminiwa says:

        “As usual, it’s humanity that messes things up. When flipped by a machine, coins come up heads a solid fifty percent of the time, and tails the other fifty percent. Put the fate of the coin in grubby human hands and the odds tip slightly in favor of the side that faces up just before the coin is flipped. The side that was face up at the beginning of the flip has a fifty-one percent chance of landing face-up at the end.”

        http://io9.gizmodo.com/5826157/coin-tosses-arent-really-fifty-fifty

        So, 51% heads is actually pretty typical ^.^

      • Muga Sofer says:

        One could argue that a small statistical difference is more likely to be a result of the study’s design than to be “real”, and – being undetectable – we would have no way to disprove that theory.

    • ediguls says:

      In fact, it would be better not to use a bar graph at all for such a small amount of numbers. A table would be more informative and have a greater data-to-ink ratio, to channel Tufte.

  7. Nadja says:

    Bravo, this is why I love this blog.

    It boggles my mind why people can’t embrace these (preliminary) results for what they are: it’s great news there doesn’t seem to be much gender discrimination in the open source community! Shouldn’t this be helpful to the feminist cause? Show this result to young girls. Tell them that if they feared going into tech because they believed there’d be widespread gender discrimination, here’s a piece of evidence showing that their fears might be overblown. Hurray… Right?

    • The Smoke says:

      Totally agreed. However most feminists wouldn’t be happy to live in a world where the feminist goals are actually realized, since in such a world you can’t be fighting for feminism anymore. In particular this is good reason for them not to accept the notion that things are not actually so unfair right now.
      With feminist here I mean ‘actively part of the movement’.

      • phantasmoon says:

        That’s uncharitable. I’m sure most feminists would like to live in that world. Unfortunately, their worldview is based around the idea that there is a systematic discrimination against women, that good intentions and even individual actions aren’t enough to make a difference, and that people who distract from or hinder the cause of raising awareness about, and fighting against, “the patriarchy”, are hurting the cause of all women.

        If the evidence seems to point out that there doesn’t seem to be much discrimination in tech, well, the evidence is wrong because of course there’s a patriarchy and of course there’s a problem. And if you present good news about the status of women in tech, or any other area, they will attack you because you’re distracting everyone from the fact that the patriarchy is real and must be dismantled.

        • ThrustVectoring says:

          You’re not actually disagreeing. Feminists would like to live in a world where gender equality has “won”. They’d also be unhappy about living in that world, due to the sudden loss of raison d’etre.

        • Patrick says:

          Easy test- provide a feminist evidence that there is little or no sexism in an area of life she previously believed had a lot of sexism. See how she reacts.

          For example: Provide evidence that the differential effect of gender unblinding in submission acceptance for men versus for women is INCREDIBLY small, to the point where you’d need a couple hundred female contributors in a room before you’d have enough people its affected to fill out a hand of bridge. Point out that the effect size is so small that if someone tells you that their submission was negatively affected by their revealed gender, your default assumption should be that they’re wrong, because false positives are likely to easily outnumber actual incidences of that occurring. Point out that the tech world, at least in this aspect and per this survey, is less sexist than… uh, virtually every other community, ever.

          See how that goes.

          If she’s happy, you’ll have your answer.

          • dust bunny says:

            I don’t agree. You’re holding feminists to an unnaturally high standard of rationality, as if they weren’t fairly average people.

            A typical person, when faced with evidence that their belief system can’t score a “win” in some specific context, will not actually update their priors. They will perceive whoever is presenting the evidence as hostile to their belief system and their group. And that’s actually a very good heuristic.

            It would be nice if feminists were actually better people than literally every other major group everywhere, but sadly, that’s not the world we live in.

          • Luke Somers says:

            I think a better test would be if you show them a case where there WAS bias, and then over time the bias shrank to what you describe.

            That would give them the choice of YAY WE WON, which is kind of missing from what you describe there.

          • butts kapinsky says:

            Hi, Patrick.

            I am a feminist and am extremely interested in the evidence you’ve listed. Could you please link the relevant studies? I find it annoying both when feminists and MRAs push bad or incorrect information (Examples: feminists sometimes don’t like it when you tell them domestic violence is largely bidirectional, and MRAs sometimes don’t like it when you tell them that women ATTEMPT suicide more than men, and that this is a more relevant figure than SUCCESSFUL suicides).

            My current understanding of the research is that, in general, identical resumes will see the female name rated as less competent, offered a lower starting salary and rated as less likely to hire. Screaming patriarchy at this is a bit extreme, but it is evidence of a system which rewards women less for the same amount of work.

            Just remember to update your priors of feminists after I’ve seen the research.

            Cheers.

          • InferentialDistance says:

            this is a more relevant figure than SUCCESSFUL suicides

            I keep seeing this asserted, but I’m not persuaded. Society is much more sympathetic to women’s sadness and weakness, which could unconsciously encourage (poor) suicide attempts.

          • dust bunny says:

            @ Mark Atwood

            I agree that the problem of feminist Schlimmbesserung is real and needs to be addressed. But I don’t see how gotchas directed at individual feminists for basic failures at rationality help at all. Blaming isn’t likely to help either, since it’s going to be tribal. Feminists can entirely reasonably ignore such blaming, because supporting policy and intervention without good evidence is a ubiquitous problem, not a feminist one.

            I’m going to be predictable and offer a “more of the same” type solution. Try to shift culture so that people value good evidence more highly, and understand what constitutes good evidence better, and know why good evidence is relevant and important in policymaking. Feminists are not impervious to reason at all.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @butts kapinsky – I do not think it can be defensibly claimed that surviving suicide is a worse outcome than dying from it, any more than I think it can be defensibly claimed that women are “the real victims of warfare”. I would be interested in hearing your reasoning though, if you wouldn’t mind elaborating.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            women ATTEMPT suicide more than men, and that this is a more relevant figure than SUCCESSFUL suicides

            I’d say that both are relevant. And it’s kind of depressing that both sides treat it as a contest and seem to be vying for the spot of “most suicidal.”

          • Schlimmbesserrung: An effort at making things better which actually makes them worse.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        With feminist here I mean ‘actively part of the movement’.

        To me, that’s the problem with using “feminist” uncritically in this way.

        If I start a movement for blue-people equality, and we actually do achieve equality for blue people, well, who’s going to be left calling themselves “bluists” in the “bluist movement”? Only the people for whom equality isn’t enough, and who want actual government privileges for blue people.

        But by any objective measure, in such a world, nearly everyone actually is a “bluist”, and “bluism” has achieved its goal—except perhaps in a few minor areas here and there.

        • John Schilling says:

          Do we have anyone left who calls themselves an “abolitionist”?

          Do we need to? Slavery still exists in some corners of the world, but at a level where opposition is generally rolled into general human-rights activism rather than having a large movement dedicated to that singular cause.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            But is it a good idea to say “I’m opposed to abolitionism”?

            I don’t think so. Not even if people are calling for preferential racial quotas in the name of “fighting slavery in the workplace.”

            It’s deliberately ceding the moral/connotative high ground for no particular reason.

            ***

            Especially if there were a small but vocal number of people out there who were legitimate, hardcore anti-abolitionists.

          • Nornagest says:

            We have anti-slavery activists. I think “abolitionist” has passed out of use because slavery is legally abolished pretty much everywhere, it just continues in some places extralegally or on a customary level, where abolition (double abolition?) would do it no further good.

          • John Schilling says:

            But is it a good idea to say “I’m opposed to abolitionism”?

            If we had a sizable group who called themselves “abolitionists” today, I would wager that A: the ones who focused their activities on places like Mali and the Sudan would get almost zero publicity(*), and B: the ones who focused their activities in the United States and Western Europe would be doing things that sensible people should oppose.

            * Unless they hired Emma Watson as a spokesperson, of course.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ John Schilling:

            I am not disagreeing with anything you said in that comment. The question is whether it’s a good idea to let those people take over the term “abolitionism” and declare yourself an “anti-abolitionist”. Especially when there is the very real chance that you will be conflated (purposefully or not!) with the small segment of people who really do want to bring back slavery.

            Let me stop using metaphorical language: there really are legitimate anti-feminists out there who do believe that woman are inferior, or at the very least that men and women belong in “separate spheres”. Mostly, they are religious traditionalists, though some of them are in the alt-right or the “novo-regressive” movement. It is foolish to let yourself be grouped in with those people, if you in fact share the feminist belief in the equality of men and women but disagree on the proper means of promoting it.

            Worse, the actual anti-feminists actively want this confusion to occur because it makes them seem more reasonable. In fact, some of them are most likely posting here.

            @ Nornagest:

            That is surely true. But it’s beside the point, which is whether a group calling for racial quotas should be allowed to get away with calling themselves “the true heirs of the abolitionist movement” without any pushback.

          • The Smoke says:

            I agree with what you say, but let’s apply this to self-identifying as feminist. It doesn’t actually tell really anything about yourself.
            Does it mean you want i) equality before the law (that wouldn’t justify using that label, because it is the baseline assumption anyway), that you think ii) women should get special attention because of perceived prevailing inequalities, or even that iii) men should be out under special scrutiny because of the possible danger they represent?

            If I don’t have any more information I am going to put the person somewhat in the middle, dependent on the typical views of persons that identify as feminist I have encountered. For me personally this would roughly mean ii).

            I also agree that I should have just written what I mean directly.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ The Smoke:

            If it’s just an average person you meet at work or some social event, and you hear him or her identify as a “feminist”, the term is simply too vague to determine their precise views. Especially if it’s a woman: I think most woman these days are simply going to reflexively agree with feminism in the broad sense.

            Most people have not thought about this very much. You are going to go wrong assuming everyone who casually identifies as “feminist” is a “feminazi”.

            Now, if we’re talking about someone who runs a “feminist” blog, dedicated to “smashing the patriarchy”, then you can make some more assumptions.

            But in dinner-party conversations, you have to keep in mind that the whole thing is a conceptual morass, and most people are confused about it. One person may call himself an “anti-feminist”, while another may call herself an “ardent feminist”—and they may well share the exact same views.

            Especially when we’re talking about things like the entertainment industry. It is not at all unreasonable, in my opinion, to point out that Hollywood in many ways promotes a certain idea of gender roles—because it sells. Or in video games: only in the past decade or so has there really been a consistent move toward creating equal female characters.

          • transparentradiation says:

            Vox Imperatoris. You’re a very fair personage. My compliments. And you identify as an Objectivist, is that correct?

          • I wonder if any of the people who say “wage labour is slavery!” call themselves abolitionists.

        • The Smoke says:

          Whenever somebody uses the word feminist they have a certain definition in mind. Then when someone reads/hears the word they might think of another. This alone causes a lot of misunderstandings.

          There are little to no movements (-isms) where the label is best used to describe people who identify with the goals of the movement, but rather people who identify with the movement itself and who advocate serious systemic changes.

          I think my use is much more adequate and consistent than ‘someone who believes women should have equal rights’ as it is often used, the only difference is that I am upfront with what I mean.

          • This. If you give a bunch of people a political compass quiz, many of them end up in the socially liberal/fiscally conservative quadrant. You’d be crazy to use this fact to claim that half the population are libertarians. Probably less than half the population have any idea a libertarian movement even exists, much less personally subscribes to it.

          • Jonas says:

            You’d be crazy to use this fact to claim that half the population are libertarians.

            That depends on what the meanings of ‘are’ are ?

            If people hold substantially libertarian views and vote libertarian where possible, then they are libertarians in deed. If they call themselves libertarians, they are libertarians in name. (All four combos probably exist.)

            Your point seems to be that they don’t self-identify as libertarian—that they’re not libertarian in (self-applied) name. I think it’s much more interesting whether they’re libertarian in deed, in substance.

            You could have argued that the political compass is a bad measure for this, but you didn’t. Is that because you think the name side of the name/deed split is more important (and the strength of the test is irrelevant), or is it because you think the PC actually is a fairly good measure?

          • Adam says:

            I think he’s saying it’s a really big quadrant and you have to be pretty far into the corner of it to really be a libertarian. Many people are in the quadrant but usually close to the center or at least close to the center on the economic axis.

          • Consider the statements “I’m a libertarian because…” and “the problem with libertarians is…” Hearing either of these in a normal conversation, we would expect people to be referring to (1) people who self-identify with the libertarian movement, or (2) people who vote for political candidates on the basis of their agreement with libertarian views, or (3) people whose stated views have significant overlap with views that the speaker recognizes as libertarian. We would not think they were referring to everyone whose views fall within the broadest possible definition of libertarianism.

            Similarly, when someone says “I’m a feminist because…” or “the problem with feminists is…,” they’re not referring to everyone who would agree with the statement “women are people, too!” They mean people who self-identify with the feminist movement, or whose views are strongly aligned with those of the feminist movement.

            Imagine if libertarians popped up in the comments of every anti-libertarian article to say, “libertarianism just means you think people aren’t slaves to their governments! The only reason you could possibly oppose libertarianism is if you want the universal slavery of a totalitarian state.” I think we can all agree that that would be a terrible argument.

      • AspiringRationalist says:

        > Most feminists wouldn’t be happy to live in a world where the feminist goals are actually realized, since in such a world you can’t be fighting for feminism anymore.

        I think you’re confusing “most” with “the loudest”.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Agreed.

        • honestlymellowstarlight says:

          Bold claim: loud minority > quiet majority, in every way that matters. Taleb put out a thing on this a while back.

        • patriarchal landmine says:

          by loud, we can easily assume you are referring to the president of the united states of america who repeated the wage gap myth during a state of the union speech.

          yup, he’s just one stupid loudmouth idiot, but he sure doesn’t represent everyone. just… half the country.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Leaving aside the fact that the President is obviously a very loud voice indeed – and an active politician – mentioning a commonly-held belief in no way implies that you hate Truth or something.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Muga Sofer:

            Mentioning it, no.

            Citing it as accurate when the only way you could not know it was not accurate is to be incredibly incompetent, kinda sorta.

          • Jonas says:

            Citing it as accurate when the only way you could not know it was not accurate is to be incredibly incompetent, kinda sorta.

            What?! I always thought that a politician’s main competency was in lying… ?

    • Yakimi says:

      Analyses of bureaucracies should also apply to movements, especially to ones as thoroughly institutionalized as feminism, as entities that have to manufacture problems to justify their continued prominence. Those employed in activism and journalism can only be expected to argue in favor of a world in which they become more important and powerful.

      • Ptoliporthos says:

        I was wondering if it was more like Conquest’s third law and the feminist movement is actually run by the patriarchy. It certainly looked that way this past week, anyway.

        • DrBeat says:

          There’s a good reason us MRAs sometimes refer to feminism as “The Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Patriarchy”.

          Feminism is what you get when you immerse yourself completely in every single belief that underlies sexism before thinking about how to fight sexism.

          • Maware says:

            When I flirted with the dark side, the explanation was that feminism benefits high-status/elite men, by disempowering the bulk of men. Feminism sexually liberated women to chase after the high status men they prefer in their youth, while enabling them to work at traditionally male jobs thereby depressing wages and making men compete and fail more.

            The losers were the majority of men who lost the stabilizing influence of wives and who suddenly found the economy not only shedding many male jobs due to productivity gains, but the increased competition for the remaining service jobs due to women. If you look at older media, it’s surprising to find men in professions now completely dominated by women, like store clerks and clerical type positions.

            Much of MRA philosophy is quite elegant (which is why it should be distrusted, it explains things TOO well) if you read it. Reading about male disposability was a shattering experience, for one.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Maware
            The losers were the majority of men who lost the stabilizing influence of wives and who suddenly found [… ] increased competition for the remaining service jobs due to women.

            A vivid image! Poor fellow, he no longer has a wife cooking for him , she’s outside competing with him. Lucky fellow, if he’d like to stay home and let her bring in some money.

          • Maware says:

            Wives don’t marry men who don’t bring in money, although they may sleep with them. Social roles are less flexible than you think: women are dissatisfied with house husbands for the most part, and they make up a tiny part of the population. Many stay at home dads will tell you of the isolation and issues with other women they have.

            What happens is that they redouble trying to marry the smaller amounts of men who do earn money, and increasingly remain single as they age and fail. Meanwhile you have a fair amount of underproductive, isolated, and unhealthy single men.

            This is the part of the MRA analysis which is interesting, but you wade through a lot of junk to get to it.

        • It turns out that I was familiar with some version of Conquest’s third law, but I didn’t know it was his. Have a link.

          1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
          2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
          3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

          • Samedi says:

            These remind me of John Gall’s “Laws of Systems” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics). If you consider an organization a “system” then the laws explain quite a lot. For example, “Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function.” And, “The system itself does not actually do what it says it is doing.”

          • Jason K. says:

            I can summarize laws 2 & 3 into one:

            The implicit goal of any organization or movement will become its own perpetuation and growth. This can also be applied to any distinct sub-group of an entity, down to an individual member.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          What happened this week?

          Interestingly, I seem to have absorbed a definition for “Conquest’s third law” that was … significantly less american-conservative than the original – “Any controversial movement is eventually controlled by those [in power] whom it claims to oppose.” I wonder where it came from.

          • Anthony says:

            Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem said that women who didn’t vote for Hilary were betraying women.

      • Samedi says:

        In my field we call such organizations “self-licking ice cream cones”. A phrase which I find highly amusing.

    • James says:

      Great point.

      Some MRAs (Honey Badger Radio) have gone so far as to say ignoring such results and continuing to preach (listen and believe) gender discrimination is tantamount to abuse.

      see: self-fulfilling prophecy, no autonomy, no moral agency.

    • curtains says:

      You guys don’t get it. There is no conspiracy. These journalists are just farming for clicks the way they always do. Rage gets clicks. There is no hidden agenda aside from boosting pageviews. All media is now tabloid media. At best, they are individually consistent about which side they take on all the hot button issues they are addicted to covering, in order to avoid alienating their readership.

      Ryan Holiday is one of the few media insiders who is willing to speak plainly about this. It applies to social justice issues as well as anything. Luckily, we are reaching “peak content” as adblockers proliferate and venture capital money runs out. Hopefully the next iteration of journalism is better that this one, and people figure out which news sources stayed credible and which ones didn’t.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      “Hurray… Right?”

      Mostly, yes! 🙂

      OTOH, there is also a caveat/concern that such studies may possibly be overlooking subtler issues, and that taking such studies at face value may lead to a premature declaration of victory.

      People whose main exposure to feminism is as an excuse to attack them will understandably feel exasperated by this hesitation. But IMO it tends to come from those who have a lot of experience of sexism…and often also of prematurely declaring victory.

      I mean, what dust bunny said applies too–typical people often don’t update their priors–but, well…as dust bunny said, it often *is* a good heuristic when you have strong support for your priors…as in Eliezer’s “I defy the data.”

  8. vV_Vv says:

    Of course, this doesn’t rule out that one gender is genuinely doing something differently than another, so they had another neat trick: they wrote another program that automatically scored accounts on obvious gender cues: for example, somebody whose nickname was JaneSmith01, or somebody who had a photo of themselves on their profile. By comparing obviously gendered participants with non-obviously gendered participants whom the researchers had nevertheless been able to find the gender of, they should be able to tell whether there’s gender bias in request acceptances.

    So we are to believe that their automated script is able to determine the gender of participants better than the humans who decide whether to accept pull requests. I don’t buy it.

    The default hypothesis for the difference in acceptance rates between “blinded” and “obvious” gender should be that it is due to systematic measurement bias.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think the theory is that their script compares email addresses to Google Plus pages. Although a human could do that, most people don’t. In theory, right now I could Google the email address you used for your SSC registration, find your social media profile, and see if it contained gender cues. In practice, you’re just a series of Vs.

      • vV_Vv says:

        In theory, right now I could Google the email address you used for your SSC registration, find your social media profile, and see if it contained gender cues. In practice, you’re just a series of Vs.

        If I sent you code to publicly include in your project, possibly with the implicit promise to maintain it for some time, wouldn’t you be a bit curious about who the hell I am?

        • Mary says:

          The whole point is that they care about the code, not you.

        • ThrustVectoring says:

          Not particularly, as long as I can associate further code contributions as coming from the same source. If the patch is good, accept it. Otherwise don’t. If I’m hiring or looking for someone to speak at a conference, your code contribution has some means of contacting you. If you wanted to advertise who you are with your code, you’d be doing so already.

        • Eric Anholt says:

          I’m an open source developer, and do a mix of traditional projects and github. I have accepted contributions from people on github without knowing real name. However, in general we’ll have exchanged some emails outside of GitHub, so I expect a lot of the “blinded” population really wasn’t.

          I am surprised that gender-ambiguous usernames (which I think of as those people who go by MostAwesone or whatever) did better than non-gender-ambiguous usernames. I’m seriously prejudiced against contributions from people that won’t put their name on it, and I’m definitely not alone, so I wonder what’s going on here.

        • Anon says:

          Yeah, no, as one of the maintainers of a large project, having worked with / contributed to a number of others, no one does this. It’s basically either you recognize the handle or you don’t, and maybe glance at the other repos contributed to. Even then, it doesn’t make much difference: all that really matters is if the code would be a positive change.

        • As a maintainer of a few small projects, this has literally never occurred to me

        • patches welcome says:

          No, and the insinuation irks me slightly. If I’m “curious about who the hell you are”, I have `git log –author` and the like. Why would a maintainer ever “find your social media profile”?

          • voidfraction says:

            I’ve searched for people’s resumes after they contributed to a project open-sourced by my company, but that was just to see if they’d be a good candidate for an open role we had.

      • Anonymous says:

        “I think the theory is that their script compares email addresses to Google Plus pages. Although a human could do that, most people don’t”

        I do it all the time to people who open pull requests or issues on my github project to satisfy my voyeuristic tendencies.

      • Deiseach says:

        In theory, right now I could Google the email address you used for your SSC registration

        I just did that right now. It brought up a handful of results, three of which were indeed comments I had left on other sites*. The rest (as “best matches”) had to do with Connemara Pony societies.

        There was a popular fad a couple years back for an online text analyser which said that, given a sample of writing, it could identify gender. Like everyone else, I copied’n’pasted a chunk from my Dreamwidth journal into it. It said I was male.

        I am not a Connemara Pony, should anyone be in any doubt about that, neither am I male 🙂

        *Under a different name. If anyone wants to try Googling “Deiseach”, there is another Deiseach out there who’s not me 🙂

        • Muga Sofer says:

          To my eternal disconcertion, googling my email address (or name) will occasionally turn up sites hosting lists of cracked emails and passwords, usually in Russian.

          (Yes, I’m on them. By sheer luck, I changed my password before this was discovered.)

  9. I read that and my thoughts immediately jumped to Paul Graham’s essay on how to spot gender bias. The idea is that if you’re biased against women (or whatever) the ones you let through will have to be extra awesome and will subsequently out preform people who weren’t discriminated against. If one were to imagine that women were somehow less confident about submitting pull requests then the requests that were made would be fewer but higher quality and more likely to be accepted.

    • eponymous says:

      That depends on whether bias occurs only at an initial selection step, or is pervasive and affects subsequent performance.

      For instance, suppose fewer women enter tech because of the hostile work environment, and the hostile work environment also lowers women’s performance. Then we would expect higher-ability women to enter tech (compared to men), but they would under-perform their ability because of the hostile work environment, and so it’s not clear whether their final output would be higher or lower.

      (I’m not endorsing this hypothesis — I personally favor differential occupational preferences.)

    • The Nybbler says:

      Graham’s test was mostly nonsense. The definition was self-contradictory. He promises “…in some cases it’s possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool”. Then, one of the conditions is “the groups of applicants you’re comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability”. That’s not “knowing nothing about the applicant pool”, in fact that’s knowing quite a bit about the applicant pool. It also applies only to some sorts of bias; if you’re more strongly biased against higher-ability women than lower-ability women, the test might not work even assuming the applicant pool meets the condition.

      It also applies only to cases where you have one test and one measure. When you have many different tests, it fails due to the possibility of Simpson’s Paradox. For instance, if men are more inclined to submit to projects with maintainers with extremely high standards than women, more men’s pull requests will be rejected, even under an assumption of no bias and no ability difference between men and women in the pool of contributors.

      • Randall Randall says:

        In context, knowing nothing about the applicant pool means knowing nothing about the distribution of gender in the applicant pool, I would think.

      • Paul Graham’s intuition was right, but his math details were wrong. That’s ok, because you can fix it. Rather than looking at *median* performance of accepted groups, you can instead look at *min* performance of accepted groups.

        I.e., compare the stupidest accepted woman to the stupidest accepted man.

        https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/paul_grahams_bias_test.html

        This works as long as the distributions are not bimodal with an empty gap right near the quality cutoff.

        • TrivialGravitas says:

          I think the specifics of venture capitalism prevent that from working. VC doesn’t work by trying to only choose successful clients but by choosing people with high payoff potential (and being diversified enough that the risks aren’t an issue). As a result they simply don’t care how bad the failures are, only how good the successes are.

  10. Github has become SJ-deranged, so it’s appropriate to use some salt. Recent coverage: http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2

  11. Newbie says:

    I feel like informal peer review like you’re doing could serve a function similar to snopes. Snopes calls out urban legends and blatant falsehoods and serves as a useful way to deflate viral myths. There’s another level of analysis that could be done in explaining how studies and experiments have been misreported, or where the conclusions of a paper aren’t born out by the data.

    It would basically be a media peer review site to hold news outlets responsible for their science reporting, and when they distort research/statistics to serve their own ends. A media that reports on the media, which is what a lot of these blog posts of yours have essentially been. I would love it if something like that existed and served as a trusted non partisan source for higher level fact checking.

  12. Anonymous says:

    As a nerdy straight white male programmer, that fact that people like me are constantly being propagandized against by the media is getting pretty wearisome. Add in the apparent surge of support for socialism among the young and it’s getting downright frightening.

    If I was an American I’d be thinking about buying a gun and at least having a backup plan in mind to escape the revolution, as paranoid as that might sound.

    • Anonymous says:

      As a nerdy straight white-ish male and very leftist non-programmer, it’s not the socialists you need to worry about. Both because socialists are too hopelessly divided to do anything and because many socialists (/leftypol/, for instance) are fanatically opposed to identity politics in any form and giving it its strongest critiques.

      The people you need to worry about are the regressive, illiberal social justice types. Many of whom are not socialists, many of whom call themselves socialists but seem curiously comfortable with top-down social change and corporate power.

      • Anthony says:

        I was reading some discussion about the “code of conduct” controversy in open-source circles, and one thought which struck me was “This is exactly the sort of corporate bullshit a lot of people in the open-source community were trying to escape.”. Funny that Social Justice requires submitting to corporation-style control.

      • Jon Gunnarsson says:

        Wait, why would it be curious that socialists are in favour of top-down social change? After all, that’s what pretty much every socialist government has done (or at least tried to do).

      • Viliam says:

        My (very simplified) model is that the “old left” used to be middle-class people trying to speak in the name of the working class; while the “new left” is upper-class people trying to speak in the name of the working class and the middle class. Of course each class projects their own thinking on those they pretend to defend.

        The old left (the socialists) wants to get rid of the “top 1%”, which would more or less bring them to the top positions of the society. The new left (the regressives) wants to divide the “bottom 99%” internally as much as possible, and eliminate all the microaggressions and free speech because those are the most frequent “dangers” that the most rich people face these days.

        Incentives. When you think about social justice, remember that their leaders (not the average members) are the rich kids, the future kings and queens of this world. Suddenly things start making sense. Both real equality and meritocracy are their enemies.

        • Alex Welk says:

          This. With an extra helping of This on top. I think it is almost too common to forget that there can and often is a serious disconnect between the various parts of a movement’s hierarchy (no matter how much it may say it has no hierarchy, someone is writing the academic treatises and talking to news media). Differences between the leaders and the movement as a whole could account for large parts of the movement’s appearance to outgroups.

    • perpippity says:

      You don’t need to be American to buy a gun. Lots of places in Europe, to name one, have plenty of guns. (If, on the other hand, you’re a Japanese citizen, you’re probably out of luck.)

    • The Nybbler says:

      You misunderstand the situation. If the revolution comes, it will be against these people, not by them. They are already on top. I suspect they will end up falling without an actual shooting war, however.

      • anonymous says:

        No one is going to have a revolution against Slate, the Atlantic, tech times, and some people on twitter. If you think they are on top you need get out more.

        • Alex says:

          And the Atlantic spends most of its time running articles about political correctness run amok. If SJWs are what you fear, The Atlantic is on your side.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      If you are referring to support for Sanders, the ‘socialism’ covers single payer and free college- it isn’t hard to figure out why young people would support things that would benefit them. Aside from that Sanders has ‘spend more on social security’ and… I think that is the extent of the socialism. The rest is social justice, railing against the financial industry and other populist measures like protectionism.

      • Thomas Jørgensen says:

        Single payer would benefit everyone except people working in medical billing and medical insurance – The US health care provision system is uniquely wasteful. It doesn’t make anyone better off that you spend twice as much on administrative overhead as Canada does.

        Thus, this isn’t so much “Socialist” as “What is currently being done is just horribly worse than known best practice, so lets quit doing it this way”.

        The free college thing would require a campaign of auditing US university administrative and prestige spending with fire and sword to be practicable. I mean, a lot of nations do this, but a lot of nations also don’t have universities that build the kind of bondogles and hands out the kind of administrative sinecures the US does…

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Single payer would benefit everyone except people working in medical billing and medical insurance – The US health care provision system is uniquely wasteful. It doesn’t make anyone better off that you spend twice as much on administrative overhead as Canada does.

          It may be more efficient to have one giant nationalized grocery chain than to have dozens of different government programs for providing groceries, all working against one another.

          But that doesn’t mean that any form of government-provided groceries is more efficient than a free market in groceries.

          Healthcare is not a public good. It just isn’t. It is rivalrous and excludable. The only thing that’s sort of a public good is fighting infectious disease.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Vox Imperatoris

            One argument for this is to point out obvious absurdities, like the price of an ambulance ride, and ask, “Why couldn’t I set up a competing business that offers the same thing but for closer to what it actually costs to run, completely undercutting everyone else?”. The answer to that question will point you to the factors that prevent you from doing this and thereby serve to artificially raise the price of ambulance rides (or whatever else).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            Exactly. Especially on your first point.

            As one economist (I think it was George Reisman) has said, take the “shortage of hospital beds”. If you had a free market in healthcare, an entrepreneur could simply buy a hotel, take on the non-critical patients from the hospitals, staff it with nurses, and then make money by charging way more than a hotel charges but way less than a hospital bed costs.

            I don’t exactly want to sing the glories of the Russian system, but when I was studying abroad in St. Petersburg, I became sick with gastroenteritis. The state-run healthcare system is free and…not good (actually, the doctors are good, but the accommodations are terrible), but I ended up spending five days in a private clinic, paid for by my American insurance. You can see it on Google Maps here.

            What was interesting to me were a few things:

            a) The price of every service was clearly posted in a little book you were given upon going in.
            b) The place had clearly been converted from a hotel.
            c) All the doctors and nurses were very good, professional, and spoke English.
            d) The accommodations and food were significantly nicer than I have seen in hospitals in the U.S.
            e) Everything cost at most half of what it would cost at hospitals in the U.S.
            f) They didn’t have every service, but they had a private ambulance constantly parked outside waiting to take people to the state hospital if necessary.
            g) It was located a block from the “Square of Proletarian Dictatorship”, where Lenin first ruled from the grounds of a boarding school for aristocratic girls, after overthrowing the Provisional Government. (The place is still the headquarters of the “Gubernator” of Leningrad Region, as can be seen on Google Maps. The left side says “First Soviet of the Proletarian Dictatorship.” The right says “Workers of All Countries, Unite!”)

            These doctors and nurses are almost certainly of the same or similar quality as doctors and nurses in the U.S., probably a large number of them would wish to practice in the U.S., but they are kept out either at the level of immigration or by not allowing their degrees to transfer. And that’s not to mention the difference in regulations that allowed them to run a place that like.

            From what I understand “private clinics for rich foreigners” is a pretty good little industry in many less-developed countries. I think they should take the principles behind those and apply them to regular hospitals for non-rich natives in developed countries.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            The free market works well, as a general principle. As a matter of empirical fact, in health care, it doesn’t. Wait, let me modify this some. The *US* system of a health care market is an abysmal failure.

            Citizens of the united states of america pay an enormous surcharge and get no better care than is typical for a developed nation. And it’s not just that wages are higher – the differential persists when you do the accounting in “percent gdp” and when you dig down, you find that most of this extra expense boils down to far more paperwork.

            In some ways this is absurd, I mean, I am saying that having the government just take over this entire sector of the economy results in the job being done with 50% fewer bureaucrats being involved. But that appears to just be how the economy works, and as a general principle, governments and nations ought not to ignore the experiences of the rest of the world and keep doing things poorly just because doing them better runs counter to ideology.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Thomas

            I don’t think the claim “in the rest of the developed world, healthcare is fully nationalized, single-payer, free at the point of use, and all works much better than the US, or at least, just as well for much less money” is accurate.

            Are you perhaps from the UK or Canada? Most countries really don’t have an NHS. Most countries have a healthcare system that is private to some extent. Only a few have a nationalized, single-payer system.

            The problem is that the US’ system is in certain ways uniquely terrible, and as I argue above, this quite clearly is not down to the free market just making things enormously expensive for no reason.

            I’m all down for adjusting the theory when it doesn’t match the data, but you have to make sure your data is actually accurate first.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Anonymous

            While the UK and Canada’s healthcare systems are somewhat peculiar in having a single-payer system, the USA is a lot more peculiar (amongst first-world nations in not having universal health care of any sort.

          • Anonymous says:

            @sweeneyrod

            I’m not sure how that would cause the problems people cite with the US system, i.e. everything being inordinately expensive for seemingly no reason.

            Also, I’m not sure the differences with regard to who is paying for it are as great as you might think. According to this Forbes article, about 50% of healthcare spending in the US is by government.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            We do have single payer for the most expensive time of life to be a healthcare consumer, when you are old and near death. So, it’s a little bit of an apple and oranges comparison to just site the 50% figure is particularly meaningful. But there is a fair amount of consen in studies that Medicare is WAY cheaper than any comparable private market costs.

          • Adam says:

            I have absolutely no clue what causes this, but the biggest personal problem I experience with healthcare is nobody can ever tell me what something is going to cost. Get a treatment, get quoted a price, pay it, then four months later receive a bill saying ‘oops, sorry, we actually ended up getting billed this, and your insurance actually paid less than we thought they would, and you now owe this.’ How is a market supposed to function when neither party knows what a service is going to actually cost until months, sometimes years, after it is rendered? This is probably more of an issue with the insurance providers than the service providers, who could quote an immediate cash price if you actually have the cash, but since we’re now forced to purchase insurance (and effectively were forced to before if you had a real job), doing that may as well be setting money on fire every month if you’re not going to file a claim when you require treatment.

            The other obvious issue with the insurance model is it’s not really insurance. Flood insurance works because most of the people paying premiums never need to use it, and when the really expensive disasters happen, the government pays anyway. Everyone has healthcare expenses at some point, and insurance largely works by hoping they’re old enough to be eligible for Medicare by the time those expenses get really big. It’s more of a forced savings plan than insurance, which is probably fine in principle, except for some odd reason we’re forced to contribute to multiple forced savings plans at the same time, one of which can only exist at a profit by stiffing us and the other of which can only exist at all by stiffing doctors.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @Adam: From Jim’s “How to do health care right”:

            The American health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. In America, the health care system is disturbingly expensive, and sucking up alarming and rapidly increasing amounts of taxpayer money. America has the best health care system in the world for the very rich and the very poor, but for those in between, not so good. For the non working and part time working affluent (me) it is woefully bad.

            Because there are no prices in the American health care system, there is no competition, so costs rise to absurd and astronomical heights.

            Stuff that is offered on a fixed price basis, for example dental surgery and laser eye surgery, works well, but almost all health care is offered on the basis of that they will do it, then afterwards make up a price on the basis of political power. For example my family has catastrophic coverage, which means we pay most ordinary medical charges out of our own pocket, but the insurance kicks in when we actually come down with something expensive. My wife was advised to get a colonoscopy. We shopped around, got a reasonable price at a doctor with a good reputation, negotiated with the insurance company, did all the stuff one does in an environment which actually has prices. Then after the colonoscopy was done, the hospital pulled a huge list of stupendously expensive charges out of their ass, most of which were obviously ridiculous or completely made up out of thin air, just trying it on to see what they could get away with, and all of which were charges we had definitely not agreed to, nor consented to in any way, formal or informal, written or unwritten. They just were not used to doing stuff on the basis that one has a definite price, and that the price one charges affects demand for one’s services. The concept seemed alien and incomprehensible to them. Mentally, they were socialists.

          • Nita says:

            @ jaimeastorga2000

            “Socialists” in the last sentence just means “badwrong”, not anything actually socialism-related. Trying to squeeze the maximum possible amount out of the buyer in every transaction (in other words, attempting to achieve “perfect price discrimination”) is clearly a capitalistic, profit-driven strategy.

            But I agree that your health care system is a good illustration of what happens when the free market assumptions don’t approximate reality even at a stretch.

    • noge_sako says:

      Its mostly overblown click-bait that doesn’t really professionally effect you.

      Every single guy I know who was a really good programmer in college who graduated (and also did well at school) got a good programming job.

  13. krstck says:

    As a female* programmer, I’d very much like it if everyone would stop analyzing me and my peers and leave us alone to do our work, goddammit. But any time I bring up my opinion on this, I’m hounded by people telling me to shut up because I’m sooooo privileged to not have experienced rampant sexism or something. But most of the anecdotes I read about how awful it is tend to be people choosing the least-charitable interpretation of some guy being socially awkward.

    Look. Women, in my experience, just aren’t interested in programming. I’m supposed to believe that this is the patriarchy or something, but in my friend-group, all of the people that have the slightest interest in the details of my job are men. And look at the sheer difference in number of PRs in this study by women versus men – 150,000 versus 2.5 million. Go browse recent projects on Github – any language – it’s all going to be men. And there’s nothing stopping any woman from forking an open source project and hacking on it, but *they just aren’t interested*. (Most men aren’t either, but the people who are interested are almost always men.) There aren’t a bunch of lonely female-owned forks sitting around, submitting PR after PR only to be rejected.

    Would I like more women to be interested in programming? Sure, I guess, I don’t really care. My being female doesn’t have the slightest impact on my ability to write code. If any woman wants to code, there’s literally nothing stopping her. In fact, there’s *tons* of resources out there explicitly begging her to learn!

    Again, I just don’t see this rampant sexism that’s keeping all these competent female programmers out of the industry. The female programmers just don’t exist in the first place, and that’s no one’s fault but their own.

    * When did we start saying “woman programmer”? That sounds awful.

    • perpippity says:

      Thank you! I have no problem saying if a woman can code and wants to, her work product should be judged on the same basis as anyone else’s. I have serious problems with “disparate impact as a categorical theory”. Women are capable of lots of stuff. Most just aren’t interested in the same things as men. You are– and more power to you.

      • The Nybbler says:

        > When did we start saying “woman programmer”? That sounds awful.

        Well, at some point, Our Betters (that is, the SJWs) decided that using “female” was some sort of geeky tic that is (wait for it) unwelcoming to women. Comparisons to the Ferengi of Deep Space 9 were brought up to show how awkward the term is.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Terms like “woman doctor” and “woman lawyer” have been around since the Bad Old Days of outright sexism, where this was a necessary qualifier, since “doctor” or “lawyer” per se simply implied “male”.

          There was a similar debate with “woman senator” versus “senatrix”. They went with “woman senator”.

          • Yli says:

            I am now very saddened that ‘Senatrix’ did not become a thing

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Yli:

            Yes, most unfortunate. Aviatrix, too.

            I realized I forgot to include the obvious comparisons:

            “Woman doctor” versus “female doctor”: the latter did not take off until the mid-60s

            “Woman senator” versus “female senator”: same story.

            These may be confounded by “woman” appearing next to “doctor” for other reasons, so pay less attention to the relative frequency and more to the fact that virtually no one said “female doctor” or “female senator” in print before the mid-1960s.

            For additional anecdotal evidence, see the fact that Ayn Rand wrote a (ridiculous) article about why a woman shouldn’t want to be president. The title? “About a Woman President”.

          • brad says:

            The -trix suffix is the best part of will and trust law: testatrix, executrix, and rarely administratrix.

          • BBA says:

            Coining “litigatrix” is one of the finest contributions of AboveTheLaw.com to the English language, along with “benchslap.”

          • Deiseach says:

            Use of the term “woman doctor” from a short story collection published in 1894 (story is “The Doctors of Hoyland” by Arthur Conan Doyle):

            “Verrinder Smith, M.D.,” was printed across it in very neat, small lettering. The last man had had letters half a foot long, with a lamp like a fire-station. Dr. James Ripley noted the difference, and deduced from it that the new-comer might possibly prove a more formidable opponent. He was convinced of it that evening when he came to consult the current medical directory. By it he learned that Dr. Verrinder Smith was the holder of superb degrees, that he had studied with distinction at Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and finally that he had been awarded a gold medal and the Lee Hopkins scholarship for original research, in recognition of an exhaustive inquiry into the functions of the anterior spinal nerve roots. Dr. Ripley passed his fingers through his thin hair in bewilderment as he studied his rival’s record. What on earth would so brilliant a man mean by putting up his plate in a little Hampshire hamlet?

            But Dr. Ripley furnished himself with an explanation to the riddle. No doubt Dr. Verrinder Smith had simply come down there in order to pursue some scientific research in peace and quiet. The plate was up as an address rather than as an invitation to patients. Of course, that must be the true explanation. In that case the presence of this brilliant neighbour would be a splendid thing for his own studies. He had often longed for some kindred mind, some steel on which he might strike his flint. Chance had brought it to him, and he rejoiced exceedingly.

            [Dr Ripley goes to call on his new medical neighbour]

            …Turning round, he found himself facing a little woman, whose plain, palish face was remarkable only for a pair of shrewd, humorous eyes of a blue which had two shades too much green in it. She held a pince-nez in her left hand, and the doctor’s card in her right.

            “How do you do, Dr. Ripley?” said she.

            “How do you do, madam?” returned the visitor. “Your husband is perhaps out’?”

            “I am not married,” said she simply.

            “Oh, but I beg your pardon! I meant the doctor – Dr. Verrinder Smith.”

            “I am Dr. Verrinder Smith.”

            Dr. Ripley was so surprised that he dropped his hat and forgot to pick it up again.

            “What!” he gasped, “the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!”

            He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any Biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed.

          • Anthony says:

            Best in class:

            “Lady Novelist”. So much better than “authoress”.

            When I lived in the Berkeley Coops, one of the house managers gave her title as “House Manageresse”.

          • Maware says:

            Don’t forget asterix, obelix, dogmatix…

        • krstck says:

          > Well, at some point, Our Betters (that is, the SJWs) decided that using “female” was some sort of geeky tic that is (wait for it) unwelcoming to women.

          Like…I *kind* of get that, if someone is using “man” and “female” in the same sentence, as if to highlight their sex *specifically*. But “female programmer” is the correct terminology to distinguish from “male programmer”!

          Is caring about correctness some kind of male-only trait? Maybe that’s why so few women write code. I’m being facetious, but if someone’s feelings are so fragile that “insensitive” terminology is going to cause them to log out of their terminal, shut their text editor, and never write a line of code again….. well, you didn’t care enough about it to be doing it in the first place.

          Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think anyone should be a dick to women on purpose or whatever. I’m just tired of people talking about it! I want people that talk about gender instead of code to feel bad. I don’t want people to feel like they can’t reject my PR because I might cry about Code of Conduct. I don’t want people to wonder if I only have my job because I’m a diversity hire. I’m tired of this idea that my gender means I need my hand-held and I need to be tip-toed around. The only thing that should matter is: do my tests pass?

          • Jason K. says:

            It isn’t going to go away because the core motivations driving the behaviors are intrinsic to the genders and how they interact. It is worse now because these social signalling games used to be largely restrained to one’s circle of acquaintances. With social media and a content starved 24hr news cycle, a story that plays to the narrative we want to see (in these cases, we want to see it because it allows us to play and reaffirm our roles) can spread cross-country with nary any scrutiny and bring intense pressure onto the ‘villain’ of the moment.

        • Svejk says:

          I though it was ‘female-as-a-noun’ that was objectionable, not ‘female-as-an-adjective’? The former does seem to have an inbuilt Ferengi sneer.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            You’re right.

            This whole little subdiscussion is misguided, as I tried to indicate above.

            If anything, “woman x” sounds traditionalist and dismissive of women to me, but that has been the standard usage. As in “woman doctor”. Is it ungrammatical? Not really. No more than “research paper”. English has no strict separation between nouns and adjectives.

          • rockroy mountdefort says:

            feminists object to both, because their objections to “female” are built on the eminently rational basis of “inbuilt Ferengi sneer”

    • jsmith says:

      * When did we start saying “woman programmer”? That sounds awful.

      I don’t know, but it’s poor grammar. Woman is a noun, not an adjective.

      • Liskantope says:

        I’m not sure that it’s grammatically incorrect to stack two nouns like that. Compare to “lion king” or “child prodigy”.

      • Viliam says:

        I am not a native English speaker, but I always felt like in English every noun can be an adjective, or more generally, anything can be anything. You take a noun and ask “is there a specialized adjective form of this word?” — if the answer is yes, then you use the specialized form; if the answer is no, then go ahead and use the noun.

        (Even in the previous paragraph, I used “adjective” twice, once as a noun, once as an adjective. Actually, I was tempted to end it by “…go ahead and adjective the noun” so I would also verb it the third time, but I didn’t feel completely comfortable with that. Perhaps “adjectivize” would be the proper form here?)

    • Anonymous says:

      When did we start saying “woman programmer”? That sounds awful.

      I suspect it’s because “female” continues to have strong connotations of certain common biological features. Whereas “women” have penises, don’t have penises, and everything in between (at least so I have been educated, over and over).

    • Good Burning Plastic says:

      “Woman programmer” sounds like it means someone who programs women to me.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      * When did we start saying “woman programmer”? That sounds awful.

      Hey, at least it wasn’t programmeress 🙂

    • Muga Sofer says:

      I must say, I’ve been surprised by how much more conservative – or at least antifeminist – the women I’ve met in programming courses at college have been. Much more than either the men or women I know from outside colledge.

      I don’t have any hard numbers – or a decent sample size – but anecdotally, women in computing fields seem to be noticeably more conservative than men (who seem to skew conservative/libertarian themselves.) I have absolutely no idea why this would be, but it’s interesting.

      • Liskantope says:

        Because women who are more immersed in left-wing feminism are more likely to receive dire warnings about how hostile the male-dominated environment of programming is?

        One obvious problem with that hypothesis is that it would imply that women in other male-dominated arenas, including math departments, would also be more conservative and/or less feminist, which isn’t consistent with my experience. Still, people in academia seem to be more liberal in general.

      • NN says:

        There seems to be a definite pattern here, since it shows up internationally as well. The countries in the world with the greatest percentage of female science degree holders are, in order: Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Romania, Algeria, Bulgaria… You get the idea. Or at least, that was the case back in 2011 (I’ve heard that the Iranian government has since instituted strict gender quotas in their universities, so their numbers might be different now).

        I would speculate that it might have something to do with people from conservative backgrounds valuing potentially lucrative jobs more than “following your dreams,” but I don’t know enough to say for sure.

        • Sandy Beach says:

          Look up the gender equality paradox. Basically, the more equal a society is, the more it will follow gender norms.

        • Francisco Boni says:

          To the extent that the sex roles of society-at-large affect sex differences in aggression, one would expect smaller sex differences in cultures where boys and girls are socialized more similarly, and larger sex differences in patriarchal in which boys and girls are socialized dissimilarly. Empirically, studies find the EXACT OPPOSITE. Sex differences are largest in progressive sex-role cultures (e.g., Scandinavia) and smallest in more patriarchal cultures (Schmitt, 2014).

          It is also possible that gender roles and socialization practices may, themselves, be evolved mechanisms (see Pirlott & Schmitt, 2014). For example, adaptations in parents may lead to differential socialization of boys and girls; these adaptations may be sensitive to local contexts—such as societies with high levels of warfare socializing boys more than girls to especially tolerate pain.

          To the extent that the sex roles of society-at-large affect sex differences in aggression, one would expect smaller sex differences in cultures where boys and girls are socialized more similarly, and larger sex differences in patriarchal in which boys and girls are socialized dissimilarly. Empirically, studies find the EXACT OPPOSITE. Sex differences are largest in progressive sex-role cultures (e.g., Scandinavia) and smallest in more patriarchal cultures (Schmitt, 2014).

          There are many problems with the “patriarchy” or “it’s just because society doesn’t let girls be as aggressive as boys” explanation of sex differences in aggression. These sex differences demonstrably stem from genetic-developmental experiences (including in utero masculinization), are consistent across species, and are universal across cultures. And to the extent they do vary culturally, sex differences are largest in progressive sex-role cultures (e.g., Scandinavia) and smallest in more patriarchal cultures (Schmitt, 2014). If patriarchy and sex roles are supposed to cause large sex differences in aggression, these social forces aren’t doing a very good job.

          “Mate preferences actually get LARGER (not smaller) in nations with more gendered economic equality. Zentner and Mitura (2012) found sex differences in preferences for physical attractiveness increase from a small effect size (d = 0.24) in lowest gender equity nations to a moderate effect size (d = 0.51)”

          “These large sex differences are especially noteworthy as they emerge from a highly egalitarian nation (Norway) with high paternal investment expectancy, and because they contradict social role theories that predict a diminution of psychological sex differences as gender economic equality increases.”

          http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915003748

    • Error says:

      As a female* programmer, I’d very much like it if everyone would stop analyzing me and my peers and leave us alone to do our work, goddammit

      Do you want to date?

      That’s not entirely rhetorical, but I’d like to know if, in your professional life, you get asked that far more often than you’d like. I’ve always had the secret suspicion that the feminist complaints about insufficiently-feminized tech have less to do with gender politics than sexual politics; an environment filled with too many men they don’t want to date, but so demographically tilted that there aren’t enough No’s in the world. That could easily feel like a hostile environment even if it isn’t.

      Last year I attended a convention panel on the subject. Most of the panelists were women (as a rule I pay much more attention to complaints about the field from women who are actually working in the field). One of them had an interesting anecdote: She was discussing the subject with male coworkers who were also complaining about not enough women in the field. She objected and pointed out a number of them in the office. They sort of grudgingly admitted that those weren’t the kind of women they were talking about. i.e. not young and attractive. Her conclusion: “For some of these people its not about improving the lot of women, it’s about improving their dating pool.”

      And my thought was “Well…duh? I happen to like it when my dating pool is made up of people with shared interests, and that’s more than enough reason to support getting more women into tech. I expect most other people do too.” Beyond that I don’t care, because I don’t really see artificial barriers; it’s not like the manuals and compilers and build tools care about the shape of your genitals. Except that’s not what women (or maybe just feminists?) want to hear — because they don’t want to date you, and they don’t want you thinking about dating them. It’s not enough to have shared goals; one must have shared motives to not Be Evil.

      Of course, I’ve just done exactly the analyzing you’re complaining about, so maybe I should shut up. I’m not actually sure what my point is here, so I guess I’ll close with that.

      • Nita says:

        they don’t want you thinking about dating them

        Seriously? Is that what you got from the story you just passed on?

        Male nerds resent being considered “not really men” (see a couple of bans in the previous thread), female nerds resent being considered “not really women”. I don’t see much of a difference at all.

        Imagine the gender-flipped scenario:

        Nurse Mary: Hey girls, isn’t it terrible that there aren’t any men working with us?
        Nurse George: Uh, that’s not quite true? For instance, I’m a man.
        Nurse Mary: Haha, you know what I mean, George! When I said “men”, I meant hot men.

        It seems like Mary was too busy thinking with her pussy to avoid blatantly insulting a colleague — kind of a bad thing, IMO.

        an environment filled with too many men they don’t want to date

        For me, as someone who still happens to be in the “really a woman” category, the only dating-related problem with guys in tech is that I had to choose just one (he was worth the sacrifice, though) 🙂

        • Error says:

          Seriously? Is that what you got from the story you just passed on?

          In retrospect, posting about a six month old impression of an anecdote that probably didn’t go exactly the way I remember it being described was probably a bad idea. Oh well, can’t edit it now.

          I do remember her complaint was about the motivation rather than about being personally insulted by it, which leads me to suspect the original incident wasn’t quite as blatent as you suggest (or perhaps that the man in question counted her in the ‘hot’ category).

          the only dating-related problem with guys in tech is that I had to choose just one

          I know I’ve internalized local weirdness when I have to read this twice to figure out what you’re talking about. O_o

        • Anonymous says:

          > Male nerds resent being considered “not really men”

          Well, male nerds also sometimes resent being considered men (the whole nerd scrupulosity thing), and female nerds sometimes resent being considered women (e.g. theunitofcaring).

          Nerd scrupulosity was a big part of my decision to transition, and I think it’s fairly common for trans women to have [had] the nerd scrupulosity thing.

          Anyways, I think “they don’t want you thinking about dating them” (at least as a ‘feminist’ thing) is a consequence of circlejerking on places like tumblr.

          • Error says:

            I’m not getting this. How does not wanting to be considered a man follow from nerd scrupulosity?

          • Cord Shirt says:

            I…sort of feel like in an ideal world nerd scrupulosity wouldn’t be a part of anyone’s decision to transition. Like…I guess I…alieve that nerd scrupulosity isn’t or “shouldn’t be” related to gender identification. Do you think I’m wrong?

      • Aap says:

        That could easily feel like a hostile environment even if it isn’t.

        That is a logical consequence of being a small minority, but I’ve actually never seen feminists make that argument. They always seem to claim that the men in these fields are more misogynist than men in more equal fields.

        • Nita says:

          They always seem to claim that the men in these fields are more misogynist than men in more equal fields.

          More like “the culture of these fields is about as misogynist as we expect a culture of a male-dominated field to be”.

          I don’t really agree with that either (I think it’s really heterogeneous, and much better than one would expect from the gender imbalance alone), but I’ve never seen the “nerds are the worst misogynists” complaint that’s frequently referenced around here.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            Nerds are more open about it (or any other “offensive” belief) and/or worse at hiding same. That’s all.

            Earlier feminists generally thought this was a good thing, because if someone’s willing to admit to something, you can argue with them about it. If OTOH the people with a given belief choose to avoid conflict by always hiding it…well then, you can never discuss it with them; you never get the chance to convince them they might be wrong. That’s one reason earlier feminism was pro-nerd. (Another is that Second Wave feminism actually is IMO a movement created by and for female nerds.)

            But as feminism has become more widely accepted, it’s been adopted by many less perceptive, less thoughtful people…who see nerds’ higher rate of “openly expressed sexism/misogyny” and mistake this for a higher rate of *actual* sexism/misogyny.

          • Nita says:

            @ The Nybbler

            Thanks, I took a look at the articles. Here are my impressions:

            (1) The Daily Beast – the author identifies as a nerd, argues that popular media promotes unhealthy attitudes, argues that reactions to Elliot Roger’s killing spree demonstrate these attitudes, says that “we [nerds] all need to grow up”

            (2) The Mary Sue – the author identifies as a nerd, criticizes a movie, argues that “we mistakenly assume that the guy wearing a Green Lantern T-shirt who can recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail in its entirety is harmless”

            (3) Charleston City Paper – the author identifies as a geek, ties his personal experience in the subculture to Elliot Rodger via the fact that he also was “a lonely, bright-ish virgin who retreated into the world of video games”

            (4) New Statesman – quotes a Facebook rant by a comic book artist, also mentions “gamers, comics and sci-fi fans, and even [..] board- and tabletop-gaming enthusiasts”

            (5) Jezebel – based on a reddit discussion, quotes redditors, also mentions gamers

            Sorry to be so contrarian, but literally none of these articles talk about men in tech fields, STEM students, or anything along those lines.

            Plus, 3 out of 5 are in-group criticism, written to caution fellow “nerds” against self-righteousness, and in all cases, the general idea seems to be “sexism in nerd subcultures does exist”, not “nerds are much worse than average”.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I’ve seen the argument made. It even has a name, which I don’t remember. However, the SJ types insist that this means it _really is_ a hostile environment. The logical conclusion is that in an environment where the gender ratio is lopsided in favor of men, the men should never ask the women on a date because that’s harassment. Fortunately not a problem for me, as I am monogamous with a woman in a different profession, but the children of some of my colleagues might have some things to say about such a policy.

      • krstck says:

        Well, I’m married, but even before that I never really received any interest from men. Going along with what @Nita said, female nerds are often considered “not really women” (by all parties involved!) and so our presence and concerns are dismissed. I have gotten a lot of “ok yeah, you’re a girl, but…” but what they really want to say is “you’re not one of THOSE girls”.

        Here’s the thing. Girls that grew up programming are generally not going to be the “hot chicks” that dudes typically want to date. I don’t feel like I have to disclaim “not all girls” to this crowd, but everyone KNOWS what I’m talking about. My husband thinks I have Aspergers, and though I disagree with him on that, I do feel a disconnect in my being able to communicate and relate to other women (and men). Being a “nerd” might be “cool” now, with cutie-girls loudly proclaiming their interest in Comic Books and Star Wars and going to conventions, but that absolutely wasn’t the case in the late 90’s-early 00’s when I was growing up.

        Personally, a lot of the complaining coming from the “women in tech” movement reads like a lot of #humblebrag to me. It’s just so hard to get work done when everyone wants to fuck you all the time, you know? I don’t have that problem, I’ve never had that problem, and my entire adult life I’ve been pretty much surrounded by men. But, you know, my feelings about being a “woman in tech” are irrelevant because I’m not a sexually-attractive woman in tech, which is *really* what everyone is talking about.

        • Error says:

          female nerds are often considered “not really women”

          Somewhat tangential, but: I do get the impression that a lot of the “women are excluded from tech/tech is misogynist” complaints don’t actually come from nerd girls, attractive or otherwise.

          Anyway, thanks for answering. It’s hard to get a handle on what things actually look like on the ground through all the noise.

        • lisa says:

          I think the sort of experience you describe is one that often gets lost in the discussions of sexism and harassment in tech and elsewhere. That can give off the sense that the concerns of feminism, “Women In Tech”, or of female nerds are not about you. I understand feeling that it’s always the shiny golden people who get to tell their story, and like your story is not listened to. It sucks to be treated like an outsider.

          I can relate somewhat to the experience you describe. I’ve been charitably described as “blunt” in how I talk to others. I was terribly nerdy growing up, a skinny, too-pale, glasses-wearing, braces-having, flat-chested geek. I don’t think joining the school server maintainance / AV club won me any points in social status. I am one of the girls you mention who grew up programming.

          Expressing interest in mainstream geek culture like Star Wars is quite unrelated to expressing one’s personal experiences with sexism in tech. Whether or not a woman’s interest in such things comes from an authentic place, I certainly agree that as geek culture has become more mainstream, it has become easier for women (as well as men) to show interest in these things without negative social repercussions. Today’s young women don’t have the same experience as we might have had in the early oughts.

          As a fellow Woman In Tech, however, I have had some bad experiences with unwanted male attention at my job. Talking about being sexually harassed in the workplace isn’t a humblebrag like “oops, teehee, all the boys want me!” It actually really sucks. Being touched without your consent or having one of your seniors offer to tutor you in JS in exchange for sex isn’t flattering or exciting, it is scary and gross – especially when you also have to worry about maintaining a good professional working relationship with your harasser and any other men who might be present. While there may be exceptions, I very, very much doubt that many of the women who discuss their bad experiences as Women In Tech are doing so to boost their ego by bragging about how all the men want them. They are sharing how bad it feels to be treated like your greatest way of contributing to the group is as a sex object. Again, it sucks to be treated like an outsider. The implication that we secretly want it is a pretty dangerous one.

          • Error says:

            Expressing interest in mainstream geek culture like Star Wars is quite unrelated to expressing one’s personal experiences with sexism in tech.

            It may be worth distinguishing here between geek culture (scifi, comics, games, anime) and nerd culture (physics, technology). The former has been mostly mainstreamed, the latter certainly has not; and while the overlap is heavy they’re not identical.

          • Jiro says:

            I think there’s a difference between an interest in a subject, and devoting a certain amount of effort to the subject. Watching Star Wars is mainstream. Writing Star Wars fanfic or making your own Stormtrooper costume isn’t.

          • My bet is that women have very different stories about what it’s like in tech because different companies (and probably divisions and such as well) have different cultures.

            Women aren’t having the same experiences.

      • Adam says:

        I think this discussion, certainly here but on the most of the Internet too, gets dominated by an extremely narrow view of ‘tech’ that basically just means websites and cloud services providers. My wife is a hardware engineer who has worked in defense her entire career, a field with far fewer women than most software and especially web development. But it’s also a field dominated by older men, so no, her complaints have never been about being hit on too much or being viewed as a sex object. It’s more to do with rarely being taken seriously, being talked over all the time, suggesting something and having it ignored only for the exact same suggestion to be enthusiastically adopted when it comes from a man, the general feeling of exclusion that comes from nearly always being the only woman in the room, etc.

        In her particular case, I think there are compounding factors. One, she’s younger than everyone she works with. Two, she’s extremely hard of hearing and very soft spoken and shy because of it and often difficult to hear when she does speak. Still, it pays to remember that not everyone in the world is under 30, and evaluating every person you ever meet as a possible hook-up partner kind of goes away when you get older, at least for most people.

        • Error says:

          It might be an accidental artifact of the term STEM. I know I think of tech as referencing computers and engineering as referencing the sort of thing your wife does, by your description, and to me those feel like very different professions and cultures.

          • Adam says:

            Oh believe me, she’d be perfectly happy with that. She’s an electrical engineer by trade, which sometimes involves coding, but for the most part, her work in the past involved integrated circuit design, not software, and at this point she’s graduated to technical lead on a field-testing team. She can’t stand the job-title creep of how many people these days call themselves ‘engineer’ and would be happy to distinguish between the engineering of physical systems and software systems.

            It’s just weird to me that all the hand-wringing seems to come from web companies, but when you look at numbers from the US BLS, web dev is like 30% female. Mechanical and electrical engineering are hovering at 8-9%. Theoretically, they should have it much worse, but the substance of the actual web company complaints seems to have less the character of being annoyed at a workplace dominated by men so much as being annoyed at a workplace dominated by people in their 20s.

        • Aapje says:

          I think there are compounding factors. One, she’s younger than everyone she works with. Two, she’s extremely hard of hearing and very soft spoken and shy because of it and often difficult to hear when she does speak.

          Don’t you think that these could be the primary reasons and her gender is at most a compounding factor?

          The problem with anecdotal proof is that it’s often very subjective and prone to be forced into a narrative. For example, I had a very similar experience in school as your wife, due to me being very low on the social ladder. If I was a woman, I might have concluded that this was because of my gender. But being a man, I obviously can’t use that narrative.

          • Adam says:

            To be perfectly blunt, I think she just suffers from crippling self-doubt and anxiety. They keep promoting her and giving her raises and she’s the only true engineer working with a bunch of retired pilots. The evidence to me suggests they tremendously value her for that, but she doesn’t see it because she’s a paranoid wreck. For instance, she’s convinced she’s going to lose her security clearance in spite of no criminal record, no credit problems, she passed the first two re-investigations, etc.

            But she’s one person. I didn’t mean to prop her up as an example of industry issues, more to point out that problems with being in a room full of raging hormones aren’t as much of a problem in industries where the average employee isn’t 24, which is fairly unique to web companies.

      • Liskantope says:

        There are two issues to worry about when contemplating skewed gender ratios in the workplace, although they are often conflated. One issue is the possibility that there might be some kind of prejudice behind the gender skew, or really any other mechanism at play other than innate interest or ability which is keeping the minority gender out. The other issue is the effect in and of itself of having less diversity in the workplace. When a man says, “I wish there were more women in the office”, in most contexts he’s probably referring to the second issue and not expressing his opinion on the first one at all.

        An overly simplistic way to look at dating dynamics when a work environment is heavily male dominated is that it’s bad for the men because they have a harder time finding someone there to date, and it’s bad for women because they have to fend off a lot more unwanted advances. This is magnified by the dating dynamic in society-at-large, where single men tend to have a harder time getting dates and single women tend to have a harder time staying single. I remember seeing a metaphor for this on Reddit where men are dying of thirst and women are drowning. Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that men and women are symmetrically disadvantaged in this situation (though when you take each particular disadvantage to its potential extreme, this symmetry becomes dubious). It also seems fair to say that in identifying the downsides of having a skewed gender ratio in the workplace, this is a major factor at least for single employees (assuming most single men are open to dating their coworkers), although it’s far from the only downside to lack of diversity.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      Are you familiar with Megan McArdle’s old piece on same-sex marriage? (Disclaimer: I’ve supported same-sex marriage since I read Andrew Sullivan’s “Here Comes the Groom” in The New Republic in 1989. But McArdle gave a good argument for caution.)

      She mentioned the economics concept of “the marginal case”:

      Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. “That’s ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!” This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can’t justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he’s only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity….

      Marriage…looked, to those extremely smart and well-meaning welfare reformers, practically unshakeable; the idea that it could be undone by something as simple as enabling women to have children without husbands, seemed ludicrous. Its cultural underpinnings were far too firm. Why would a woman choose such a hard road? It seemed self-evident that the only unwed mothers claiming benefits would be the ones pushed there by terrible circumstance.

      This argument is compelling and logical. I would never become an unwed welfare mother, even if benefits were a great deal higher than they are now. It seems crazy to even suggest that one would bear a child out of wedlock for $567 a month. Indeed, to this day, I find the reformist side much more persuasive than the conservative side, except for one thing, which is that the conservatives turned out to be right. In fact, they turned out to be even more right than they suspected; they were predicting upticks in illegitimacy that were much more modest than what actually occurred–they expected marriage rates to suffer, not collapse.

      How did people go so badly wrong? Well, to start with, they fell into the basic fallacy that economists are so well acquainted with: they thought about themselves instead of the marginal case.

      You’re apparently not the marginal case.

      I am. I was a high-IQ kid with lots of interests, one of which was programming. One of the reasons I dropped that interest was because I didn’t find the culture congenial.

      I almost did. (Which means this was a more painful experience than if the culture had been “just an overall bad fit.”) It was actually quite a good fit in most ways. It was a better fit than “the general surrounding culture” in many ways. But.

      But there was a subtle sexism / male-oriented-ness. This is often tolerable (though still off-putting) as an adult, but as an adolescent, I decided it was more than I wanted to put up with…and that’s part of the problem: Even if I picked up the interest again now, I skipped developing it in adolescence–exactly the time when it’s most important to develop one’s talents–and I did so because of the male-oriented culture. I’m not the only one.

      (I agree that part of the problem is “uncharitable interpretations of men being awkward”–but that’s partly because most people tend to typical-mind and underestimate inferential distance, especially in adolescence. Another part of the problem is “uncharitable interpretations of teenage girls being awkward”…for the same reason.)

      SJWs want the problem to be simple and easy to solve, so they rant at male nerds as if they could “just” easily change their behavior. In fact this is a *subtle* problem that’s *difficult* to solve. Not least because the very way in which the culture is “male-oriented”/”sexist” is itself very subtle and difficult to quickly explain. Deborah Tannen in the ’90s did a good job. Her explanations are books. Because a book is what it takes. (Example: Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, 1994.)

      Anyway…both adolescents in general, and high-IQ individuals in general, tend to be sensitive; put the two together and you get *extreme* sensitivity. And sensitive high-IQ adolescents, who really would’ve enjoyed the field and been good at it, *are* getting put off for reasons unrelated to their competence.

      One possible reaction to that situation is, “Well, that often happens, to many people considering many fields. So oh well.” Another possible reaction is to want to change it. Yet another is to agree that it’s bad while still being unsure anything we could do *would* change it.

      I agree that it does often happen. I dislike it ever happening, because I prefer for people to enter the fields they would enjoy and be good at. I also reserve the right to focus my attention in this matter especially on the field(s) that *I too would enjoy* and that people *like younger!me* are getting put off of.

      But as a non-SJW, I agree with you in that I don’t know if there’s a solution.

      The traditional feminist solution was, “Just convince men-in-general to better empathize with women-in-general.” That solution assumed that intention to empathize was all that was necessary for understanding (because it also assumed no gender differences existed), and hence that this task would be easy.

      Neither of which has turned out to be the case, it seems. So if we update that solution, it would now be, “Accomplish the difficult task of teaching men-in-general to better understand women-in-general[, so that if they want to, they know how to change their culture in ways that will actually help].” (Or for female-dominated professions, “…of teaching women-in-general to better understand men-in-general.”)

      …when it comes to the issue of *adolescents* being put off from entering a field, that might be somewhat doable. After all, it is the job of the adults in a field to try to understand and support adolescents considering entering it. (Isn’t it?)

      Perhaps we could also help “teen-girls-in-general” better understand “teen-boys-in-general” and vice versa…though that is much more difficult, as members of each group tend to (mis)interpret the others’ preferences through the lens of their own and then be horrified, and again, adolescents tend to be especially sensitive and prone to typical-minding. (See: Redpill. And the old rec.arts.sf.* thread Mark Atwood mentioned. Even adults are horrified; adolescents are worse.)

      …whatever. I care about the issue, is my point. :/

      • Nadja says:

        Fascinating. I agree with the point you made in your previous comment about not declaring victory too early. I was just about to respond with: well, but then what do we do about it? What would be the productive way of approaching the slight sexism that might exist? Isn’t the current feminist approach doing more harm than good? (As suggested by many others here, including Garret M. Petersen, Kendall, and the Nybbler.) But after reading your current comment, I see that’s a question you’re raising yourself: “But as a non-SJW, I agree with you in that I don’t know if there is a solution.” I was also going to emphasize that I very much care about young girls making good career choices for themselves. And then you said exactly that.

        I’ve listened to talks by many women who were successful in their technology careers. They all (I’m not exaggerating) had one thing in common. When asked the obligatory question about how it was for them to be a woman in technology, they didn’t have much to say. They were often apologetic about it. They knew they were “supposed to” care and have an opinion. But they just never paid enough attention to how their gender affected their career. What if this sort of approach makes success easier? Maybe if sexism is so subtle that one can’t quite put a finger on it, then the best thing is for an individual to fight back the way you’d fight back any other sort of bullying/mistreatment. Stand up for yourself. Keep doing good work. Keep learning. People are always going to pick on others. I don’t think “nerdy” guys have it any better than women.

        I really like your point about marginal cases. I’m very curious to learn more about your specific marginal case. Where did you grow up? What was it about the tech culture that turned you off? What did you end up doing instead?

        My story is very different from yours, but there are some parallels, so I’d be curious to compare notes.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          But they just never paid enough attention to how their gender affected their career. What if this sort of approach makes success easier?

          Yes, Barbara Kerr came to a similar conclusion in Smart Girls, Gifted Women. (This was a multiple case study that started out focusing on the women who’d been in her Sputnik-era gifted program, and then expanded to, IIRC, National Merit Finalists and so on.)

          But…people differ in personality and “social perception,” such that some people will find this much easier than others.

          Also, “It’s all in your head / you’re just oversensitive” is a favorite bullying technique.

          *Also*, a group of children selected for high IQ is likely to have a higher percentage of members who are “good targets” for that kind of bullying. This shows up in the research on such children–when bullied they often object more to the idea that “any human could treat another human that way,” than to the pain of physical attacks or insults directed at them personally.

          IOW, the issue of “standing up to bullies” is much more complex for some high-IQ kids than it might appear on the surface. Or than it *is* for most typical kids. As described here:

          Ten-year-old Greg Barnes was acknowledged by school personnel as highly gifted. His scholastic achievement test scores placed him in the 99.9th percentile, as did his score on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. On this particular day, when he returned home from school, Mrs. Barnes knew immediately from his despondent expression that the day had been less than ideal.

          “Something wrong?” she probed gently.

          “Yeah,” he said in a tone of thorough disgust, “I got into trouble. We’ll have to see the principal tomorrow.”

          “What for?”

          “I got into a fight with Joe and beat him up.”

          Mrs. Barnes was shocked. Greg was not an aggressive child. He had never reported such an incident before. In fact, he was an extraordinarily sensitive boy who genuinely cared about other people.

          “What happened?” she inquired further.

          Greg explained that he and Joe had exchanged insults during music class. Both boys, Greg insisted, were at fault. Later, Joe had cornered Greg by the lockers, taunting him, threatening to beat him up, and egging Greg on to fight. Greg responded by punching Joe, who punched Greg back. When the teacher came onto the scene, Joe was crying while Greg continued to rain punches upon him.

          “Well, it sounds like you stood up for yourself…” began Mrs. Barnes. She was surprised at Greg’s immediate and heated denial.

          “No, Mom – it wasn’t that simple.”

          “But wasn’t he threatening to beat you up?”

          “No, Mom! You don’t understand!”

          Greg was getting visibly more upset as Mrs. Barnes attempted to convey that she was not being judgmental. Unable to comprehend why her efforts to convey caring and understanding were being met with mounting frustration, Mrs. Barnes decided to defuse the issue.

          “OK. Why don’t you write down what happened and explain how you feel about it. Obviously you were there and you know why it happened better than I do.”

          Greg willingly took a seat at the typewriter and laboriously typed out his story and explanation. An hour and a half later, he handed the pages to his mother: “It all began in third grade…” started the first paragraph. Greg went on to describe in careful detail how he and Joe had met and embarked upon a rocky friendship. At certain times, Joe seemed to want to be friends. At other times, Joe refused to allow Greg to participate in ongoing playground activities. Greg admitted to sometimes levelling “insults” at Joe in retaliation for these playground rejections.

          Greg listed incidents from 3rd and 4th grades as well as the 5th grade incident that precipitated the immediate problem. For each incident, he detailed each child’s behaviours with painful accuracy in an effort to render an objective view of what had happened. Greg’s outburst was, according to him, not only a response to the day’s happenings, but a reaction to the entire pattern of incidents composing their relationship over the past two years. The argument of the day was simply “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

          The next day, Joe, too, wrote out his version of the fight. He wrote simply, “Greg hit me and then I hit him back and he kept hitting me.”

          Greg and Joe had participated in the same fight. Yet, Greg was fighting over a broader and more complex issue than was Joe.

          This is the type of thing that it’s common to write off as “oversensitivity,” but labeling it that doesn’t lead to any reliable methods of addressing it.

          Morelock points out that such children have “an emotionally infused need to understand the truth of their situation and to communicate that truth to others…. They live life by analysing it step by step while emotionally responding to that analysis.” That…really seems like the same thing that’s driving their high intellectual achievement and desire to share their discoveries with others. If so, it’s something we should allow them to keep.

          Morelock’s suggestion:

          “Greg must be helped to see, of course, that others do not always perceive experiences with such detailed clarity or infused with such emotional intensity and significance especially other children his age. Nevertheless, this should not be conveyed as a defect on his part, such as “oversensitivity” or a tendency to “carry a grudge.” Rather, he needs first to have his view of reality validated, and second, to be helped to find ways of building bridges with other children and not faulting them because of their differing level of awareness…. At the same time, children like Joe need to be made aware of the role they play in instigating unnecessary ill feelings.”

          …strikes me as more likely to actually work. But that technique isn’t something I’ve personally experienced.

          So, back to your point…my friends (some of whom have Asperger’s) and I have kicked around the idea that Asperger’s might sometimes be more of a help than a hindrance for a high-IQ person. Might keep you from even noticing some of the subtle social stuff. As Meredith Patterson described. (But probably only for a specific, mild, degree of Asperger’s–and Asperger’s comes with other problems.)

          More in another comment.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          I’m very curious to learn more about your specific marginal case. Where did you grow up? […] What did you end up doing instead?

          First of all, what about you? Where did you grow up, and what’s your story?

          Anyway, to answer your questions…I keep trying to summarize quickly, and it keeps…turning out long. Sorry about that.

          I grew up in Yankeedom, USA and attended non religious, “progressive-ish” private schools. (Where, as I said on the other thread, I never learned any academic competitions existed. Maybe competition was too “square” for my schools.) I took the Actual Real MBTI as part of a study I was in :waves to Universal Set: and came out as INTJ (but I think INTP fits better).

          I liked playing around with computers from the time my parents first got one when I was a preteen. Wrote a bunch of stuff in ROM BASIC (it’s what I had)–so I couldn’t save anything, always had to print it out and then type it in again when I came back later. Learned about hardware from reading PC Magazine–it’s what I had access to (I didn’t know BBSes existed, and we didn’t have a modem then anyway). Started homebuilding my own desktops as soon as I could.

          After I got online as a teen (in the gopher era), I…basically just the usual: spent all night downloading Linux onto dozens of floppy disks, spent years trying to make Wine work (for games), had one computer with an uptime measured in years…etc. I wrote a fair number of little fixes and tools for myself, but for myself they stayed. It never really occurred to me to even *try to figure out* how to share them with others, let alone to actually do it. At that stage, I think the reason for this was mostly my school experiences–I had learned very thoroughly that I was a CHILD, and children are NOTHING, and WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO EVEN TRY TO TALK WITH AN ADULT–etc.

          (Another aspect, though, was…”perfectionism” is the wrong word. I’d call it, “That thing where smart girls are held to a higher standard of i-dotting and t-crossing than smart boys are.” It’s like the book I once read for novelists, about character archetypes, which listed two archetypes of a smart man–“anal scientist” and “absent-minded professor”–but only one archetype of a smart woman: “anal librarian.” An absent-minded *woman* is just an “airhead”; a *smart* girl is expected to also be tidy/polished. If there *is* an elementary-school “leak in the pipeline” as Scott has hypothesized…then this might be one of the contributors. Because IMO the standard of “polish” to which smart little girls are often held is high enough to create habits that discourage sharing. If you have two equally-lazy youths, who both just kludge together an ugly fix…the guy is more likely to go ahead and share it; the girl is more likely to…not even have it occur to her that she could, because “*of course* anything you actually *share* needs to be more polished than that.” KWIM? Or is it different where you’re from?)

          I went to boarding prep school for 9th grade, which experience taught everyone involved that I really belonged in college, so the next year that’s where I went. There and online, I encountered geek/hacker and physics cultures…with aspects I ultimately decided I’d rather not put up with (more on that below).

          This didn’t convince me to give up my interests immediately; it only meant I continued them in isolation instead of trying to interact with most of the others who seemed to share them. Flaw in this plan: When I did meet someone I wanted to befriend and even date…well, we all know what “the group’s” opinion tends to be of someone who “was brought there by her boyfriend.” It often doesn’t occur to people that maybe one of the reasons she’s dating their friend is *because he shares her interests*. Yes, some of these “girlfriends” may be annoyingly “closeted” geeks, coming into the group after having been reluctant to give up their higher status; but others will be more like I was, coming in from…complete isolation.

          It’s around this point (age 17 or so) that I started focusing more on other interests. (So come to think of it, I guess I didn’t give up quite as young as I half-remembered above!) I left college one semester short of a degree and started a couple small businesses. (Years later I went back to pick up those last few credits so as to have A Degree Any Degree in case I ever need it.) My businesses are in fields I don’t have much natural interest in, but…one of them I could enter easily (I don’t envy the men in that one. Do try to support them though), the other I considered necessary/important despite not initially enjoying it. I’ve found things to enjoy about these fields; I’ve even, rather oddly for an INTwhatever, learned to enjoy the fact that the items I create/develop make my customers happy. These days the only vaguely coding-related thing I do is the occasional Sims mod. (Which I don’t share. I’m too lazy to make them “minimally polished enough” to “deserve sharing.”)

          You could say I fit Barbara Kerr’s claim that high-IQ women often don’t “achieve on paper” because they’re “too well-adjusted”: I’ve adjusted to the world in which I happen to be, learned to enjoy things my personality didn’t initially pull me toward, etc. (Which is kinda sad considering that when I first read her work, I was sure I never would.)

          What was it about the tech culture that turned you off?

          I already mentioned a minor roadblock I encountered on the hobby end of things. And, again, Deborah Tannen’s Talking from 9 to 5 described in detail a lot of the issues I saw.

          To describe the general issue concisely, I’m going to have to oversimplify to an extreme, offensive degree–so please keep in mind the following *is* an *extreme* oversimplification:

          The culture had been created by and for (mostly straight) men, including the aspects of maleness that women often (a) don’t know about, (b) don’t understand, and (c) especially in adolescence tend to be horrified to discover. The culture just had that stuff all hanging out there–that was off-putting aspect #1.

          Off-putting aspect #2 was that since the culture was created by and for men, its traditions and usages treated the subject–“you,” the member of the culture–as a man with (straight-)male-typical sexual proclivities and assumptions and perceptions. IOW, from the teen girl POV, this “horrifying” attitude isn’t just something you discover exists, it’s also something you too are being assumed to hold.

          And so–off-putting aspect #3–though women did appear in the culture, it was as (sorry to use the old term but) objects rather than subjects. “Foreign creatures” rather than “you.” (nb: To summarize it as “foreign creatures” is an extreme oversimplification, but it’s the only way to keep the sentence short enough not to distract from the larger point.)

          All three of these aspects show up in, for example, the vignette in Reviving Ophelia where the physics teacher begins an explanation with (paraphrase since I’m too lazy to look it up), “So, imagine you’re speeding in this cool car with this hot girl and…”

          “Cheesecake lying around all over the place” was another manifestation, of course.

          I think it’s maybe similar to the complaints men often voice about romance novels. I think many teenaged boys might have to love an interest much more than “the equivalent” teenaged girl would in order for the boy to be willing to continue with the interest if its culture was “like living in a romance novel.”

          (And, yes, this would be a problem with *any* mostly-male culture, *not* just tech. Tech is not “worse” IMO.)

          BTW, a problem with pointing out this type of issue to members of another group that doesn’t have it: There’s a human tendency to go, “I don’t have this issue” -> “Having this issue seems really weird” -> “Having this issue means you’re weak” -> “OtherGroup is weak.” No, this is one specific issue and that’s all it is. There’s not just one single axis of sensitivity, and wanting consideration on a single issue doesn’t make someone *generally* “weak” or “oversensitive.” If I could have *one* way in which members of a SomeGroup-dominated culture could be asked to pull up their socks and try to overcome their natural human flaws, it would be this one: I’d have them overcome the natural tendency to overgeneralize “We’ve been asked to be sensitive on this *one* issue” to “OtherGroup is a bunch of weaklings and we need to treat them with kid gloves about *everything*.”

          …uh, [/soapbox]

          There were other issues…but it’s late, and I’m tired. Sorry to repeat myself again but Deborah Tannen did a good job describing them. I’ll just say that in a way, more direct issues, “deliberate ‘attacks'” or etc., were easier for me to deal with than this subtle “male-oriented-ness.” (Also why I like nerds: Nerds tend to be direct–so if there’s a problem, you can actually address it. Except on this one issue, unfortunately.)

          Reading Meredith Patterson’s other essay touching on this topic makes me both nostalgic and sad. Yes, I recognize that culture; yes, in many ways it fits my instincts, my natural personality, better than any other…except. Except for the things above that I decided I’d rather not deal with. Having left that culture behind (somewhat. I mean, here we are on the periphery of it), having found other things to enjoy and to support myself with, other people to exchange ideas with and fit in with…has changed me, and in some ways the change has been away from my natural personality. Well, that’s life, I guess.

          BTW. Today my first seeds of the year came up. Future stock of starts: growing. 🙂 …and now I’m remembering a certain “Lone Gunmen” flashback episode. Kid!me had similar ideas to kid!Langly; today, I grow things. I suppose many people here are still with Langly 100%; I’m…not so sure. There’s good and bad in both.

          Sorry again for the length.

          What’s your story?

          • Nadja says:

            @ Cord Shirt

            I have just ordered “Smart Girls, Gifted Women”. Darn, no Kindle version! I’m not very good at finishing paper books these days. But, I also got “Talking from 9 to 5”, which – thankfully – is available in audiobook!

            I really like your discussion of bullying. I realized that what I wrote came out wrong. Whereas I think it’s reasonable to expect adults to learn how to deal with jerks (not in all environments, but definitely in most white-collar office environments), I would never, ever, ever tell a child to “just stand up for themselves.” I’m very grateful for researchers who are trying to figure out how to help bullied kids. Unfortunately, for many, learning these techniques is a necessity. At the same time, I strongly disagree with people who say “kids *need to* learn how to deal with bullies in school, because, well, one has to deal with bullies later in life, too.” An adult has more freedom, and all sorts of resources and strengths a child doesn’t have. There’s just no comparison.

            See, I’m glad I asked about your background. Your story shows me that I really just have no idea. First of all, everyone really is different. Secondly, there does seem to be something weird/wrong about the culture in the US in terms of how it affects adolescent girls. And, finally, wow, see, initially I was going to tell you: “hey, it’s not too late to become a programmer; in fact, I can help you get started, if you’re interested.” But now I think that this wouldn’t be something you’d be interested in. Given that you are incredibly gifted, what you may have missed out on because of the male-centeredness problem is not just the opportunity to be some programmer somewhere. Instead, you may have actually missed out on becoming one of those tech people who build companies, who create amazing products, and who shape the world. I now understand so much better where you’re coming from.

            But, I am really happy to learn that you’ve been able to build your own businesses anyway. It seems like you did very well for yourself. I don’t know enough to see why you’d think of yourself as not having achieved enough on paper, but – hey – is it ever too late to achieve more? =)

            Some other stuff in your comments: the point about girls and the sharing of polished products rang very true to me. I had to get over this sort of attitude myself. It’s probably still holding me back a bit. I’d never thought of it as a “girl” thing, but I can see that it very well may be.

            “Reviving Ophelia” – another book I haven’t read. =) But I think I get the point. I looked through it on Google books just now. It mentions, among other things, that girls often suffer from a lack of female role models. Come to think of it, most of my childhood role models were men, but I was fortunate in that it never bothered me. All the books I loved as a child had male heroes. My best friends were guys. I was on a math/science track in high school, so most of my classmates were guys, too. And it never felt strange. I never felt different. It was all just so natural. But then… Then, I came to study at an American university, and things stopped being easy. I talked to guys, the way I was used to talking to guys, and it wasn’t working any more. Now they all thought I was hitting on them! Some actually told me they could never be close friends with a girl! (Fortunately, I was able to find a really cool, reaaaally smart girl to be best friends with.) So, anyway, that shift: was it because we were all older or because there *is* something about American culture that makes women into “foreign creatures” in the eyes of men?

            And while we’re on American culture, quite unrelatedly, this whole jocks versus nerds thing… Really? In my high school, if you wanted to be cool, you wore black sweaters, worked on math puzzles on paper napkins, and carried a copy of “The Drunken Boat” under your arm. Ahh, I miss high school. We were all such posers. (If you’ve seen “To Rome with Love”, think the Ellen Page character.)

            Anyway, it’s getting late. I’m going to be looking out for your comments around here on SSC. I’m looking forward to chatting more. That is, of course, unless the reign of terror gets us first. =)

          • NN says:

            Since we’re trading anecdotes, it’s probably worth bringing up that my mother is a computer programmer. It wasn’t her first choice; she wanted to be a veterinarian but switched majors when, in her words, she realized that she would have to spend years studying creepy crawly animals before getting to the cute ones. So at least one “marginal case” woman was pushed into the tech industry by external factors. But then the tech industry was different in all kinds of ways back in the early 1980s when she started working in the field. Wikipedia says that in in 1984 37.1% of Computer Science degrees from American colleges were awarded to women, which is probably why my mother has never once suggested that there was anything unusual about her ending up in the tech industry.

            I think it’s maybe similar to the complaints men often voice about romance novels. I think many teenaged boys might have to love an interest much more than “the equivalent” teenaged girl would in order for the boy to be willing to continue with the interest if its culture was “like living in a romance novel.”

            Having spent an awful lot of time around fan fiction communities (particularly Livejournal fan fiction communities back when people still used Livejournal), I can’t help but notice that practically all of the “male dominated” aspects of tech culture that you mention are present in a gender-flipped form to a much greater degree in the female dominated aspects of fan fiction culture. Yet, as far as I can tell, what we generally see is not males being driven away from being interested in fan fiction entirely. Instead we generally see them forming their own fan fiction communities (usually significantly smaller and less productive than the female dominated ones, but they exist) that cater more to, for lack of a better term, male-typical tastes.

            We see this most famously with the Bronies, but HPMOR also sort of counts. For whatever reason Eliezer wasn’t driven away from Harry Potter fan fiction by the gigantic amount of Harry Potter slash fiction and artwork floating around the internet, nor by the fact that most fan fiction communities assume (not without some justification) that everyone involved is female, to the point that one LJ fan fiction community I came across back in the day was formatted to display each post’s comment count as “X fangirls” instead of “X comments.”

            Obviously, fan fiction has a far lower barrier to entry than programming/hacking, so this may not be the best comparison, but I still think it’s worth looking into.

            The infamously poor quality of many works of fan fiction would also seem to be a data point against your theory that “don’t share your work until it’s really, really polished” is a typical female trait.

      • NN says:

        You have a point about marginal cases, but the question then becomes why didn’t a similar effect keep women out of medicine, biology, psychology, much of the humanities, and other male dominated fields which rapidly achieved gender parity or even female dominance over the past few decades? I have a really hard time imagining that medicine has a more “female friendly” (or friendly-to-anyone-at-all) climate than computer programming.

        I don’t doubt that various forms of bias and sexism exist, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that they are major drivers of gender disparities (at least when it comes to driving adolescents and adults out of the field; I’m still open to ideas about early childhood socialization).

        Especially given that the gender gap in computer science has actually greatly increased over the last few decades:

        In the United States, the proportion of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that fewer than 12% of Computer Science bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women at U.S. PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

        If sexism is to blame for the programming gender gap, then someone has to explain why programming culture became far more sexist over a period of time when the rest of society was becoming less sexist.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          I didn’t say it’s “a major driver of gender disparities.” I said it’s a thing that happens that I’d like to reduce the frequency of.

          I suspect that a sincere but mistaken belief that this problem was *the* “major driver of gender [and racial] disparities” is what inspired policies like affirmative action which have not worked as well as people expected them to, and which have also had unexpected negative effects.

          It’s tempting to respond to those negative effects by denying that this situation even happens at all. I’m just saying it does.

          To put it another way: I did not go around demanding that hackers change their culture for my sake. Instead, I quietly left. These days, OTOH, we have a situation where some women (at least some of whom may actually be interested in STEM) loudly demand that “nerdy men” change for their sake. And we have some nerdy men resenting that and saying or wanting to say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” My point is just that if you say “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”…some will, in fact, get out of the kitchen. And that’s not always because of simple lack of talent and/or interest; sometimes, it’s because of “nothing more than” culture clash.

          As to why it’s played out differently in different fields: I’d say it’s because each field had its own culture and its own personality type that was most attracted to it. Some fields had a culture that more women found congenial, and some fields tended to attract personality types that were common enough among women to form a critical mass who then influenced the culture. Other fields did not.

          BTW…don’t assume that having made this mental connection means I somehow agree with this author on everything but…the 1915 novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman also expressed the opinion that different male professional cultures were more or less…welcoming…to women. Her three male characters are a sociologist (the narrator), an engineer (the “worst” according to her), and a man who was “born to be a poet or a botanist” but his family convinced him to be a doctor and who loved (biological) science (the “best” according to her). Interesting how she seems to have accurately predicted that smart women would find literature, biology and medicine more welcoming, and engineering less so.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ Cord Shirt
        Not least because the very way in which the culture is “male-oriented”/”sexist” is itself very subtle and difficult to quickly explain. Deborah Tannen in the ’90s did a good job. Her explanations are books. Because a book is what it takes. (Example: Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, 1994.)

        Suzette Hayden Elgin’s books were around that same time, and also very good, with some methods individuals can use to deal with this (or to use ‘verbal self-defense’ in general).

  14. perpippity says:

    “Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale.”

    Feminism is so NOT “merely the belief” yada yada yada. In terms of Louis C.K.’s shtick about boys and girls (below), feminism is the project to make people believe that there aren’t any bodies buried at all, and that the only harm out there is the nasty hurricane of harm caused by boys. Feminism is a mean-girls clique, a deranged lynch mob out after your emotions, society gone rancid. It’s very Soviet in terms of the nasty mental and emotional shit that goes on.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTrCBcrFMCI

    • Dahlen says:

      Feminism is a mean-girls clique, a deranged lynch mob out after your emotions, society gone rancid. It’s very Soviet in terms of the nasty mental and emotional shit that goes on.

      Can we please not have a two minutes hate on every one of these articles?…

      Piggybacking on a discussion in the latest open thread:

      It would be interesting to have more serious feminists/social justice people and/or Noam Chomsky socialist-anarchist types; I’m not sure what one could do to attract them.

      Well. I wonder what.

      Don’t get me wrong, what’s happening with science journalism downstream from the actual study is unmistakeably shitty and in no way novel, and I’ll grant that it’s because of feminism that this is the new direction in which the headlines are sensationalised, but there’s a strong case to be made that we haven’t hit the pinnacle of gender harmony a decade or several ago and that there are still changes that could roughly be considered “feminist” to be made that would help rather than hinder society (even if they’re not likely to come from feminists of the SJW persuasion). In case you find that statement highly objectionable, on top of all that, this community is, however reluctantly, adjacent to a blogosphere that literally collects all the most patriarchal aspects of all historical societies ever into one big idea system of misogyny on steroids, and what they consider feminism is anything onwards from the 19th century. In the light of that fact, maybe it wouldn’t be wise to contribute to conditioning in the reader an aversive reaction to the word ‘feminism’ and anything it could stand for?

      There’s a baby in that bathwater, that’s all I’m saying.

      • The Nybbler says:

        > In case you find that statement highly objectionable, on top of all that, this community is, however reluctantly, adjacent to a blogosphere that literally collects all the most patriarchal aspects of all historical societies ever into one big idea system of misogyny on steroids

        Really, guilt by association? I’m not sure what “adjacent” means in this context, but I think most measures of “adjacent” which would put SSC adjacent to them would also put it adjacent to the SJW blogosphere. Neither “adjacency” imposes any duty on SSC’s commentariat, or on Scott for that matter.

        As for feminism, I’m afraid the baby may have drowned. I’d like to see the name reclaimed by non-SJWs, but it doesn’t seem likely.

      • Zorgon says:

        You had my fervent agreement right up until this bit:

        >this community is, however reluctantly, adjacent to a blogosphere that literally collects all the most patriarchal aspects of all historical societies ever into one big idea system of misogyny on steroids

        Is this the standard now? “Adjacent”? BRILLIANT! I can get on with pointing out how feministing and Alas and all that lot are adjacent to Stormfront.

      • The Smoke says:

        I have my aversion to feminism to the most part from reading feminist blogs / media. There is of course the really bad stuff, which is still pretty much socially accepted, and then there are a lot of more moderate feminists.
        What I find interesting about the latter is that most of them are thoughtful and intelligent persons EXCEPT that when talking about gender they regard ‘feminist theory’ as facts and based on that sometimes even feel justified to express really sexist views themselves (E.g. Cathy O’Neil, Piper Harron, I don’t know how to hyperlink, else I would be more specific).

        Pointing out specific problems without drawing overblown conclusions, as done here, actually helps everyone getting a better understanding. In particular the civil tone in the comments here helps (me) getting a more nuanced grasp on what exactly my problems with feminism are, and so being less angry at feminists in general.

      • Dahlen says:

        @ The Nybbler and Zorgon:

        Whoa. Chill. What I meant by “adjacent” was that Jim, Heartiste et al are a few (< 5) links away from the SSC blogroll and the pool from which commenters are drawn includes a handful who also comment over there, which means said idea system is not some distant nemesis but something that occasionally leaves traces here.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      I’m pretty sure this violates the comment policy.

      It’s definitely unnecessarily rude, regardless. You’re well aware that there are self-identified feminists here and that your description is incredibly unfair to them.

      • perpippity says:

        I’m well aware that there are self-identified feminists here, but I don’t care whether their feelings are hurt. What they need to do is not care what I think.

    • Feminism is literally millions of people, many of whom have no idea what others are doing and saying under the banner of feminism.

      I challenge the idea that we can sum up feminism any more easily than we can sum up Christianity.

      • John Schilling says:

        Is it even possible in this media-saturated age to “have no idea” that lots of feminists are conducting and promoting dubious studies to prove the pervasiveness of sexist discrimination by privileged men who need to be put in their place?

        Meh. If Christianity were a million Crusaders slaughtering the Infidel at the Pope’s command, and a billion people who showed up at church for an hour every Sunday to proclaim a “religion of peace” and obliviously ask, “What’s a Crusade?”, I’d have no trouble summing up Christianity as a religion of murderers and idiots. I can hope that we might find a more charitable description of feminism, but it won’t come from the supposed ignorance of the majority of feminists.

        • Nita says:

          Is it even possible in this media-saturated age to “have no idea” that lots of feminists are conducting and promoting dubious studies

          Yes, absolutely. Most people can’t tell a dubious study from a good study, or, for that matter, from vaguely scientific-sounding crackpottery. That doesn’t make them “idiots”, just uneducated and confused.

          And the ongoing comparisons between posting social criticism online and killing people (“lynch mob”, “slaughtering the Infidel”) are unhelpful, no matter how misguided the criticism might be.

        • Anonymous says:

          Well, Christianity has the advantage of having an unchanging source document, and an official hierarchy of priests interpreting the rules, which helps to keep everyone not living in a cave on the same page. Feminism has neither, it is just a collection of roughly adjacent ideological points that nobody has any control over.

          • John Schilling says:

            Christianity’s source document has very little to do with how Christianity is actually practiced.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Eh, yes and no. Practice and doctrine can certainly diverge a lot, but the existence of authoritative documents definitely places some bounds on that. Without a Bible to fall back on, the Reformation plays out very differently, if it happens at all.

          • perpippity says:

            Good points!

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      “Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale.”

      This 1970s Feminist wishes that people would not identify ‘feminism’ with any kind of SJW stuff. (Particularly SJW-style retreat to a trivial motte like “the belief that women are people”.)

      Here’s my definition of ‘feminist’ (in a useful zone between trivial motte and the far edge of bailey). “Important practical goals of us 1970s feminists aren’t yet done, and are high priority.”

      • John Schilling says:

        Could you elaborate on the goals that were important and practical in the 1970s and have not been substantially achieved in the 2010s?

        • Adam says:

          Paid family leave seems like the most obvious. Also the general sense (that may or may not be accurate, but is definitely there) that reproductive rights gains are fragile and could disappear any minute if they stop fighting.

          Plus, there are at least a few feminists who legitimately care about international issues, i.e. genital mutilation (even seen quite a few who are strongly anti-male circumcision), sex trafficking, honor killings, the few countries out there where women can’t drive, go to college, whatever else is still left.

          • John Schilling says:

            On the second point, fair enough, I should have specified “in the industrialized west”.

            As for reproductive rights, I think I am both dispassionate and reasonably well-informed about this and I see the odds of women in the United States being more than modestly inconvenienced in their pursuit of many forms of birth control up to and including first-trimester abortion as being negligible. And mostly subsumed into the remote general possibility of a civil war or other complete sociopolitical upset, which would basically negate any present activism.

            The illusory threat/promise of a return to the 1950s is deployed by both sides to motivate their base to fight ever harder for, well, whatever the issue du jour is even if it isn’t abortion or birth control. If the goal is reproductive rights, that one has in fact been accomplished even if you fear it might be unaccomplished in the future. If the goal is eliminating the fear, that cannot realistically be accomplished by so long as there are feminists stoking the fear.

          • Adam says:

            I agree that the chances of it actually happening are basically nil, but it clearly does motivate them and I get the impression the goal at this point is eliminate all politicians trying to remove reproductive rights, and those politicians certainly do exist so that isn’t a finished goal. I’d even say that seems to be the single issue most driving the recent spat of ‘stop the infighting, Bernie and Hillary supporters’ memes and articles I keep seeing, the conviction that this election is special above all in recent memory because of anticipated supreme court appointees who will overturn Roe v. Wade if a Republican is president.

            Which is really weird, by the way. I always thought when I was younger that single-issue abortion voters were universally Republicans.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Adam
            I’d even say that seems to be the single issue most driving the recent spat of ‘stop the infighting, Bernie and Hillary supporters’ memes and articles I keep seeing

            Clintonista here. I’m glad to hear pushback against infighting is starting. Apologies for ad hominem, but I model Sanders supporters (like Nader supporters in 2000) as being motivated by head in the clouds stuff, and by negative personal emotions toward celebrities etc. Abortion/RR cuts through that level: it’s real to Democrats who are otherwise not so pragmatic.

          • John Schilling says:

            I get the impression the goal at this point is eliminate all politicians trying to remove reproductive rights

            Which, as a goal, is right up there with removing all terrorists or all Nazis. We’d still be fighting WWII in the streets of Germany if we went with that last one. These are again poor metrics if your real terminal goal is to eliminate the threat, and a recipe for fanaticism if you make them your terminal goal.

            And I’ve been hearing literally since 1973 that one more conservative Supreme Court justice, one Republican president in office at the wrong time, means an end to legal abortion and is thus the One True Cause for every woman everywhere. When do we get to call bullshit on that one?

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ John Schilling
            And I’ve been hearing literally since 1973 that one more conservative Supreme Court justice, one Republican president in office at the wrong time, means an end to legal abortion

            The Supreme Court likes its own precedents, and politicians on both sides like the 3-letter label Roe that fits well on placards and in headlines. But the fact is that access to abortion is being chipped away, seriously and steadily, by restrictions that are subject to review by several levels of courts … and a SC Justice serves for decades.

            How attacking PP would fare in a 2017 SC we don’t know, but a law can be thrown out on problems in its fine print and President and Congress can change before it gets re-worked, and attacking PP* is something that Republicans are trying now (which is another reason to beware of a Republican President).

            (*and the actual sources of PP’s abortion funding)

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ John Schilling
            I see the odds of women in the United States being more than modestly inconvenienced in their pursuit of many forms of birth control up to and including first-trimester abortion as being negligible.

            'Modestly inconvenienced' and 'neglible' are your opinions. On the 'testimonials' thread, Nita and I posted numbers, ie facts. Here are links to some more:

            http://www.cyclebeads.com/blog/815/why-arent-all-women-using-contraception?-

            http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Unintended-Pregnancy-US.html

            http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/win/contraceptive-needs-2013.pdf

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Mark Atwood
            I do support fully gratis BC treatments, for the simple fact that the kind of people for whom such a negligible modest inconvenience is so overwhelmingly burdensome are the LAST people who should ever breed.

            I would go a step further, and say that as a society, we should flat give a few hundred dollars in cash to any fertile person, age 30 or below, who asks for a gratis permanent sterilization.

            These are actions so worth agreeing on, that y’all’s opinions and motives seem hardly worth arguing about. 😉

            This might be elegant reasoning against the argument that the ‘kind of woman who needs help’, doesn’t deserve it.

            (But for the record:
            1. Temporay sterilization would be less scandalous than permanent, and
            2. ‘Modest/trivial’ is different for different budgets. To take a flat cost that all budgets must pay, and pronounce it ‘modest’ because it would be modest on the budgets you’re familiar with — almost deserves the p-word. Even if and when all US states stop requiring physicians’ prescriptions including pelvic exam etc for BC pills (so far not quite three). Not to mention, for abortion, the inconvenience of travel to a far clinic, getting ultra-sounds, counseling, etc etc, often needing several trips.)

          • John Schilling says:

            To take a flat cost that all budgets must pay, and pronounce it ‘modest’ because it would be modest on the budgets you’re familiar with — almost deserves the p-word

            $9/month is modest on pretty much any budget that doesn’t involve starving or freezing to death and thus rendering the whole issue moot. I don’t think it is particularly privileged to say that if the price for having a full and safe sex life is a modest fraction of the price for having any life at all, this is a problem that I’m not going to worry about any time soon.

            But I don’t think there would really be enough controversy to matter over a plan to provide a fairly broad range of free birth control options to any adult woman who wants them. One thing that is controversial enough (in the US) to almost certainly scuttle any such proposal are government-funded third-trimester abortions. Another would likely be having public schools or similar government institutions providing contraception directly to minor children.

            If you want free birth control for adult women, you’ll need to decouple it from late-term abortion, probably from birth control for schoolgirls, and maybe from abortion entirely for a generation or so. Not abandoning those fights, just separating them. Since this is exactly the opposite of Planned Parenthood’s strategy, and PP is the Progressive vanguard on all related fronts, I’m guessing universal free contraception is going to have a rough time in the United States for a while longer.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ John Schilling

          Disambiguation:
          a) practical/possible to accomplish (given X date/resources)
          b) of practical use if accomplished

          Small example, professional dress code. In the 70s we wanted to wear b) practical-useful-comfortable stuff instead of high heels and fancy hairstyles and make-up; we got that allowed in a lot of jobs, but not yet a) everywhere; 1970s goal not yet accomplished.

          Bigger 1970s b)outcomes, not yet a) (and perhaps impossible ever) accomplished: 51/49% lawmakers, CEOs, etc.

          Referencing Ernestine for tautology, and this clip shows where journalism was then too.

          • John Schilling says:

            Is “51/49% lawmakers, CEOs, etc”, a terminal goal, or a metric for a goal?

            It is a poor metric for even the broadest conception of equality of rights or opportunity. Men and women are not interchangeable, cannot be culturally programmed to be interchangeable, and the residual differences will drive >>1% spreads in any profession or avocation.

            It is a poor metric even for ensuring that men’s and women’s interests are represented at the highest levels of power, because the mechanism that gets you 51/49 instead of what the natural ratio is unlikely to select for a sincere desire to fairly represent gender-linked interests.

            If it is a terminal goal, I genuinely have difficulty understanding why people would value it, and that doesn’t happen often. As a metric, it will lead to increasing fanaticism in pursuit of increasingly marginal gains.

          • Aap says:

            It’s especially problematic when an imbalance in favor of women is apparently not a problem (see gender of college graduates). ‘At least 50% is not equality’, it is dominance.

      • Sandy Beach says:

        So what you’re saying is they’re not true Scotsmen? Sorry, Scotspeople.

      • Viliam says:

        “Important practical goals of us 1970s feminists aren’t yet done, and are high priority.”

        In my opinion, most of those goals aren’t achieved in the developing countries… and the problem is that in the current political climate it is problematic to mention that.

        In other words, overthrowing the power of SJWs seems like a logical first step towards achieving most of the feminist goals. Then we can start freely criticizing genital mutilation or “honor” killings without being immediately accused of racism. (Also mansplaining, if the person who criticized that happens to be male.)

        • Nita says:

          What makes you think it’s problematic to mention?

          (Unless you mean saying “Shut up and be grateful you’re not in Saudi Arabia!” a la Dawkins — that might indeed be perceived as rather unkind.)

          • Aap says:

            The feminist response to Cologne clearly showed that SJWs think that it’s problematic to say that certain cultures have more sexual violence than others.

            Not surprising, since most are strongly Marxist, so they divide society in groups who are either oppressed or oppressors. Middle Easteners are automatically in the oppressed group, so they can’t then be oppressors, unless you ignore that ‘vector’ and regard them simply as men.

          • Nita says:

            It seems that both Muslim and Western cultures feature a significant undercurrent of “slutty women don’t deserve to be treated with basic respect” — only the threshold of what counts as “slutty” is higher in the West (due to liberalism and feminism), and lower in Muslim countries (due to an “arms race” in signaling modesty).

            Therefore, feminists see anti-liberal, anti-feminist groups as people who want to make Western culture more like Muslim culture — which, if true, would make their cultural critiques a transparent rationalization of ethnic tribalism.

            Also, it’s not like muggers and thieves in the West are respectful of women or representative of Western culture, either.

          • Aapje says:

            It seems that both Muslim and Western cultures feature a significant undercurrent of “slutty women don’t deserve to be treated with basic respect”

            The difference is that in one of these cultures, it is a mainstream belief and in the other it isn’t. Of course, many feminists have the false belief that it is mainstream in the West (which they call rape culture), despite all the obvious evidence that it isn’t.

            feminists see anti-liberal, anti-feminist groups

            Conflating these two is exactly why large parts of feminism is guilty of what it purports to fight: crass stereotyping and bigotry.

            Plenty of feminism is anti-liberal and plenty of anti-feminism is liberal.

            Also, it’s not like muggers and thieves in the West are respectful of women or representative of Western culture, either.

            Those criminals target men more than women, so I don’t see why this would prove that ‘we’ treat women badly.

            This kind of hugely biased cherry picking that you engage in (ignoring all male victims and only focusing on women) is endemic in feminism. Of course, you can prove anything by just ignoring all data that disagrees with your beliefs.

          • Nita says:

            The difference is that in one of these cultures, it is a mainstream belief and in the other it isn’t.

            Do you really think that the majority of Muslims believe that men should grope women on the streets? Why?

            I don’t see why this would prove that ‘we’ treat women badly

            Well, obviously — because that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that you’re comparing average, law-abiding Western citizens to mobs of Muslim muggers.

          • John Schilling says:

            Do you really think that the majority of Muslims believe that men should grope women on the streets? Why?

            You left out an important word in translating Aapje’s claim there. The word is “slutty”.

            I think a more charitable reading of Muslim culture would that a majority believes that men can’t help but grope slutty women and so shouldn’t be punished, shamed, or thought less of for succumbing to that irresistable temptation but that slutty women should be punished, shamed, and thought less of for offering it. Even this may not be a majority view across a billion or so Muslims, but the insistence on highly restrictive codes of female dress and conduct suggest it is fairly common.

          • Nita says:

            @ John Schilling

            a majority believes that men can’t help but grope slutty women and so shouldn’t be punished, shamed, or thought less of for succumbing to that irresistable temptation but that slutty women should be punished, shamed, and thought less of for offering it

            This is the same misconception that some feminists have about Christian proponents of modesty, and I’m surprised to see you repeating it.

            No, they believe that not only groping, but even staring is wrong, even if “provoked” by the wrong behavior of others.

          • Aapje says:

            Do you really think that the majority of Muslims believe that men should grope women on the streets? Why?

            I never said ‘majority,’ I said mainstream. I refuse to defend straw men.

            Pretty much all Muslim cultures are heavily patriarchal (real patriarchy, not feminist patriarchy). In a patriarchy, there is a a strong separation of the sexes which increases sexual frustration, a strong belief that men lack the ability to restrain themselves (so women need to protect themselves or be protected by men who are relatives) and a strong sense that people should be punished when deviating from the norm too much. Note that these beliefs are just as common among men as women.

            The result is that there is both much more harassment in general and a much greater sense that women deserve it when they act/dress wrong. Finally, the justicial system will often refuse to go after perpetrators of severe sex crimes.

            Although there are strong cultural differences in the Muslim world, of course, Saudi-Arabia is a lot worse than Turkey.

            No, they believe that not only groping, but even staring is wrong, even if “provoked” by the wrong behavior of others.

            Ehhhhh, no. A common belief is that it is wrong for other men to do that to their relatives, but that women who ‘provoke’ deserve to be harassed. See chapter V:

            http://egypt.unfpa.org/Images/Publication/2010_03/6eeeb05a-3040-42d2-9e1c-2bd2e1ac8cac.pdf

          • Nita says:

            @ Aapje

            Thanks for the source.

            1. I don’t know an objective way to tell whether something is “mainstream” or not. Egyptians in your source report that harassment has become more common in the recent troubled years. Redditors were really entertained by that video of a female singer being molested by the concert crowd — and reddit is pretty mainstream, IMO.

            2. You do realize that the study you linked was conducted by a feminist organization, right? (And funded by the UNFPA and the EU — which are presumably representative of “the current political climate”.) If modern feminists don’t allow anyone to criticize non-Western cultures, how is that even possible?

            3. “Sexual harassment is wrong, so I condemn it wherever I see it” is a consistent stance.

            “Feminists’ whining about sexual harassment has destroyed our wonderful culture, where men were manly and women dressed modestly” + “Muslims demand that women dress modestly, therefore they support sexual harassment, which makes them inferior to us” is not.

            I know this peculiar pair of statements probably doesn’t describe your views, but I have seen this combination, and it’s what causes the angry feminist reactions.

            Similarly, “feminists inflate the definition of rape!”+”there were hundreds of rapes in Cologne!”.

            4. Here in Eastern Europe, a blessed land still largely free from the dreaded “PC police”, I have also noticed a correlation between anti-Muslim views and racist views, as expressed in online comments — so the idea that some of the cultural criticism may be racially motivated does not seem implausible to me.

          • John Schilling says:

            No, they believe that not only groping, but even staring is wrong, even if “provoked” by the wrong behavior of others.

            The two are not contradictory. “It’s wrong, but we can’t blame them for it” is a common thing, factoring into e.g. most defenses of rioting ever, and a disturbing number of date-rapes in western cultures. Sometimes even infanticide, and there we don’t have the ability to blame someone else instead.

            I don’t see any good way of distinguishing the two hypotheses in this case,but I haven’t examined the matter closely. What evidence are you using?

          • Aapje says:

            @Nita

            1. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a single survey with consistent methodology for different countries. It seems like such an obvious study to do that it’s quite amazing that no one did it. In the absence of such, I agree that it is a subjective analysis of various bits of evidence.

            But regardless of whether you want to call it mainstream or not, I think it is very difficult to argue that Muslim countries don’t have a higher rate of sexual violence. Especially for feminists, since it is clear that Muslim countries are more patriarchal than the West, so by their own reasoning (patriarchy causes sexual violence), it logically follows that Muslim countries would be more sexually violent.

            BTW. please don’t conclude that all Reddit users have the same beliefs of a few Reddit users in 1 subreddit. It should be obvious that there are many sampling biases and thus your conclusion about mainstream beliefs is erroneous.

            2. I was talking about mainstream Western feminists. I have a gazillion times more respect for non-Western feminists. There is an obvious difference between claiming to be suffering from patriarchy when you are actually in a patriarchy vs claiming to suffering from something you aren’t. It’s the difference between a homeless person claiming to be dead broke and Hillary Clinton making that claim.

            3. That wasn’t a common reaction at all though. The common complaint was: ‘we are taking in a lot of people from a culture where many people have beliefs that result in a very high rate of sexual violence and this is being covered up.’ When people weakmen their opponents, it says more about the people who use that tactic (that their ideology can’t deal with certain facts) than about their opponents.

            4. Eastern Europe is quite different from the West, IMO. I was talking about Western feminists. Anyway, my point of disagreement is not whether racist beliefs exist, which they do. My issue is that large parts of feminism allows some very crude generalizations (all men are culturally conditioned to use sexual violence), but react angrily when confronted with a claim that certain cultures have more sexual violence than others. Note that they are hugely hypocritical about it, since I’ve never seen a feminist who didn’t think that ‘bro’s’ are more likely to engage in sexual violence. So it’s not like they don’t believe that some subcultures are more sexually violent. However, they are bigoted against white men* and if non-white men are worse in any way, it would undermine their hierarchy of oppression (where white men are the worst oppressors and everyone else supposedly oppresses less badly).

            * It’s amazing how often the term ‘white men’ is used in feminist writing, in ways that would be seen as racist if you’d replace it with ‘Jews’ or ‘blacks.’

          • Nita says:

            @ John Schilling

            a common thing, factoring into e.g. most defenses of rioting ever, and a disturbing number of date-rapes

            You’re absolutely right. And after seeing those date-rape defenses, feminists tried labelling their source “rape culture” — and everyone else went “how dare you!?! our culture is 100% against rape! now I’ll never listen to feminists again!”. So, if it’s offensive/unhelpful to call these unfortunate attitudes “rape culture”, then it’s similarly unhelpful to say that Muslim culture promotes mass molestation.

            Of course, we’re not glad that a large number of the people displaced by the war happen to have these sexist cultural beliefs. But at least they’re not the majority and don’t have the law on their side — and feminism did succeed in changing Western culture, despite starting from a much weaker position.

            Currently, the main barrier to changing beliefs in non-Western cultures is their suspicion that the West is an immoral society with alien values. And the things our local Muslim-haters tend to say and do are really not helping.

          • Aapje says:

            @Nita

            And after seeing those date-rape defenses, feminists tried labelling their source “rape culture” — and everyone else went “how dare you!?! our culture is 100% against rape!

            That is a straw man. The actual argument is that our culture is not a rape culture because:

            – The overwhelming majority of people think that rape is one of the worst crimes that a person can experience
            – Very few people think that people deserve to be raped as a result of something they do (‘victim blaming’ is almost never blaming victims for the crime, but rather blaming them for taking risk seen as irresponsible, which is an important distinction that many anti-rape activist seem unable to make)
            – The police/courts actually do their best to prosecute, within generally accepted judicial standards, which unfortunately have their limits, especially for crimes that are often he said/she said
            – There are very few rape jokes and those that exist, trade on the taboo, rather than on the legitimacy of rape

            There is one specific exception, which is prison rape of men, where the attitude of society is very different. My experience that feminists always talk about rape culture as something that effects women, while ignoring only real rape culture that exists in the West, is one of the reasons why I think that there is an extreme pro-woman/anti-man attitude in feminism.

            So, if it’s offensive/unhelpful to call these unfortunate attitudes “rape culture”, then it’s similarly unhelpful to say that Muslim culture promotes mass molestation.

            It’s not offensive to call out people with bad beliefs, it’s offensive/unhelpful to claim that the West has a ‘rape culture’ in general.

            The main reason is that (like a lot of feminism), it really seems to be an attack on white men. Why else would these feminists refuse to use the word for Muslim culture(s), but use it liberally for a culture with much less sexual violence? You fail to address those double standards, Nita, but those are why people get so upset with feminism. It’s one thing to be wrong, but it’s particularly irritating when people cannot even be consistent in their wrongness.

            Currently, the main barrier to changing beliefs in non-Western cultures is their suspicion that the West is an immoral society with alien values. And the things our local Muslim-haters tend to say and do are really not helping.

            They’ve started giving sexual behavior education to immigrants thanks to the ‘Muslim-haters’ who demanded that the government actually addresses these crimes. Isn’t it strange that one this issue, it is the feminists who try to downplay the sexual violence, just because the perpetrators are a ‘victim group?’ Isn’t that rape culture by their own standards?

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m not trying to be helpful, I am trying to be truthful. Once we have truthfully established the zone of possible agreement, we can either try to help reach an agreement or pursue some alternate strategy. We aren’t at that point yet.

          • Nita says:

            @ Aapje

            The police/courts actually do their best to prosecute

            Feminists have worked extremely hard to make that happen. In the past, it used to be “oh, are you married to him? that’s not rape”, “oh, are you a prostitute? that’s theft, haha”, “oh, were you drinking? tsk tsk, what did you expect?” — and everyone still believed that their culture was totally against rape, it’s a terrible crime, etc. etc.

            And yes, someone should do that kind of hard work for the rights of male prisoners, too. Making everyone hate feminists for being biased won’t solve this problem.

            @ John Schilling

            I don’t mean helpful for me or for our discussion here. I mean helpful for changing the beliefs we consider harmful.

            Personally, I’m against using the phrase “rape culture”, precisely because it’s so counterproductive. If you want to argue with someone who believes that Western countries do have “rape culture” but Muslim countries don’t, you’ll have to go find that person.

          • John Schilling says:

            I mean helpful for changing the beliefs we consider harmful

            How do you propose to do that without truthfully acknowledging what those beliefs are?

          • Aapje says:

            @Nita

            I am discussing feminism today, you are derailing the conversation into a discussion about historic feminism.

            Making everyone hate feminists for being biased won’t solve this problem.

            It’s not about hate or us vs them. It’s about countering a harmful narrative that creates more victims.

            It’s not very useful to engage in emotional tribalism.

          • Nita says:

            @ John Schilling

            How do you propose to do that without truthfully acknowledging what those beliefs are?

            Why, by sneaking competing beliefs into their minds, and letting cognitive dissonance do its job, of course. Certainly, I’ve never persuaded anyone by telling them what their beliefs are.

            Then there’s the inconvenient little fact that the previous time Europeans collectively focused on the bad qualities of specific minorities, we ended up killing members of these minorities in rather large numbers. So, many people are wary of heading in a similar direction again.

          • Aapje says:

            @Nita

            It is really rather offensive to argue that:

            A. Honestly assessing cultural differences and asking for non-violent solutions, such as proper education and migration limits, is on par with genocide. This kind of over the top response is exactly why the P.C. left has such a bad name. Furthermore, the ironic truth is that this unwillingness to honestly debate the issue and be truthful out of fear of extremism, is actually driving people away from moderate politics towards extremists.

            B. Europeans collectively murdered the Jews. My grandparents on one side hid people from the Nazi’s and my other grandfather was a forced laborer. Neither chose to commit genocide or had the power to stop it. When you are holding Europeans collectively responsible, you are insulting my family and the many other Europeans who suffered from Nazi occupation.

            Now, you are free to act as the worst stereotype of people who have beliefs similar to yours, but that may have the opposite effect of the one you seek to achieve.

          • Nita says:

            @ Aapje

            A. If you re-read my comment, you will notice that I did not say that. I said that the things some people are currently saying (“their culture is bad! get rid of them!”) remind other people of the beginning of that chain of historical events, and that has an impact on their actions.

            B. As far as I know, my ancestors didn’t join any death squads, either. But was there antisemitism in my country? Yes. Did it make recruiting for death squads easier? Most likely, yes. It doesn’t make everyone in Europe guilty of anything, but it is a clue to what kind of thing we should probably try to avoid.

            Yes, it would be fantastic if we could all come together and discuss the issues caused by the refugee crisis calmly, without accusing anyone of being either an orc or a Nazi. Then we might actually have a chance of getting through this mess without too many casualties. Unfortunately, polarization and extremism on both sides has become a huge barrier to that.

            I don’t know what beliefs you’re attributing to me, in particular. I’ve tried to explain some of the psychology and reasoning of so-called “SJWs”, to the best of my ability, in the hopes that it might help you form a more accurate idea of their opinions and talk to them more effectively.

            And I note that my original question to Viliam — what made him think that FGM and honor killings are impossible to discuss — still hasn’t been answered 🙁 (I’ve actually seen those subjects discussed in modern feminist spaces, so I hoped to learn how Viliam got such a contrasting impression.)

          • Aapje says:

            It just legitimizes overly negative narratives about certain ethnic groups when they get countered with overly positive narratives. When these feminists argue that people from these cultures are no more sexually violent than natives, the facts becomes a weapon for the other side. In the German context, where the the government tried to cover up the truth, more and more people will simply stop believing their government and lose faith in the political process (with violence as the result).

            To answer your question about FGM and honor killings (and more): in my country we had a unified front by mainstream political parties against anyone who dared say anything negative about immigrants and an effort to prevent inconvenient facts about immigrants from being researched/published. Beliefs shared by a large minority in society were not represented in politics (except 1 racist party which was silenced and for which most in that minority wouldn’t vote for either). Because negative aspects of migrant cultures could not be discussed in the political arena, it was obviously impossible to get them addressed with policies, which just made problems worse and worse (like FGM and honor killings, although these were actually lesser issues).

            Ultimately, this resulted in a political revolt by an outsider, who was murdered during the election campaign by a SJW. This destabilized the political arena permanently, greatly increased polarization and distrust of the government by that minority, caused a lot of violence against minorities, etc, etc. I put most of the blame for this unfortunate chain of events on the P.C. multiculturalists, who tried to put out a fire with gasoline, making everything a 100 times worse than if they had simply chosen the truth over ‘they can’t handle the truth.’

            Very similar polarization happened in France, Denmark, Belgium and now the UK, Sweden and Germany. Meanwhile, the do-gooders wallow in their moral superiority, while they unwittingly cause(d) many of the problems they smugly blame on the other side.

            Mark my words, with the huge influx of migrants in Germany, the inevitable friction between different cultures will become so large and the costs of integrating people so massive, that you will get a huge blow-back once citizens realize that the consequences of open borders are not just a pleasant feeling about ‘doing the right thing,’ but more crime, terrorism, cuts in government services, etc. Don’t be fooled by how the opposition to open borders is currently not that strong. It was similar in my country until it suddenly flipped and culturally, we are probably more like Germany than any other country (although we don’t have the same feelings of guilt, which is why Germany is lagging behind the rest of Europe on this issue, but this won’t last forever).

      • perpippity says:

        I guess you really feel for mainstream Republicans, then, who wish their party weren’t associated with the Religious Right, Ann Coulter or Trump. The thing about both groups (feminists and political parties) is that about all a person needs to do to belong is to self-identify as such. (Yeah, you have to register for the party, but that’s a rubber stamp. The party itself can’t prevent it, as Trump’s example demonstrates.)

    • Cord Shirt says:

      Just wanted to repeat here that IMO *second-wave* feminism was originally a movement by and for *nerdy* women. Not “mean girls.”

      Oh, did the popular crowd co-opt it? Well gee, it’s not like *that’s* ever happened before. :facepalm:

  15. BBA says:

    Maybe everyone’s looking at it the wrong way, and it’s not that we need more women in programming (and other STEM fields), it’s that we need fewer men.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Even better conclusion: we need fewer journalists.

      • Ptoliporthos says:

        We need more journalists and fewer hacks that copy-paste press releases. Most science journalism looks like this. Why does anyone believe journalists do any better covering economics or politics? About the only reporting I ever find consistently reliable covers current weather and traffic conditions, and whether the visiting team or the home team lost.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          This wasn’t a press-release. Someone tracked this down so they could turn it into a story.

          • Ptoliporthos says:

            I have a hard time believing that 2-3 dozen science writers were all perusing the preprints of the same impact-factor 2 journal and all decided to write the same story about the same article.

            Most universities will prepare a press release to accompany a publication that includes authors, no matter how tangentially involved, from their institution, if they think the study might attract significant press interest. I imagine the most likely scenario is that somebody in the PR office at Cal Poly or NC State has a nose for clickbait, and sent out a press release to accompany this preprint.

            You could probably reconstruct the text of the press release from the articles using the same techniques scholars use to infer the text of lost manuscripts from surviving copies, quotations, and summaries.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            It’s not a preprint is it? It’s a submission for open peer review. That means it hasn’t even been accepted by a journal for peer review.

            My prior is that somehow some journalist found out about it and wrote the first story. All of the other stories just piggyback off that one.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Yeah, I assumed this was a case of everyone else copying the initial fake/distorted story.

            This happens all the time; in fact, in my experience it’s more common than the “press release” thing.

      • anon says:

        fewer journlolists

    • patches welcome says:

      The careers definitely need to stop being shilled to people who are just desperate for a secure paycheck. Fortunately for open source, it doesn’t care what your day job is.

  16. Alex Mennen says:

    > For example, suppose that the reason revealing gender decreases acceptance rates is because corporate contributors tend to use their (gendered) real names and non-corporate contributors tend to use handles like 133T_HAXX0R. And suppose that the best people of all genders go to work at corporations, but a bigger percent of women go there than men. Then being non-gendered would be a higher sign of quality in a man than in a woman.

    In that case, being gendered would be a sign of quality, not the other way around.

    • Theo Jones says:

      Agreed. If I were running an opensource project, I would take people who use their real names as more credible. And I would be very skeptical of someone who used some stupid username like 31137t_Hax0r. And its not just me. This is what ESR has to say on the matter.
      http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
      The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don’t do this; they’re proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it.

      • Aegeus says:

        This doesn’t seem supported by the data, because using their real name (which reveals their gender) *decreased* acceptance rates. Apparently the people who run github projects think the opposite of the way ESR thinks.

        Personally, I don’t give a crap whether you use a handle or not. Certainly, l33thax0r-type names show a lack of sophistication, but in this day and age, separating your real name from your online identity just seems like common sense. And it’s easy to come up with a handle that’s recognizable without sounding like a tryhard or script kiddie.

        For instance, you might use a normal-sounding pseudonym, like “Scott Alexander.” 😛

        • Theo Jones says:

          I realize that the evidence seems to contradict the favoritism for real names idea, but my point was that its a result I wouldn’t have expected.

        • Good Burning Plastic says:

          “Scott Alexander” would have been counted as a gendered name in such a study.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            I thought they checked if your screen-name matched your real name to determine whether it was “gendered”? (Alongside other indicators, like listing it in your bio.)

            Actually, I hope they didn’t, because I thought of Ozy as male for the longest time based on their username.

          • Cadie says:

            My full legal name would have been counted as a gendered name too – and they’d have put it in the wrong category unless they actually went to the trouble to dig up my Facebook account to verify. “Oops. [Male-Sounding Name] is a woman, looks like one, says she’s female, and is listed as [Other Person]’s sister. Better move her data to the other category.”

            Of course, I doubt there are enough women with masculine names to significantly affect the data… unless a big enough minority of women are choosing masculine names as pseudonyms on purpose. If “Erica Lastname” doesn’t think she’ll be taken as seriously or just wants to avoid the issue, there’s nothing to stop her from using “Eric Lastname” as her handle and email name, and checking her handle and Google account isn’t going to reveal anything. Plus there are plenty of nicknames that are unisex but usually assumed male unless otherwise specified (Alex, Chris, Sam…) that some women would use online without specifying.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          And it’s easy to come up with a handle that’s recognizable without sounding like a tryhard or script kiddie.

          Yup.

      • suntzuanime says:

        ESR is incorrect about a lot of stuff.

        • TrivialGravitas says:

          In this case I think he’s just old. It’s hardly the first time I’ve heard it, but I’ve never heard it from a programmer younger than me, and I’m into my 30s now. the typical 20 something on github has different fashion around names.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Well, 1337 5p34k has been stupid since its inception, even if a few good things like “pr0n” have come out of it. But there’s good reasons to use a handle; I use mine to keep the “real world” separate. It wouldn’t be hard to for a determined person connect my real name with “The Nybbler”, but it isn’t going to be a simple Google search. There may be good reasons (even aside from gender issues) for a person not to use their real name on an open source project

        1) Their government might be hostile to the project, even if there aren’t actual laws against it. Think encryption, or anything touching on the wide world of copyright.

        2) Their real-world employer might be hostile to the project or the whole idea of their employees “moonlighting” on open source.

        3) They are concerned a dispute on an open source project might spill over to the real world, or vice versa

        4) They’ve become known under a handle and they see no reason to change it.

        But what do I know? My handle is a reference to a tool used in cracking copy protection schemes, and also not one I use on open source projects.

      • Shieldfoss says:

        He says it behind a handle. Just because you and I know that “ESR” are his initials doesn’t magically turn it into a name instead of a handle.

        Additionally: That was written before the current social milieu, before people got the notion into their heads that if you disagree with somebody, it is acceptable to call their boss to try and get them fired, or a SWAT team to get them killed. I used to post many places under my real name, but I don’t any more.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Upthread the point is made that one reason to have your real name as your user name is to build resume.

      People trying to build resume are less likely to submit great code.

      • Adam says:

        Data point of one here, but I use my real name on GitHub (mostly because it’s my name and I use it pretty much everywhere), but virtually everything I commit is to private repos I have commit access to. I’ve only ever submitted three pull requests I can remember to open source projects (honestly not even sure if they were accepted or not, was just forks I added features to for my own work and decided to offer it back to them because other people found it useful and said I should). If I were to frequently submit pull requests to open source projects, I can’t imagine devoting the same level of effort that I devote to my actual paid work. That isn’t even just on interest, but partly out of duty. Someone paying me deserves more effort.

    • Tommy says:

      >In that case, being gendered would be a sign of quality, not the other way around.

      You missed the second half of Scott’s claim:
      >Then being non-gendered would be a higher sign of quality in a man than in a woman.

      In the specific situation he describes (gendered names = corporate; high-quality go corporate; women more inclined to go corporate than men), non-gendered men will be of higher quality than non-gendered women. I believe this is what he means, despite the awkward phrasing.

    • I have no idea to what extent if any this applies to the community being studied, but for what little it’s worth I gather that at least some open-source communities are pretty much openly hostile to anyone working for “the man”.

  17. “Declare how many different subgroup groupings you tried, and do appropriate Bonferroni corrections.”

    Argh, no! We have good methods now for dealing with this problem: include predictor variables for the subgroups and do a multilevel Bayesian regression (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/multiple2f.pdf). And we have readily-available, open-source software to do it, such as the rstanarm package for R.

    If any researcher reading this blog would like to analyze their data in this way but needs some help, drop me a line; I’ll walk you through it. (Offer limited to the first few people who ask.)

    • Corey says:

      Scott Alexander, take this man up on his offer of help the next time you get your hands on interesting data. This is an incredibly high-value proposition.

  18. Richard says:

    One question I had reading the paper that I’m hoping some of the statistically-minded readers here can help answer: Looking at Figure 5, I was curious how many people in each category were insiders and how many were outsiders, so we could get a sense of what the average numbers look like without the insider/outsider split. Considering men see a medium dropoff upon being gendered in both insider and outsider categories while women see no dropoff in the insider category and a large one in the outsider category, it looks like the two could average out to about equal values, but it depends on the relative sizes of those groups. We can get close by looking at the earlier results section (p.7), when they say they have n=3064667 pull requests (which can be verified by adding up the total of the values in the table on that page), and that if we exclude insiders we have n=2473190. This tells us that a bit over 80% of the pull requests come from outsiders, although we don’t know if the insider:outsider ratio is the same for women and men. What confuses me, though, is that if you look at the graphs on p.15 again, the confidence interval seems to be roughly the same width for outsiders as insiders, and if anything, it’s wider for the outsiders. Am I misunderstanding how those error bars work to think that they’d by necessity be narrower if there was a 4x larger sample size for outsiders than insiders, or did they make a mistake in that graph?

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Yes, that’s weird. It’s not logically impossible, though, because not every profile in the previous set goes into this graph. Also, the gendered profiles have very small error bars. I believe that is not because profiles are overwhelmingly gendered, but because the set was defined by an automated process, while the neutral profiles had to pass manual inspection, and thus are a small sample. But for the error bars you mention to make sense, there would have to be a correlation between outsiders and being excluded from the data.

      (Also, error bars do not depend only on the sample size, but also on the point estimate. That the outsiders have a rejection rate closer to 50% raises their error bars. The contribution from the 1:4 sample ratio is 2:1, while the contribution from moving from 90% to 70% is 2:3. Combining these gives 4:3, which is not very far from 1. We observe a ratio near 1, but on the other side.)

  19. merzbot says:

    “Science journalism is a garbage fire. Seriously, it’s complete trash,” has been the rationalist refrain since the dawn of time. I wouldn’t be so quick to point the finger at “institutionalized social justice,” whatever that means. Besides, the mainstream media explodes with articles about how ridiculous student SJ activists are whenever that flares up. They sensationalize anything for views. Their only ideology is ad money.

  20. Mark says:

    Clear proof that tech is run by hostile androgynes who are sexist against both men and women (but slightly more the latter).

  21. Henry Sartain says:

    > For example, suppose that the reason revealing gender decreases acceptance rates is because corporate contributors tend to use their (gendered) real names and non-corporate contributors tend to use handles like 133T_HAXX0R. And suppose that the best people of all genders go to work at corporations, but a bigger percent of women go there than men. Then being non-gendered would be a higher sign of quality in a man than in a woman.

    Wait, isn’t this backward at the end? Being non-gendered is a sign of *low* quality in this story, being one of those non-corporate 133t haxx0rs. And it’d be a weaker sign of low quality for men than women, or conversely being gendered would be a higher sign of quality. Or am I missing something?

    > In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage.

    Similarly this sounds backward — these data show unblinding gender giving everyone a disadvantage, not an advantage.

    • Murphy says:

      Think in terms of the projects rather than just the people.

      If company repos are tougher on code on average and people submitting to company repos are more likely to be gendered.

      If a larger fraction of identified women are submitting to corporate repos than hobbyist repos then you could see both higher quality from women and a higher pull request rejection rate.

    • Deiseach says:

      Wait, isn’t this backward at the end? Being non-gendered is a sign of *low* quality in this story, being one of those non-corporate 133t haxx0rs. And it’d be a weaker sign of low quality for men than women, or conversely being gendered would be a higher sign of quality.

      If gendered names means someone working for a corporation, and the very best go to work for corporations, but more women work for corporations than men, then a name that is identifiable as a man’s name means he must be one of the very best.

      But not all the very best men go to work for corporations. Some (many, lots?) are non-corporate contributors and use neutral names or pseudonyms. Whereas it is only the less capable women who use neutral names/pseudonyms (all the really good women are working for corporations and use their real names).

      So if you can identify gender by name, then it is more likely to be a woman and you can assume she is one of the best. If the contributor’s name is gender-neutral and it turns out to be a man, then you can assume he is better than, or at the very least equal to, a similarly pseudonymous woman.

  22. Kyle says:

    As a daily user of GitHub it’s pretty clear that this study was performed by people unfamiliar with how the site (or version control in general) is used. I think looking at sexism in acceptance rates is a perfectly fine endeavour (if the stats are interpreted properly) but this study went off the deep end by claiming that women are somehow more competent which reveals their bias and perhaps compromises their work as a whole.

    1) I am surprised that there are only 20x more PRs by men. I would say it’s more like 100-200x more men on GitHub then women.

    2) But the women that are there are usually always employed by some small to medium tech company. So this study is possibly comparing mostly professional women with mostly hobbyist men.

    3) PRs from companies are less likely to be the work of a single person. It’s often the case that someone has bundled up fixes the whole team has contributed to and then made them public.

    4) In my experience a lot of people on GH with feminine sounding names are actually men from Eastern Europe (Sasha, Nicola, etc) or India (Sandy, Sunny, etc).

    5) A lot of Americans who do have photos as their avatars often use the douchiest looking hipster picture. This makes me a lot more prejudiced against them than say the Europeans who have a regular pic of themselves in work clothes.

    6) True “insiders” would usually not be making pull requests as they would have commit access to the repo. So when you look at PRs you are by definition looking at inter rather than intra-group communication. You can’t look at PRs and say women are more “competent” while totally ignoring everyone else who has gained commit access which is a much higher achievement than having a PR merged.

    7) The number of lines altered by a PR has little to do with the complexity of it. It could be that you only altered 10 lines of code but had to add 1500 lines of regression tests.

    8) Generally speaking smaller PRs are better and large PRs are likely to get rejected and you will be asked to split it into multiple small PRs. If women are getting larger PRs merged then it’s possibly because men are being less critical of them.

    9) For more complex patches PRs are often used as a code review. They’re then rejected and another one is opened with the advice taken. That could be rejected as well, and repeat… Thus you might find that the best coders who take on the biggest features have the lowest acceptance rates.

    10) Finally, a closed PR does not mean the code was bad. The author could have closed it because they selected the wrong branch or the reviewer could have closed it but taken inspiration and implemented the fix themselves in a slightly different way due to their better understanding of their own project. Similarly more complex PRs are more likely to sit as open for weeks or months because nobody has time to review them but this study counts them as rejected.

    • Murphy says:

      Actually 2 sounds quite testable, check if repos are company-owned, see if women are more likely to be submitting to those and see if company owned ones are tougher on submissions in general.

      • Kyle says:

        I think you would probably end up biased towards San Francisco startups. The big players (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) who pay programmers six figures keep most of their repos private and/or on their own platforms.

        One thing I’m sure you will find with company owned repos is that they won’t merge requests without tests. I bet this is why PRs from women are 50% longer.

        Alternatively you could look at organisation accounts on GitHub which are special groups that can own repos and then add all their members as committers. To be a member of a non-commercial organisation is pretty much a stamp of approval that you’ve been a long time high quality contributor and it would be a much better signal of quality than whether or not random PRs were merged.

        Also nobody has mentioned that all this study looked at is public GitHub repos and GH is heavily biased towards web developers. So any conclusions shouldn’t be applied to programming or tech as a whole.

        • Kyle says:

          In regards to tests: sometimes it can be easier to get a PR merged to a company’s repo.

          Big projects tend to have tests, style guides, and so on. If you follow the rules then they will often merge your request with little resistance.

          However smaller projects (especially one man projects) often have no tests, only personal style, and suffer from “not invented here”. Getting PRs accepted to them is harder and they will often tell you to fork instead.

    • Jeff Kaufman says:

      RE 6: I work on an open source project for work, and every commit goes in via pull request, even for “insiders” with full commit access, because that’s how we do code review.

    • Also re 6, I maintain an open-source project, and our project workflow is also pull-requests-only, including maintainers’ commits. We adopted this process several months in to the project, though.

      • Kyle says:

        (replying to Jeff as well)

        That’s a common pattern for projects larger than a group of friends but what sort of projects make up the majority of GH and what sort of project are the majority of PRs going to? If we’re going to assume that every project is run professionally then we might as well only look at the top 100 projects in detail rather than scraping data about millions.

        For example when I just now looked at famous web projects (Django, Node, RoR) some things stood out that were probably missed by the authors:

        1) People with commit access are often merging their own requests once the review is done (especially Django).

        2) Many people are closing their own requests after noticing a mistake (especially RoR).

        3) Many merged PRs are showing up as closed presumably because they are being merged locally rather than through GH (seems to be the majority of PRs in Node and about 50% in Django).

        Yet this study assumed that people are merging or rejecting other peoples PRs and that a closed PR is a rejected PR. If the above three points are widespread then they alone could scuttle this study.

    • Ricardo Cruz says:

      I have posted some of my projects in github, but I don’t know what a PR is… Is it related to the bug tracking system? (I never used one, my projects are too small for that :))

      • brad says:

        PR = Pull request. Anyone can ask you to include a patch in your repository via a pull request. For small out of the way projects you aren’t likely to get very many.

  23. Daniel Speyer says:

    If women submitting hidden have a higher success rate than men submitting hidden, then that means they must be submitting higher quality work. That probably means that their standard for how good code has to be before submitting is higher (since basically everyone creates code of many qualities). That could mean that they’re accustomed to being held to a higher standard, or that they’ve *heard* they will be so often that they’ve internalized it, or that they’re more likely to be intrinsically motivated and therefore take greater pride in their work…. I guess there are too many possible explanations to conclude much. Still, there’s probably something interesting going on.

    • anon says:

      I’ll go with “they’re more risk-averse”.

    • Mary says:

      “If women submitting hidden have a higher success rate than men submitting hidden, then that means they must be submitting higher quality work. ”

      Must?

      There’s the difference between obvious and non-obvious women that that does not account for.

  24. Tom Bull says:

    “Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.”

    Really, what is the worst that could happen if there is an institutionalised social justice movement like you say? Where people deliberately or subconsciously misinterpret results to skew their implications towards benefiting a marginalised group? What’s the absolute worst thing? That people become more conscious of disadvantaged groups and implement positive action in their favour? That groups who have had hundreds or thousands of years of institutionalised advantage are now marginally disadvantaged?

    Damn! That sounds like a hellish dystopia if I ever heard of one. Sign me up for meninism, we’ve got to fight this!

    • Murphy says:

      When you start throwing reality in the bin in favor of political positions you lose touch with reality.

      When politics starts to set what is “acceptable” for science to conclude then it’s a short step from there to book burnings and academic purges of those who come to the “wrong” conclusions.

      I’m not talking in the abstract here, it’s what actually happens and has happened many times in history.

      • Tom Bull says:

        Hey Murphy, I’m probably being thick, but your comment seems somewhat unsubstantiated. Maybe if you could cite an example of one of the many times this has happened in history – and the dire consequences that ensued… that would be really useful in convincing me. Especially if you could show how some similar dire consequences could result from our current situation…

        • Montfort says:

          Here are several classic examples.

          • Tom Bull says:

            So, to be clear: the comparison is between soviet scientific suppression in favour of a brutal entrenched regime on one hand and modern bias-led misreporting of science where the bias is somewhat towards historically marginalised groups?
            Presumably then, the suggestion is that the potential dire consequences of our current path is that as the black lesbian elite consolidate their wealth in Moscow, the white male proletariat will be left to starve in the fields?

          • Montfort says:

            Lysenkoism is hardly a “brutal entrenched regime”. It even (allegedly) increased crop yields a little bit. It also stalled a lot of biological research that the Soviets might have otherwise done.

            The dire consequence here, then, is that we might get stuck believing false things instead of true things. True things have the benefit of working, and so enable things like (at its more dramatic side) effective antibiotics and safe, cheap transportation.

            The communist government was (one) instrument of the enforcement of lysenkoism, not a result of it, so it makes no sense to imagine one springing up here just because we refuse to ask for rigor in social sciences. Perhaps you have pattern-matched the mere oblique mention of the soviet union to other, bad arguments?

          • Tom Bull says:

            It wasn’t entirely pattern-matching: the examples you originally posted included others besides Lysenkoism. But what I expressed was supposed to use a bit of humour and satirise the situation to make a point (I hoped that was mostly clear… but expressing oneself on the internet is difficult).

            To be as clear as I can, what I’m saying is that whilst it’s deeply important to strive for accuracy everywhere it’s important to keep the levels of potential harm done by certain biases in perspective.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            The problem with using ‘level of harm caused by missteps’ is that is also something discovered by scientific findings. If those people are also systematically biased, things tilt more and more. It isn’t the Hodomor (the peasants have little grain, but I’ll report high output and things are obviously fine because everyone else is reporting high output), but it does form a clear trend. If you think that past scientific racism was caused by such a pattern (which unlike the USSR involved no coercion by the state), that gives a pretty good idea of how crazy things can get.

          • Tom Bull says:

            So, the conclusion is that the importance of every inaccuracy is paramount? They all REALLY matter. And we should put as much effort into righting the inaccuracies caused by bias in favour of equality as we should in (for example) correcting the chasm of inaccuracy that separates worldwide drug policy from reality?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Yes. To do otherwise is to admit that you aren’t actually interested in getting true results, but results to support ‘your side’ at which point credibility dies and you are back to no one believing anything you claim.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          Maybe if you could cite an example of one of the many times this [i.e. book burnings and academic purges] has happened in history – and the dire consequences that ensued…

          I don’t know about book burnings, but academics are being purged right here and now for dissenting from social justice orthodoxy. Here are some victims:

          Tim Hunt, University College London
          John McAdams, Marquette
          Teresa Buchanan, LSU
          Subramanian Swamy, Harvard
          Thomas Thibeault, East Georgia College
          Patricia Adler, UC Boulder
          David Barnett, UC Boulder

          The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) keeps a fairly exhaustive archive of all major violations of academic freedom that occur in the US. I encourage you to look through it, you will find no shortage of professors fired and students disciplined for reasons of political correctness.

          • Randy M says:

            It sounds like most of those are white or men. So what if they are now slightly disadvantaged? We probably didn’t need any of the advances they were developing anyway.

      • At first I thought you were being satirical, but by the time I got to the end of your comment, I’m adequately sure you weren’t.

        One possibility is that you don’t get your disadvantaged groups quite right, and end up being unfair to people as a result.

        • Tom Bull says:

          I agree that that is not just a possibility – it’s probably already happening. But what I’m asking is: really is it that disastrous if white men have a marginal disadvantage for a while, with all the privilege we already have?

          • Tom Bull says:

            Also, just to be clear… I’m totally in favour of pursuing accuracy in these endeavours – and I’m impressed by and in general agreement with the analysis of the paper by the post’s author. I just don’t draw the same conclusion: namely that a somewhat widespread bias towards pursuing social justice has got out of hand and the world is being made worse because of it.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            If politics has taught us anything, it is never ‘just a little bit’. Movements take as much as they can before they hit entrenched opposition. Setting the entrenchments on ‘this is what can be justified by the evidence’ is a good rule of thumb and helps prevent things from spiraling out of control. After all if your policy is ‘screwing over white males is okay’, you find that you start creating white male interest groups which is bad if your goal is to reduce gender and racial identification.

          • Tom Bull says:

            Yep, I agree mostly (apart from the word ‘never’, which should probably be rewritten ‘sometimes, on the worst occasions, not’). However I’m trying to say that portraying it as ‘us v. them’ and being ‘entrenched’ is not productive. By working together towards more equality, by guiding the debate rather than digging in at one extreme, by letting some of the less harmful, less severe biases slide… we can achieve great, productive, useful things together.

          • anon says:

            I believe I’m working towards more equality by not letting biases slide. Why don’t you work together with me instead of me working together with you? We could achieve great things together.

          • Tom Bull says:

            OK anon, I’m with you! What is the next stop in our global crusade against any bias? Whilst we’re making sure that the press don’t make any more missteps that could disadvantage white men, maybe we should rigorously fact-check some of those nasty articles that suggested there was a hint of impropriety that led to the 2008 financial crash?

          • anon says:

            As long as it is sloppy journlolism, I’m always up for a laugh!

            (same anon as above, I keep changing email and I don’t know what I used for that one)

          • Jason K. says:

            “But what I’m asking is: really is it that disastrous if white men have a marginal disadvantage for a while, with all the privilege we already have?”

            You cannot rob Peter to pay Paul and accurately call that “justice”.

          • “really is it that disastrous if white men have a marginal disadvantage for a while, with all the privilege we already have?”

            I think it’s pretty bad if white men with significant disadvantages (most likely poverty) are skunked and then blamed for resenting it.

            I wish the work which has gone into manipulating outcomes for and against various groups had gone instead into figuring out how people can perceive competence and reliability more accurately. Or, if they’re hopelessly bad at perceiving competence and reliability, into promoting random choices in the ranges where there’s no good reason to make distinctions.

          • John Schilling says:

            But what I’m asking is: really is it that disastrous if white men have a marginal disadvantage for a while, with all the privilege we already have?

            Any such disadvantage will not be applied uniformly over all white men. It will almost certainly be applied preferentially to the white men who in fact lack privilege on account of A: easier and B: everybody still wants the actually-privileged white men to like them.

            Doing collective punishment right is really hard and almost nobody bothers. Doing collective punishment wrong is always bad and can be disastrously bad.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, I see it at work in my own field, where being a white man is definitely a disadvantage, but most of the people with power are old white men (because being a white man was an advantage when starting a career thirty or forty years ago, but is a disadvantage now; hence the people with seniority who are making decisions are old white men, but it is harder than average for a young white man to start a new career).

            The move to address the historical privilege of white men has taken away no power from the old white men who grew up with that privilege, but it has hurt young white men who did not. And they wonder why young white resent all this “privilege” talk.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Mark Atwood:

            Of course they would be wrong in doing so. At least if you admit that groups like the Nation of Islam were wrong in their reactions to racial discrimination.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Really, is it disastrous if we oppress a group of poor people just because they have the same skin color as some other people we don’t like?

          • patriarchal landmine says:

            “really is it that disastrous if white men have a marginal disadvantage for a while, with all the privilege we already have?”

            we’re done here.

            feel free to give all your money away to the nearest “victim lacking in privilege.” I’ll just be over here, a white male, hoping to find another way to help men and boys abused by their mothers who never got the help they needed.

        • Murphy says:

          Once it becomes acceptable to decide what results science is allowed to get based on political orthodoxy a lot more things get affected than just disadvantaged groups.

          Unrelated theories start getting judged based on whether they feel like they promote or pattern match to unacceptable ideologies.

          Also, as other have pointed out, crusades against reality rarely tend to hurt those actually in power and almost always get turned against the weakest or most unpopular.

    • Decius says:

      The idea that “We know that ‘scientific’ ‘research’ will show implications in our benefit” is normally not associated with the marginalized group.

      • Tom Bull says:

        I think you’re conflating science misreporting (which we all agree is bad) and institutionalised social justice movement (which the post author suggests is bad and I’m suggesting might not be the end of the world).

        • Anonymous says:

          As has been demonstrated with the likes of Ferguson, social justice identity politics isn’t just about marginal situations, but can easily get out of hand and turn to violence.

          Also purity spirals leading to people getting fired for opinions that were very recently normal, etc.

    • Anonymous says:

      If you refuse to acknowledge the actual cause of a problem, then you’ll keep looking and looking for someone to blame, while getting more and more upset that the problem isn’t getting better, thus getting more and more willing to use extreme measures (because what you tried so far clearly isn’t good enough). This is the kind of dynamic that leads to witch hunts (though for literal witch hunts it was caused by accidental rather than willful ignorance).

      Also, you’re assuming what you’re trying to prove – part of the argument is over whether certain groups are even meaningfully marginalized in the first place. (“Marginalized” being a term which tends to imply that the group is being treated unfairly).

      ————————————————————————

      In cases like race and IQ, some people try to say, “we can’t acknowledge the actual cause because it might increase prejudice”, but that only works as long as the people in power have the true knowledge in the back of their minds. The problem is when you have the next generation of kids being raised with the propaganda version of reality, they’ll tend to become true believers and start wrecking everything trying to fix the problem based on their faulty understanding. I guess the alternative is lies for the plebs, with only important people being told the truth, but that obviously has all sorts of problems, especially in this modern age of pleb empowerment via the internet.

    • Deiseach says:

      “Two wrongs don’t make a right”.

      ‘All we want is the right to love one another just like everyone else enjoys’ somehow became ‘if you refuse to take our wedding photos/bake our wedding cake, we’ll take you to court, sue you for as much damages as we can, and activist groups will whip up a firestorm of hatred towards you aimed at driving you out of business’.

      See the pizza parlour employee who said for a hypothetical “We wouldn’t cater a gay wedding” and what happened to them – including that foolish woman so carried away by self-righteousness she put up a stupid “So who’s coming with me to burn the place down?” tweet.

      • ‘All we want is the right to love one another just like everyone else enjoys’ includes both the legal right and the social support that heterosexual marriage gets.

        Trying to force a sudden change in social support may not be a brilliant idea, but I don’t have huge amounts of faith in my ability to predict what people will do.

        Sidetrack: How do you pronounce your name?

        • Deiseach says:

          If someone is claiming at one and the same time that it is no business of government or society at large what they do in their private lives and that government and society owe them social support to help them promote what they do in their private lives, I wish they’d make up their minds which it is they want.

          But my point was that “What harm could bending over backwards to promote a marginalised group possibly do, even in the worst-case scenario?” was that the answer was not self-apparently “Why, no harm at all, there is never a downside!”

          Pronunciation something along the lines of “day shock” 🙂

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            If someone is claiming at one and the same time that it is no business of government or society at large what they do in their private lives and that government and society owe them social support to help them promote what they do in their private lives, I wish they’d make up their minds which it is they want.

            I am opposed to anti-discrimination laws (of any sort), but the charitable way to interpret the case for laws against LGBT discrimination is as follows. Here are all the “protected classes” in the United States, on the basis of which one is not legally allowed to discriminate:

            Race – Civil Rights Act of 1964
            Color – Civil Rights Act of 1964
            Religion – Civil Rights Act of 1964
            National origin – Civil Rights Act of 1964
            Age (40 and over) – Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
            Sex – Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Civil Rights Act of 1964
            Pregnancy – Pregnancy Discrimination Act
            Citizenship – Immigration Reform and Control Act
            Familial status – Civil Rights Act of 1968 Title VIII: Housing cannot discriminate for having children, with an exception for senior housing
            Disability status – Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
            Veteran status – Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act
            Genetic information – Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act

            Now, what is the actual reason for the fact that “sexual orientation” is not on that list, while all the rest are? Answer: prejudice against LGBT groups. The reason is not: “none of these laws are a good idea” (which is what I believe). If the general public believed that, these laws would be abolished.

            So as long as they are not grouped as a “protected class”, LGBT people correctly perceive that discrimination is being allowed toward them of a sort which is not allowed toward virtually any other similar group.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Vox Imperatoris

            Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act

            Sounds like a biodeterminist lawsuit waiting to happen.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Deiseach

            Will you mind if I keep vocalizing it as “daisy”? 😉

      • Theo Jones says:

        I think one of the biggest o_o O_O woah things I’ve seen in mainstream politics is the idea that anti-discrimination laws should apply to artists (ie. photographers) deciding what works to produce. Its an extremely dangerous idea on free speech grounds. And it seems to be spreading in mainstream politics. Unlike some of others here I’m not per se opposed to anti-discrimination law. But that application of it is very dangerous.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          …artist here. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Care to elaborate?

        • Muga Sofer says:

          I must admit, I’ve never heard of that (with the exception of casting.) It’s certainly within the overton window of internet (and, to a slightly lesser extent, offline) SJ that people should be *punished* for creating such art, but these punishments seem to be entirely extrajudicial.

          But then, I don’t really follow the art world. Has this seriously been attempted? Do mainstream individuals speak out in favour of it?

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Ah, of course, wedding photographers. And cake decorators, now that I think of it.

            Yeah, that’s extremely worrying.

            EDIT: Still, at least it’s based on accepting commissions, rather than a general policing of subject-matter; I think there’s a much stronger case to be made for policing which commissions are accepted by analogy to “black people can’t eat/shop here” stuff than for more general restrictions.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Muga Sofer – “Ah, of course, wedding photographers. And cake decorators, now that I think of it.”

            How about musicians?

            Just read the article, and a good chunk of the comment section. extremely worrying seems about right.

            The comment section, in particular, was enough to convince me that Clark has the right of it. We are not talking about accommodation and compromise any more; we are actively working as a society to make plurality and diversity impossible.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      As for why this sort of thing bothers people, coming from someone in STEM but outside of tech:

      I just finished interviewing for PhD programs in molecular bio (my handle is a Mad Max reference, I’m not actually a doctor of any kind), and one thing I noticed is that the interview pool is invariably >75% composed of women. And when you look at the grad students, the postdocs, the lab techs, or even the younger (<50) PI's you see it's about 50-60% women. I'm certainly not complaining about this, honestly I strongly prefer this ratio to the sausage-fest that was engineering school, but one other bit did stick out at me.

      The push for more women in biology didn't seem to have lessened any for all of that. I sat through a speech, by a woman in the administration to our predominantly female audience, about how there are too few women in our field and more must be done to be inclusive / diverse / etc. so as to remedy that. Even when women are the clear majority they are still considered underrepresented and are still given extra resources and consideration as such.

      My worry is that this kind of study, and the reporting it attracted, is part of why this happens. We can never say "OK, women are (more than) represented and there is no longer any detectable bias: time to go home" because there is no longer any connection between the data and reality. Women will continue to be marginalized at 70% 80% and 90% of the positions in a field, and the whole time it will be the fault of guys like me who are just trying to do some science.

      • The Smoke says:

        I actually have a hard time believing that. Don’t they usually show graphs or numbers when giving a talk about such things? Are they avoiding that or is it that they refer e.g. to lack of women in top management positions?

        • Zorgon says:

          The graphs will almost certainly consist of “gender balance in STEM” rather than “gender balance in Biology”.

          I’ve seen this myself. I’ve seen the soft sciences do it, too. I’ve even seen it in tech, since so many management positions are held by women. I’ve sat in a conference room with 70% women and watched a speaker talk about gender bias in HR positions. Again, the numbers for the whole software sector come up, not the HR numbers.

          The problem is not the stats, the problem is the narrative. Nothing may contradict the Sacred Narrative, and all things that might do so must be cast into the Pit lest they encourage and embolden the evil neckbeard MRA misogynerds.

          • Deiseach says:

            Zorgon, there is a real – I won’t say problem, but a really existing thing – that the further up the ladder you go, the more senior the management position, the more power/authority/status, that it begins to skew male.

            I have seen it in my workplace. What you say about “a conference room with 70% women”? Sure, I could match that with the HR department at the organisation – mostly women – until you hit the Director of Services, who is a guy. Five Directors of Departments, one Acting Director, one C.E.O. – all top level positions, all guys.

            Same in the other departments: ground level up to about Grade Five – overwhelmingly female. Levels above that – noticeably male.

            Why that is, how that is, I don’t know. But it’s a fact. Even with efforts and policies to promote equality and diversity, if you’re talking about the boss of your boss, it’ll be a guy – and his boss will be a guy.

          • Zorgon says:

            As someone says below, it’s mostly a combination of Experience Fetishism with the Permanent Executive Class. Nearly all larger companies feature a specific subset of society that move in and out of executive positions and nearly all of those people are old men. The women in that group tend to be significantly younger, though.

            End result? Young men are locked out of those positions, just as mentioned. Not least since it’s now pretty much an open secret that advancement to middle management and moving to administrative positions (which often make a move to management much easier) in most STEM companies is much easier for women than men.

          • Yrro says:

            Really, the problem is the time delay. It takes 40-50 years of actual meritocracy and equality for women to rise to a representative number of senior positions. We could have passed that point twenty years ago and the metrics won’t show it yet.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          According to this article, women now make up 52% of PhDs in biology but occupy only 18% of full professorships. This explains the disconnect pretty straightforwardly– the administrator lecturing Dr Dealgood is concerned about underrepresentation of women among biology faculty, particularly senior faculty, but that underrepresentation is not reflected in Dr Dealgood’s cohort of students.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Yeah I sort of hinted at that by mentioning that there was a parity / majority in PIs under 50, rather than all PIs. The new faculty and current students are where I see women dominating.

            The issue with that is that senior faculty are, well, senior. Mostly senior citizens as well for that matter. Even if my incoming class was 100% women there wouldn’t be any change in the makeup of the senior faculty for at least a few decades. It’s a solution which cannot possibly solve the problem.

          • CandyceRogers says:

            Can’t some of that be explained by simple matters of age? You all are dancing around this point but no one seems to have come right out and said it. If in fact there are more women represented in today’s graduating classes than there were 30-40 years ago (when today’s senior executive group was in college), then doesn’t it hold that in 30-40 years we’ll see that effect become more noticeable in the upper ranks? Women are increasing, it’s just going to take a while for them to gain the experience and influence and status that today’s senior executive folks have now. IOW *it is already happening* and feminists can stop wringing their hands so much.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The absolute WORST thing? I don’t know if this is the absolute worst thing, but suppose the institutionalized Social Justice movement chooses as one of its “marginalized groups” a group distinguished by its ruthlessness, propensity for violence, and hatred for the culture in which the Social Justice movement is embedded.

      This so-called marginalized group takes advantage of this to work their way into positions of power through everything from rigged elections and tests to intimidation and murder of their opponents. All of this is either applauded, excused, denied, or ignored by the Social Justice movement because it is done by members “marginalized group”.

      Then once the “marginalized group” has enough power in their own right, they eliminate all their rivals (most particularly including the Social Justice leaders) and institute a genocidal and tyrannical regime.

      That’s among the worst things that could happen.

      (Any resemblance to real events occurring in certain European countries is probably intended)

      • Muga Sofer says:

        >This so-called marginalized group takes advantage of this to work their way into positions of power through everything from rigged elections and tests to intimidation and murder of their opponents.

        ?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          The Musselmen, the Mohammedans, creating Eurabia as we speak.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            I live in Europe. I got the reference to The Muslim Immigrants easily enough, I just can’t for the life of me get what the quoted paragraph is referencing (unless it’s just a hyperbolic prediction for the future.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            Yes, it’s a hyperbolic extrapolation. Not a prediction, I don’t think Europe is dumb enough to let it go all the way. The question was “what is the worst that could happen”, so extrapolation was called for.

            The real-life basis of the extrapolation is the apparent willingness of the countries involved to downplay certain crimes committed by refugees, because it would be politically incorrect to acknowledge them.

          • Zorgon says:

            “I just can’t for the life of me get what the quoted paragraph is referencing”

            I took it as a reference to numerous accusations of electoral fraud in majority-Muslim inner city areas in the UK. (Personally I tend to assume those specific accusations are isolated demands for rigour, since electoral fraud is ubiquitous and almost expected here. See: MI5 securing the 1992 general election for Thatcher.)

    • James Picone says:

      Marginalisation and discounting of male victims of rape and abuse, particularly when the perpetrator is female? IIRC we have a semi-occasional commenter around here who was shunned by his fairly-feminist friendship group after telling them he was raped by a woman. It’s not like male victims get taken seriously in the current culture, of course, but some strains of the social justice movement are very hostile to the idea.

      Hope the right people end up calling the shots; if the radfems are the ones with power, you wouldn’t want to be trans.

    • vV_Vv says:

      Where people deliberately or subconsciously misinterpret results to skew their implications towards benefiting a marginalised group?

      Like male nerds?

    • Kendall says:

      One concern I’ve seen raised by some women in STEM and the skeptic movement is that scaremongering about sexism within a field could actually put off women from entering it.

      Tell women that misogyny is rife in a particular career, that unequal treatment is likely to limit their success, and some might choose to work elsewhere, i.e. where there’s already a better gender balance.

      Celebrating improvements in equality, and the achievements of women who do enter and excel in male dominated fields, seems more productive to me.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Indeed, I’ve been hearing this line of argument for a while and kinda discounted it… until I noticed a number of the SJ types _specifically saying_ they’d tell young women of their acquaintance not to enter CS with all its horrible toxic privileged white male mansplaining misogynerds.

    • Zorgon says:

      There are two problems with your idea here.

      1) There’s an implicit assumption that “white males” are a homogeneous group with evenly distributed privilege. That is certainly a common social justice concept, but also one that bears no relationship with reality.

      (Yesterday evening as I hobbled to my girlfriend’s flat I noticed a young White Straight Cis Male (TM) I’ve seen around town a few times sleeping in the overhang entrance to my town’s rather grandiose library. I don’t think he’s been homeless long, he has numerous bags and a big, high-quality sleeping bag, which is good as it’s February. Even so, I defy anyone on the face of the planet to tell me that guy is “privileged” by any meaningful definition whatsoever.)

      2) What exactly constitutes an acceptable amount of disadvantage to inflict on “privileged” groups purely for being members of that group?

      Are we just talking about having more difficulty in access to justice, education and abuse services? Actually, oops, all of those already exist for “white men”. OK then… direct negative bias in employment? Forced pay cuts in order to pay them the same as a woman in the same job class (regardless of experience or job description)?

      How about restricting their access to healthcare so women and minorities can have better treatment? (After all, women live longer so they need more healthcare over the course of their lives and besides, everyone knows men invent illnesses all the time.)

      OK then, how about making it so that only men are subject to the prison system and that women are instead put into hospitals or rehabilitation clinics? (After all, it’s not like women can be properly violent in the way a man can.)

      All sounding too reasonable? How about chemically castrating all men after they reach adulthood and provide sperm samples in order to “prevent rape”? Chromosome testing all babies and aborting all but a tiny percentage of male babies, thus ensuring future generations will not have to deal with the Male Scourge?

      It’s not like we want to put men in death camps, you understand. Just in controlled environments where they can live out their lives in relative luxury, kept from the possibility of hurting women and minorities.

      ***

      OK, I know the latter entries are coming from the psycho end of the radfem movement (although not as obscure as I’d prefer… far too many wannabe edgy teenage Tumblr idiots spout this stuff). I was just having fun. But my point was perhaps straightforward. If you inflict systematic disadvantage using regulatory means on a group, where exactly does the line of “acceptable” lie? Is a White Male Tax OK? How about quotas on lottery winners (since “white males” already won the genetic lottery)? How about we just have mandatory beatings every day for anyone white and male?

      Where does the line lie? What specifically about the demands of the more “moderate” SJWs makes them more reasonable than it would be to do any of these things to any other group of people, ESPECIALLY on the grounds of unselected traits like race or gender? Why is it suddenly OK if it’s the right race and gender?

      The answer, in case you’re wondering, is that it isn’t OK, it was never OK, it will never be OK, and no amount of shitty rationalisation is going to make it any better.

      • Sastan says:

        “Privilege” is just the current magic word being used to excuse racism and bigotry.

        Once upon a time it was that the jews were thought to control all the world. I mean, everyone knew that! Now it’s white men, who secretly control everything! Even the US, with its lilly white president…….

        We all know that “Those People” secretly control X. And therefore our hatred and persecution of Those People isn’t rampant bullying, but insurgent tactics against a superior foe! Any reaction by normal people is just the result of Evil Propaganda and Dirty Tricks by X. Any one of Those People who seems reasonable is merely trying to trick us with their (commie/man/jew)splaining!

      • Loyle says:

        “Even so, I defy anyone on the face of the planet to tell me that guy is “privileged” by any meaningful definition whatsoever.”

        I don’t know how meaningful it’d be, but were you comparing him to the bulk of society, or to others in his similar position? I can certainly imagine someone trying to argue that if he were black he’d be shooed away, have his stuff stolen or vandalized, and he’d be arrested or shot. Or maybe that he was less at risk to be in his situation in the first place?

        All I know is that the use of the word is based on “statistics~” and an individual anecdote isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          Yes, there’s something of a – I’m so sorry – Motte-and-Bailey going on there.

          • Zorgon says:

            There is certainly a motte-and-bailey going on, but it’s not me that’s using it. I’m more the one pointing at the big castle on the hill and saying “That! See! THAT!”

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Yes, that’s what I meant – the motte is “he’s better off in one specific way than someone else in the same position”, and the bailey is “he’s Privileged and everything in his life has gone perfectly”

          • Muga Sofer, I don’t think you’ve got the bailey right.

            It’s actually “he’s privileged, so anything that goes wrong in his life is too trivial to be worth concern when so many other people are suffering more.”

        • Cauê says:

          I can certainly imagine someone trying to argue that if he were black he’d be shooed away, have his stuff stolen or vandalized, and he’d be arrested or shot. Or maybe that he was less at risk to be in his situation in the first place?

          These are two very different hypotheses (for instance, the second one does not work in any way as a rebuttal to Sastan). Which one is the one that’s based on statistics?

          • Loyle says:

            The ideas of “Privilege” and “Systematic Oppression” are based on statistics, whether or not those statistics are honest when the subject is referenced.

            And those were just examples of possible arguments a person might make in response to the challenge. I don’t hear people talk of homelessness enough to know what arguments they would actually make. Just wondering whether “Others would have it worse in the same situation” would be something Zorgon considered people would suggest.

          • Loquat says:

            @Loyle –

            Having spent time around social-justicey parts of the internet, I can guarantee you one of the main counterarguments would be some variation of “but that homeless white guy would have it so much worse if he were homeless and black/gay/female/etc”.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Loquat

            Which is a totally absurd argument, as it can be turned around with zero effort: “That black/gay/female person would have it so much worse if they were homeless”. There are multiple disadvantages that exist, so… the one you didn’t mention must be worse? Huh? What?

          • Loquat says:

            @Anonymous

            Well, the theory is that being white gives you a lot of privilege no matter how many other problems you may have. People of any color, gender, etc, can be homeless, or addicted, or scraping by on minimum wage, or whatever, but if you’re a straight white male at least you don’t ALSO have to deal with racism/sexism/homophobia.

            As for the question of what good is *accomplished* by using Privilege Theory to prove that an impoverished white person isn’t quite at rock bottom of the social ladder… I really couldn’t tell you.

        • Zorgon says:

          >> All I know is that the use of the word is based on “statistics~”

          That’s the thing, though – it really is not. The definition of the word is (very loosely) based on statistics, but the use of it is not.

          Privilege as defined by social justice-y academics is a somewhat vague concept that seems to start out as “lack of structural oppression” and then in usage somehow manages to become a set of coherent advantages provided to one specific group of people… regardless of whether or not those advantages are meaningful, relevant or even existent to the members of that group.

          The problem with this approach is twofold. Firstly, it’s blatantly original sin, since you don’t normally get to choose whether to be assigned male at birth and you don’t get to choose your skin colour. Screw that for a game of soldiers.

          Secondly, it outright erases every single person in that group for whom those “privileges” do not exist. Probabilities are not actually a part of everyday life. “A black person is more likely to be homeless than a white person” doesn’t change the fact that the guy I mentioned upthread is clearly embarking on a period of homelessness at all. Indeed, by invoking that very thing you’ve both erased his clear (and real) suffering AND effectively blamed him for having it because clearly he’s just not enough of a Victim Class to deserve pity.

          There is no context in which that guy is “privileged” by any meaningful definition. “Statistically” is not a real-world context. It does not affect his life. It doesn’t get him off the library steps and it won’t stop the police moving him on.

          And our dear friends in SJ? They actively encourage the idea that resources that might be spent to prevent that specific, real-world person’s suffering should instead be spent on things that benefit their chosen Victim Classes.

          The reason an individual anecdote isn’t going to change anyone’s mind is not because it does not affect the statistics, meaningless as they are to real-world cases. It’s because an anecdote about a Cis White Male in clear difficulty does not fit the Victim Narrative. An anecdote about a woman, or a black person, or any other Victim Class would suddenly become a moral imperative to SJ people. The sole reason this one does not is because SJ people are incapable of even the slightest hint of the “intersectionality” they so fervently profess. They’re hypocrites, all of them, political hipsters playing at saving the world.

          • Loyle says:

            I was with you til that last paragraph there. Like, yeah regardless of how the population finds itself spread out, we should treat individuals with regards to their circumstances.

            I’m not sure how you’ve experienced things, but I’ve noticed that people in general have a really hard divorcing their understanding of the world from established memes, unless they have a specific desire for the memes to not be true. And it’s not just when talking about how white men have it good/bad compared to victim classes that people are willing to make excuses how an individual story shouldn’t change how they think of the narrative.

            This isn’t new. It isn’t right, but it isn’t new.

          • Anonymous says:

            Agreed. More generally, there are two related mistakes made by Social Justice folks. One is to notice only a tiny handful of the factors that can advantage a person but ignore all the rest. So race counts but intelligence doesn’t. Gender counts but attractiveness doesn’t. Sexuality counts but social ability doesn’t. And so on. The disturbing thing is that I think in many ways they miss the factors that have the most impact. Personally, as a straight white male with a reasonably high IQ, I would rather become a black female lesbian and keep the IQ, than become low-IQ and remain straight, white and male.

            The second mistake is more ridiculous – treating averages as absolutes. If some disadvantage is suffered by 40% of people in Group A and 80% of people in Group B, that does not equate to “people in Group B have it twice as hard as people in Group A”. A person with the disadvantage has the disadvantage. A person without the disadvantage doesn’t have it. Being a member of a group that is less likely to have a disadvantage does nothing for you if you actually have the disadvantage. Oh, sure, whatever, it might be worse to be in a group that more commonly has the disadvantage, because people expect you to have it and as such treat you differently. On the other hand, having a disadvantage that is rare for your group means there will be fewer support networks and so on in place – economies of scale and all that. I don’t think it is at all obvious that the former of these effects is greater in impact than the latter, and segueing into claiming it is only when you’re called out on making the average-absolute conflation is disingenuous and classic motte-and-baileying.

          • If some disadvantage is suffered by 40% of people in Group A and 80% of people in Group B, that does not equate to “people in Group B have it twice as hard as people in Group A”. A person with the disadvantage has the disadvantage. A person without the disadvantage doesn’t have it.

            This reminds me of a case involving Canada’s rules for accepting refugees. The rules say that if you face persecution in your home country, you can apply for refugee status. A woman from the United States was facing thirty years in prison for doing something that is perfectly legal in Canada (consensual sex with a 16-year-old). Some Conservatives responded by saying, “I can’t believe people from first world countries are using this refugee rule, they have it so much better than people from other countries, they’re so privileged, blah blah blah.” They were apparently blind to the fact that this particular person, despite having the privilege of coming from a first world country, was facing three decades in prison.

        • Zorgon says:

          Also, I should probably mention that white males under 30 are the most likely cohort to be homeless in my country. But that’s still completely irrelevant.

    • rockroy mountdefort says:

      the worst thing that could happen is that we’d all have to spend our lives reading internet comments dripping with snideness and bad faith, like yours

      >What’s the absolute worst thing? That people become more conscious of disadvantaged groups and implement positive action in their favour?

      some people think it matters whether the “disadvantages” that people become more conscious of actually exist, and aren’t actually entirely made up

      crazy, out-there, meninist stuff here, I know

      >That groups who have had hundreds or thousands of years of institutionalised advantage are now marginally disadvantaged?

      hurting the living to punish the dead doesn’t seem like a great approach to anything m99

    • “Really, what is the worst that could happen if… people deliberately or subconsciously misinterpret results to skew their implications towards benefiting a marginalised group?”

      Women are not a marginalised group; they are both a demographic majority and an electoral majority (70.4 million women versus 60.7 million men voted in the 2008 presidential election.) We have many special laws that protect women, and only women, scholarships that are given to women, and only women, special educational opportunities that are give to women, and only women, etc.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        …a third to a tenth the suicide rate, massively lower violence rates, obvious favorable discrimination in legal outcomes, better health outcomes…

        • Liskantope says:

          …a third to a tenth the suicide rate

          I wish this statistic weren’t constantly being quoted without any mention of the fact that women attempt suicide at a much higher rate than men do.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Patriarchal Landmine – True, kind, necessary?

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            The rankings, as I see it actually implmented, is

            Kind >>> True > Necessary.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            I think very few comments meet the standards of evidence implied in the “true” description, so we’re left hanging on to “kind” and “necessary”. And Necessary is very ambiguous.

          • anon says:

            @honestly
            Mostly because reporting a comment for being untrue goes against the culture unless its obvious intentional misinfo.

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            Commenters here accept the ambiguity and expansive range of truth and necessity, but not kindness, IMO. But then again, I am a nasty troll.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @honestlymellowstarlight – “Commenters here accept the ambiguity and expansive range of truth and necessity, but not kindness, IMO. But then again, I am a nasty troll.”

            I don’t think kindness has anywhere near the ambiguity of truth or necessity. I also think it is really valuable, and this culture’s attachment to it is a big part of what makes it worth hanging around. The whole wide internet is available for screaming at people, but this corner of it is for treating people like reasonable humans, even if we disagree with them. That courtesy is what protects the crazy right-wingers here, so it’s only fair that it should protect the crazy left-wingers as well.

            I don’t actually disagree with the substance of PL’s statement, but I think they’re making their point like a jerk, and think that they would do better to try for either a bit more kindness or a shed-load more truth and necessity.

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            @FacelessCraven
            It is nice to see examples of what I’m talking about. I see it more as a sort of AIDS, but for social interation. Stress is good for the body, etc. And the thought of needing someone to “protect” me from what I say gives me hives, it reads as hideously publically weak.

            And of course you don’t disagree, you thought what he said was mean, as if the truth was always cute and cuddly. That’s sort of my point, true/kind/necessary is really only the one in the middle and pretending otherwise obscures things. Unless someone disagrees with me, which I would be interested to hear.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ honestlymellowstarlight:

            No, the problem is that he said what might have been a legitimate point like an asshole.

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            @Vox Imperatoris
            Yeah, and saying things “like an asshole” is assumed to be intentional and/or bad, like we’re all running off the same social scripts and emotional vunerablities.

            I point out I have no disagreements with Scott’s implementation of the policy, only how it’s cited by commenters against other commenters.

          • anonymous says:

            If it gives you the hives, you welcome to quit trolling here and go back to 4chan.

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            @anonymous
            Was that two of (true, kind, necessary)? lolololol

          • hlynkacg says:

            @HMSL

            I’m going to wager on true and necessary.

            Seriously though, you need to step up your game if you’re going to keep hanging around here.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HMSL – “It is nice to see examples of what I’m talking about. I see it more as a sort of AIDS, but for social interation. Stress is good for the body, etc.”

            Charity and politeness are like AIDS?

            “And the thought of needing someone to “protect” me from what I say gives me hives, it reads as hideously publically weak.”

            politeness and charity don’t protect you, they protect the conversation. I would like to be able to talk to people I disagree with. people being jerks makes that harder.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            Did the comment that started this sub-thread get deleted? Or is just in the wrong place?

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @HeelBearCub: Deleted.

          • My understanding is that *attempted* suicide is often a cry for help. The fact that women attempt suicide more often, but men *actually* suicide far more often, suggests that most female suicide attempts are cries for help — that deep down, perhaps unconsciously, they’re hoping to get help from those around them rather than to actually end their lives.

            I suspect that you don’t see so many of these attempted-but-unsuccessful suicide attempt among men because, unlike women, they have no expectation that anyone will have any sympathy for them and offer any help.

          • Liskantope says:

            unlike women, they have no expectation that anyone will have any sympathy for them and offer any help.

            Possibly. Or, men are socialized not to ask for help, to hide their emotions, etc. (Only a slight variation on what you said.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            One of the primary ways men are socialized not to ask for help and to hide their emotions is to give them abuse when they ask for help or show their emotions. So unless the society has changed between the time this socialization took place and the later-on when they might consider a suicide attempt as a cry for help, those are two sides of the same coin.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          >[women have] a third to a tenth the suicide rate …

          But somewhat higher suicide *attempt* rates.

          • John Schilling says:

            We unfortunately use the word “suicide attempt” to refer to two very different behaviors, one of which is more common among men and the other more common among women.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            In my (admittedly limited) personal experience of depression, it’s more of a spectrum.

            EDIT: Of course, that same experience would lead me to disclaim that neither suicide attempts nor successful suicides necessarily reflects some sort of general factor of “quality of life” or “oppression”.

            Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/15/depression-is-not-a-proxy-for-social-dysfunction/

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Muga Sofer – “In my (admittedly limited) personal experience of depression, it’s more of a spectrum.”

            Perhaps so, but the disparity in success rates seems to indicate a discontinuity in that spectrum.

            “Of course, that same experience would lead me to disclaim that neither suicide attempts nor successful suicides necessarily reflects some sort of general factor of “quality of life” or “oppression”.”

            Why does the question of who kills themselves three times as often not reflect a general factor of quality of life or oppression, but Git PRs or women in tech or any other of a hundred oft-debated issues do?

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Because suicide is more often caused by psychiatric disease than by anything that could be considered “oppression”.

            This isn’t universally true – oppressed groups may find it harder to get medication (although I don’t believe that’s true in this case), and trauma can lead to depression and subsequent suicidality – but in general, it seems to be a public health concern.

            Certainly, both these figures are alarming from a public health standpoint, if only because they naively imply that it should be possible to lower women’s suicide attempt rates to match men’s, and lower men’s suicide success rates to match women’s. But they don’t in any way imply discrimination.

            (Biased GitHub referrals, on the other hand, are a form of discrimination. Albeit a small one.)

          • Zorgon says:

            “But they don’t in any way imply discrimination.”

            If the shoe was on the other foot you would be screaming to the high heavens that it ABSOLUTELY DID IMPLY DISCRIMINATION!!!1!

            The only reason SJ people get to enjoy this particular form of prevarication is because there is no good research into exactly why this specific disparity in suicide attempts/completions exists. And there won’t be as long as that sort of research is controlled by SJ people with an iron fist.

            But as a male with a history of depression… I can posit a strong theory of my own, and it most certainly has a lot to do with discrimination.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            > as a male with a history of depression… I can posit a strong theory of my own, and it most certainly has a lot to do with discrimination.

            As a male with a history of depression myself, I’m more inclined to hypothesize that this is about *depression*, not oppression – perhaps to the point of bias, if I’m honest.

            To be clear, when I thought that men *were* more likely to be suicidal, a number of obvious explanations presented themselves. I just don’t think that’s the case.

            >If the shoe was on the other foot you would be screaming to the high heavens that it ABSOLUTELY DID IMPLY DISCRIMINATION!!!1!

            I admit, if *both* statistics pointed to women having it “worse off” suicide-wise, I probably would be inclined to favour the oppression hypothesis.

            As it is, however, I think that the fcat I’m not crying “DISCRIMINATION!!!1!” about the fact that women have much higher levels of apparent suicidality is evidence enough that I wouldn’t do it if men attempted suicide more.

          • Zorgon says:

            >As a male with a history of depression myself, I’m more inclined to hypothesize that this is about *depression*, not oppression – perhaps to the point of bias, if I’m honest.

            Likewise… and more specifically about differential access to mental health services.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Zorgon:

            If the shoe was on the other foot you would be screaming to the high heavens that it ABSOLUTELY DID IMPLY DISCRIMINATION!!!1!

            Can all of us agree to stop mind-reading? I see way too much of it around here lately, even from people whose positions I largely agree with (like Zorgon). It’s pretty much the opposite of charity, and tends to drag discussion down to personal attacks and defensiveness.

            “If the shoe was on the other foot, wouldn’t you be claiming that it DID imply discrimination?” would be a slightly less-inflammatory, but still objectionable way to make the point. The only way I can think of to put it acceptable is to go directly to meta and ask for general criteria for when something indicates discrimination.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Muga Sofer – “Because suicide is more often caused by psychiatric disease than by anything that could be considered “oppression”.”

            You are probably correct, but I’m pretty sure you can’t actually prove that. Further, I’m pretty sure that the claim “male suicide is proof that men are oppressed” has a lot more actual evidence behind it than a great many claims frequently advanced by the Feminist movement, starting with the “women in tech” narrative. Certainly it is far more defensible than the Wage Gap, which is prevalent enough that I would not publicly contradict it under my actual name for fear of professional consequences.

            “Certainly, both these figures are alarming from a public health standpoint, if only because they naively imply that it should be possible to lower women’s suicide attempt rates to match men’s, and lower men’s suicide success rates to match women’s.”

            …That would require a recognition that the fact that men kill themselves three to ten times as often as women is a problem worth paying attention to, a position I’ve never heard advanced by anyone but filthy MRAs and people who made the mistake of listening to them. Speaking personally, when I was presented with the actual suicide statistics about a year and a half ago, I was initially convinced that they were false, since I “knew” that the female rate was higher and that suicide was primarily a women’s issue. This despite the fact that, at the time, I’d spent several months deeply depressed, too miserable to sleep barring extreme exhaustion, and fantasizing about how nice it would be to just not be alive anymore, and how I could make that happen reliably and with a minimum of mess.

            For what it’s worth, I do not think men are actually oppressed. I think life is painful in enough ways that every individual or group can be confident that their agonies are personal and unique. I do think, though, that women have an effective lobbying group, and men simply do not. Consequently, women’s problems receive attention and response in a way that men’s issues do not.

            Further, it seems obvious to me that Feminism, as a broad movement, is entirely happy with that state of affairs and actively works to maintain it. I find that contemptible.

          • Nita says:

            @ FacelessCraven

            I “knew” that the female rate was higher and that suicide was primarily a women’s issue.

            I’m sorry you were misled that way. Is that a typical misconception? I’ve considered myself a feminist as long as I’ve had any ideological affiliation at all, and I haven’t believed anything like that at any point in time. On the other hand, I’m not American, so…

            MRAs who actually talk about men’s rights/issues as such (as opposed to how feminism is the root of all evil) are doing good work, IMO. It’s unfortunate and wrong that many feminists have come to conflate men’s rights with anti-feminism and even misogyny. But some people in both movements tend turn every issue into a battle in the Great Gender War, and I’m not sure how to change that.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “Is that a typical misconception?”

            I have no idea. Looking back on what I remember of my beliefs at the time, I wasn’t under the impression that it was a particularly Feminist issue, just that it was a problem that hit women more. All the ads I saw for depression/SSRIs seemed to have a female, examples of tragic suicide in media seemed to be women, where male suicide usually came across as justice or an honorable way to die. I think it would be pretty easy to come up with a just-so story about how this is all society oppressing men, but that’s all it would be. To be clear, I am quite confidant that neither the suicide rate nor my impressions are created by Feminism, but it seems pretty clear that the movement as a whole isn’t real interested in helping either.

            “MRAs who actually talk about men’s rights/issues as such (as opposed to how feminism is the root of all evil) are doing good work, IMO.”

            That’s generous of you. Karen Straughan seems like that sort of person (the little I’ve seen of her material seemed fairly reasonable, if contrary to all received wisdom), but a lot of the other ones in the movement seem intent on simply gender-swapping feminism, including all the flaws. I think they raise some good points, but the movement as a whole seems pretty self-defeating.

            “It’s unfortunate and wrong that many feminists have come to conflate men’s rights with anti-feminism and even misogyny.”

            My guess is that as long as society interprets things according to the general oppression framework, this is inevitable. If everyone is either a victim or an oppressor, and if victims’ suffering matters more than that of oppressors, the only way to live is to seize victim status. That’s what the MRAs are trying to do, it seems to me. The framework isn’t supposed to devolve into oppression olympics, but it seems clear to me that it does more often than not, and that no one has a way to fix it. The model is fatally flawed.

            Obviously others disagree, though, so I guess we’ll see how it goes.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            FacelessCraven –

            I suspect it may be true that “men have it worse”. At least in the first world nations. I don’t think it matters that much.

            I play it up, however, because when you argue it effectively, people are far more willing to dismantle the oppressed-oppressor dichotomy (because they are more willing to dismantle the dichotomy than to treat men as oppressed, which is… interesting in a rather alarming way, but at least works for my ideological objectives of getting people to treat people as individuals rather than shoving them into classes).

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Liskantope – “I wish this statistic weren’t constantly being quoted without any mention of the fact that women attempt suicide at a much higher rate than men do.”

          @Muga Sofer – “But somewhat higher suicide *attempt* rates.”

          …An open question to either of you: I put forward that men have three to ten times the suicide rate of women, and you both immediately reply that the *attempt rate* for women is higher. This is entirely true. Since we all agree on the evidence, could either or both of you explain your interpretation of it? Do you hold that a smaller disparity in suicide attempts outweighs a *larger* disparity in successful suicides?

          • Muga Sofer says:

            >Do you hold that a smaller disparity in suicide attempts outweighs a *larger* disparity in successful suicides?

            No. I just think it suggests that this is a much weaker example than it appears to be in the absence of context.

            The obvious interpretation is that men attempt suicide in more immediately-lethal ways, probably for the same (societal?) reasons they tend to commit murders in more immediately-lethal ways. This could reasonably be considered gendered issue, much like the fact that many more men tend to die in violent crimes.

            On the other hand, the obvious interpretation is that this implies whatever causes suicide is more common in women; which, considering the statistic in isolation seems to imply the opposite is true, is a fairly important point. This could *also* be considered a gendered issue.

            At least, I think it is? I used to quote that statistic too, but stopped when I learned it was misleading.

          • Cauê says:

            This is the “they’re not equally competent at it” interpretation, and I really don’t think it’s the obvious one, compared to “they’re not attempting the same thing”.

          • Liskantope says:

            I think it’s unclear without further research on my part what the best interpretation is. I agree that there may be interpretations where different intentions behind suicide attempts are correlated with gender. But I do believe one factor at play here (admittedly not the only factor) is that men choose more violent means (for instance, guns) to attempt suicide, and these methods have a much higher chance of success. That in itself would tell us something interesting about gender and violence, although it’s not the main point.

            The main point is that merely saying “men have a higher suicide rate” in most contexts I see it quoted for (appearing to be arguing that men are more oppressed than women) seems to imply that men have it worse because they are more frequently driven to suicide. The fact that the female attempt rate is much higher at the very least makes that implication fairly dubious. Of course, the fact that more men succeed at suicide still does in itself indicate a disadvantage for men, but only inasmuch as it’s better to be suicidal but unable to kill oneself than to actually die of suicide.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Muga Sofer/@Liskantope/@FacelessCraven:
            Shouldn’t we at least be willing speculate a bifurcation of near end of natural life suicides vs. others?

            What I’m trying to get to here are long planned suicides vs. impulsive ones brought about by short term peaks in stressors. I don’t know what the split is, but I’m guessing planned suicides have a much higher rate of success across the board.

            The impulsive ones would seem to depend on the immediate availability of means that lead to success.

            Those are all more questions than answers, obviously.

          • John Schilling says:

            Planning is not the issue. Just about everybody has the means to kill themselves very reliably on almost no notice – jump out of a tall building if you’re in a city, else drive a car into a solid object at full speed. Just about everybody has the means to conduct a “suicide attempt” that is very likely to fail on short notice – barbituate overdose if you’ve got some, else slit your wrists (across, not lengthwise). And I think most people understand that jumping from a ten-story building almost always makes you dead whereas downing a handful of pills usually doesn’t.

            Intent is the issue. Most suicides reflect an unambiguous intent to die. Most suicide attempts do not.

          • Cauê says:

            But I do believe one factor at play here (admittedly not the only factor) is that men choose more violent means (for instance, guns) to attempt suicide, and these methods have a much higher chance of success.

            Surely choosing a method with a higher vs. lower chance of success has something to do with the intentions behind the attempt.
            (it’s intuitive to me that it should have much more to do with that than with gender, being such a big decision)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ John Schilling:

            Both male and female suicide attempts tend to be irrational and impulsive.

            By the time you’ve gotten to the top floor of the Empire State Building (or whatever), you are very likely to have reconsidered. Not to mention that it’s not that easy to get to the roof of most tall buildings.

            One big difference is that men are much more likely to own guns, which are much more likely to work on short notice.

            I think one of the major reasons women choose poison is not that they know it doesn’t work, but that poison in their minds offers a painless way out. (Often, what they choose is not painless at all, but they think so.)

            I’m not denying the phenomenon of fake suicide attempts, but I’m hardly sure that you can explain all of the difference that way.

          • Chalid says:

            Right, if the attempt vs success difference was primarily due to intention, you should see little effect of gun ownership rates on suicide success rates (for example). But of course you do see such an effect.

          • Nita says:

            @ Vox Imperatoris

            Yes.

            Also, they expect poison to be cleaner — you fall alseep and don’t wake up, your corpse doesn’t look too revolting, cleanup is easy. Choosing to splatter your blood and brain all over the carpet, or your guts all over the sidewalk, feels ugly and self-centered in contrast.

          • One argument I’ve seen for why women prefer pills for suicide attempts is that women are strongly acculturated to avoid making messes– and, I’d say, against looking ugly, which eliminates hanging.

            I don’t have a feeling for how much less effective pills are compared to shooting oneself, though obviously there are plenty of stories about people being taken to a hospital and having their stomach pumped. On the other hand, there are warnings all over the place about risks associated with pills.

            I’m going to go with the assumption that people aren’t reliably competent, and especially not about things they don’t usually do, so I’m not going to judge the seriousness of a suicide attempt by the effectiveness of the method if the method is at all plausible.

          • John Schilling says:

            But of course you do see such an effect.

            Right. We see gun-free Japan having twice the suicide rate of the United States, with Europe being roughly in the middle. Or was that not the effect you were referring to?

            Bringing guns into a suicide debate, or really any debate where they aren’t needed, tends to be mind-killing.

            And they aren’t needed here. Even if we take out every suicide ever attempted or completed with a gun, the effect under discussion remains overwhelming. Women, at least in the United States, are more than twice as likely as men to “attempt” suicide using methods that are unlikely to actually kill them. Men, again in the United States but taking the gun-wielding men (and women) entirely out of the equation, are more than twice as likely as women to actually kill themselves using highly lethal techniques. The relevant methods, mostly handful-of-barbituates and hanging respectively, with a side order of wrist-slitting and jumping and an unknown number of deliberate car crashes, are equally available to all genders.

            Please to explain this without any variation on “it was the deadly guns!”. Or we can derail the thread with yet another thousand posts on guns, which I thought we were done with and isn’t relevant to what we were talking about up to now.

          • Pete says:

            I tried to kill myself using drugs when I was a teenager (I’m male). I genuinely wanted to die. I regretted it soon afterwards. I told no-one for years (so I don’t believe it was a cry for help).

            Why drugs not another method? Taking pills isn’t as scary as other methods. I may have wanted to die, but I can imagine the pure, immediate terror jumping off a building and the thought is unpleasant. Hanging sounds extremely (and importantly immediately) painful. I had no access to a gun, but if I had, I imagine the immediacy of the pain and the death would have stopped me using it.

            Taking pills causes no immediate pain, and our brains are very good at discounting pain that will happen even in 20 minutes, compared to pain that will happen right this second. For me at least, wanting very badly to no longer be alive, didn’t reduce my fear of death, or pain, so I took the easier option.

            On another point, how do we know that more men commit suicide? Because we have actual dead bodies and causes of deaths. How do we know that more women attempt suicide? Because they tell us in surveys? Is it hospital reports? Surely an obvious potential answer for the discrepancy is that men attempt suicide as/more often as/than women, but admit to it less for whatever reason. Actual physical evidence (dead bodies) are surely better evidence than human testimony.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Nancy: The lethality of suicide rate by drug overdose is roughly 11%, and that’s almost certainly an overstatement as many of the failures will be reported as accidental overdoses (or not at all). This study suggests 2% lethality for suicide-by-drug, but is admittedly estimating the nonfatal suicide rate from ER admissions.

            Lethality of suicide-by-gunshot is 92%, from the first source. The most common non-gunshot methods of actual suicide were hanging and carbon monoxide poisoning, both at 78% lethality.

            Suicide attempts by drug overdose(*) and wrist-slitting are an entirely different order of thing than suicide attempts by gunshot or asphyxiation. And I do not think that this is terribly obscure; as you note, “take handful of pills, wake up in hospital with lots of people caring for you” is a cliche at this point.

            * Not counting premeditated physician-assisted suicide.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Pete: We know that women attempt suicide more often than men in part because they tell us about it, yes, but they are telling us about it from hospital beds where they were brought after having rather obviously inflicted serious injury on themselves. Pretty much every count of suicide attempts I have seen, starts with ER visits for self-harm, and those are pretty unambiguous.

            There may be a marginal difference in the rate with which men and women will pass off a weak suicide-by-overdose attempt as a merely reckless accident, but I believe that by the time you get anywhere close to killing yourself that way you are also scheduled for three days with an overworked psychiatric resident who will have a say in how it gets recorded and has heard all the usual stories. Same goes for passing off a failed suicide-by-gunshot as an accident.

            Out of curiosity, was your case recorded as a suicide attempt at the time?

          • Adam says:

            Men are more likely to present risk factors unrelated to chronic mental illness, like being war veterans, recently released prisoners, even unemployed (but not as much as a few years ago), though as far as I can tell, the effect size is so massive it does not even come close to disappearing if you control for these things.

          • Chalid says:

            @John Schilling

            So you don’t want to discuss the guns, but only after you write much more about them than I did, and in a *far* more inflammatory way, too. But ok, I guess that’s how you communicate.

            I actually thought it was a point of general agreement that guns and suicides were associated; it’s one of the conclusions in Scott’s “Guns and States” post and I recall many comments discussing the claim in a generally supportive way (though I admit I did not read *all* the comments in both threads). If it were true, then it ought to have significant implications for how we can interpret intention in suicides, should it not?

            If guns and suicides are related, as Scott and most of the commentariat seemed to think, it is absolutely relevant to this discussion, and frankly adds far more information than just handwaving about the availability of other methods, speculating about suicides’ mental states and expertise in suicide techniques, etc.

            If you don’t believe in such a link… well, lots of people do, and maybe having a connection pointed out will inform their thinking.

            Please believe me when I say that I had no intention of turning this into a discussion about gun control.

          • Jiro says:

            I actually thought it was a point of general agreement that guns and suicides were associated; it’s one of the conclusions in Scott’s “Guns and States” post

            Gun suicides are important with respect to gun deaths, but unimportant with respect to suicides. (Where “important” means “significantly affects your conclusions about”.) This is not contradictory.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Chalid:

            1. There is a universally-acknowledged and strong correlation between guns and suicide by gunshot. Guns are the preferred suicide method of Southern-ish men who own guns and want to commit suicide. The correlation between guns and suicide in general, if it exists at all, is much weaker and likely to vanish in a fog of cofounders. And Scott deliberately pulled away from that discussion at the “guns correlate with gun suicides” level to focus on homicides.

            2. A one-sentence drive-by of the form “guns correlate with badness” will get just as inflammatory a response as a one-sentence “feminists correlate with badness”, for about the same reason. I would rather not see either one here. I would not expect either to go unchallenged.

            3. How is the alleged and unquantified “link” between guns and suicides relevant to the discussion of the gender differential in the rate of suicide attempts vs. actual suicides, when that differential remains huge even when you eliminate all gun suicides from the dataset, or even when you look at gun-free Japan? You have a hypothesis that does not even begin to explain the anomaly at hand. What else do you have?

            Really, it looks like you are making the same forest-for-trees kind of mistake as the promoters and even authors of that github study. There is a substantial anomaly screaming from the dataset – deanonymized submitters are less likely to have their code accepted, women are more likely than men to attempt suicide but less likely to succeed. But rather than try to explain that, they focus on a relatively minor differential and shout “it’s the sexism!”, you look at a small differential and shout “it’s the guns!”.

          • John, I had no idea the effectiveness of drugs for suicide was so low, and I do have a lot of random information.

          • Adam says:

            Anything that has to be digested gives you a pretty big window in which to voluntarily or involuntarily spew it back up before that happens. If people tried to poison themselves by injecting frog venom or drinking bleach, I’m sure it would work a lot better.

          • Chalid says:

            @John Schilling

            To 1 and 2: read the conclusion of Scott’s “Guns and States” post. One of his points is that “an Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side effects would probably prevent about 2,000 murders in the US. It would also prevent a much larger number of suicides.” And if you search “suicide” in the comment thread you’ll find that a pretty large majority of comments that take a stand seem to believe that guns increase suicide, including one by Scott. Note the study by Alex Tabarrok too. Maybe you disagree but I do think you are the minority opinion here.

            3: The relevance is this. You have made the claim that, in general, people who succeed at suicide *really mean* it, and those that fail at suicide don’t. If that were true, then you would not expect the “trivial inconvenience” of finding a reliable non-gun method would affect suicide rates. And yet (most people believe) it does. Note that I was replying in support of Vox, who was making this point except without data.

            I don’t think a gun/suicide link explains the male-female differential and I have no idea why you think that I think that. It merely makes a particular suggested mechanism behind the differential less likely.

          • Cauê says:

            Right, if the attempt vs success difference was primarily due to intention, you should see little effect of gun ownership rates on suicide success rates (for example). But of course you do see such an effect.

            What we’d be interested to see here is gun ownership having an effect on male vs. female suicide rates. Do we see that?

            Now, I just eyeballed Wikipedia lists, but that doesn’t jump out at all. The US and UK have the same male/female ratios, for instance.

          • Chalid says:

            @Caue

            Whether one “needs” to see that depends on what point one is trying to make with the data.

            I am merely making the point that if trivial inconveniences affect suicide rates, then it is problematic to attempt to infer much about intent from success rates. No male/female discrepancy is particularly required for this point.

            @everyone

            I suppose I should explicitly say that I have no idea what the “real” cause is, and I am absolutely not trying to darkly hint anything. if you look at the abstract Nancy Lebovitz found, you see “Theories that attempt to explain this finding focus on gender differences in suicidal intent, socialization, emotions, interpersonal relationships, orientation and access to methods, and neurobiological factors,” and hey, one can construct superficially plausible theories around lots of those! Which is why it’s useful to try and rule some out, e.g. with intent and the guns/trivial inconveniences issue.

            (Conveniently, Nancy’s paper is also a test of the intent hypothesis. It claims to rule out intent via a psychological autopsy study (basically, interviews and reading through health/psychiatric history): “Although women were significantly less likely to use a violent method than men, there was no difference in the lethality of their suicidal intent.”) FWIW.

          • Montfort says:

            @Nancy, Chalid:

            The paper’s on libgen.

            It seems odd to me that they try to distinguish between suicidal intent by measuring the suicidal intent of successful suicides. I am not surprised that successful suicides measure about the same on the psychological autopsy, but maybe I’m missing something.

            Edit:
            I suppose under a basic model where “really suicidal” people try really hard to kill themselves, and succeed with probability X, and “less really suicidal” people try less hard, but still succeed with probability Y (where X>Y, but Y is still significant relative to population size), you would expect to see some difference. But it still seems like a more direct comparison would be a random people attempting suicides (not of suicide attempts – repeat attempts would confound things).

          • Just a little something for the Inkling fans: there’s a bit in a Charles Williams novel (probably Descent into Hell about a man who committed suicide with a suggestion that if he’d taken as much care about what he’d done in rest of his life as he did about his suicide, his life would have gone better. This wasn’t played for laughs.

          • Chalid says:

            @Montfort

            Your edit is of course correct. Keep in mind that X can be quite a lot larger than Y.

            I expect that doing these profiles on unsuccessful suicides is prohibitively difficult – harder to get access to medical records since you’d need the patient’s permission, family less likely to talk to a nosy researcher, and of course there are probably a lot of ethics concerns.

        • I assume that some fraction of the difference is the result of men mistreating other men rather than favoritism towards women.

          • anon says:

            In the context of discussing which gender is more marginalized (the marginalization olympics?), does the distinction matter?

          • vV_Vv says:

            What is the difference?

          • The difference is that the discussion seems to frequently get framed as either women are awful or women are unfairly favored. If part of the situation is that men should treat each other to some extent the way men treat women, then this should get mentioned.

          • onyomi says:

            I was thinking about the “women are wonderful” effect, and also the “goddess or whore” dichotomy and thought: maybe much of what we call “sexism,” against women, or, indeed, against men, is just one more instance of the outgroup homogeneity effect.

          • vV_Vv says:

            I think we all agree that Western men tend to treat women better than they treat other men.

            This can be framed as men giving unfair advantage to women or unfair disadvantage to men, it depends on what do you consider as the baseline of fair treatment. In practice, this looks like splitting hair.

            It is expected, and to some extent inevitable, that men give preferential treatment to women, at least as long as they can’t treat them as chattel. And even in very patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia or the ISIS, where women are indeed considered pretty much like chattel, men still try to shelter them from physical danger more than they shelter fellow men.
            After all, from the point of view of a heterosexual male, women are reproductive resources while other men are reproductive competitors.

            The usual criticism of modern feminists is that they keep complaining that women in the first-world are treated worse than men and they ask for special benefits to “level the playing field” while in fact first-world women are generally treated at least as good as or better than men.

          • dust bunny says:

            They’re perhaps nicer and more considerate, but they’re also more dismissive and less inclined to take women seriously. You may disagree on what being treated well entails, but having experience with both lack of respect and lack of kindness, I consider the lack of respect a greater threat to my wellbeing by a wide margin.

            Old and ugly women exist too, by the way. They might not even concede your point on the kindness.

    • Maware says:

      People will start to hate the marginalized group even more, because it’s obvious they are being promoted unfairly. Said marginalized group will also be angry at being patronized and needing constant deck-stacking in order to achieve normal results, because you know they are oppressed. They need our help, you know. Systematic injustice. It’s not like they’d ever get hired solely on the quality of their work alone.

    • NN says:

      What’s the worst thing that could happen if you discriminate against a group that has had hundreds or thousands of years of institutionalised advantage?

      The Rwandan genocide.

      Less extreme but still quite horrific examples include the “fast-track land reform” of white farmers in Zimbabwe and the expulsion of Pieds-Noirs from Algeria after the end of French rule. See also every Communist revolution ever.

      No, I don’t think outcomes anywhere near extreme as those are likely to happen in the West, but pretending that discrimination against “privileged groups” is harmless is not only wrong but actively dangerous.

      • Muga Sofer says:

        The French Revolution was also pretty clearly aimed at “privileged groups” – i.e. rich people – as were much of Maoism’s purges.

        • Simon says:

          Having read the two published parts of Frank Dikotter’s trilogy to be on Mao’s actions during The Great Leap Forward and the Chinese Revolution I think you are crediting the Great Helmsman with too much organizational structure in the purges. Notionally they were against property owning classes and industrialists but as things uncoiled they grew swiftly indiscriminate.

          When the mud and straw buildings of ordinary farmers are being crushed for “fertilizer” to “improve” soil and yields, leaving huge numbers without shelter, things are not operating on normal rationality.

          Recommended reads BTW.

        • Not to mention the Kulaks, who Stalin murdered for being only slightly less poor than their neighbours.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Tom Bull asks: what is the worst that could happen?

      Is that a serious question?

      Nobody not Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, ‘Now, let’s create a really oppressive and evil society.’ Hitler said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.’ And Lenin said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.’

      “In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough.”

      -Anton Scalia, commencement address to University of West Virginia

    • Daniel Kokotajlo says:

      For the record, I agree with you Tom Bull.

      The worst that can *realistically* happen isn’t that bad, relatively speaking. Which is why I’m way more concerned with being an effective altruist and making the world a better place than with fighting the culture war.

      • eh says:

        I present this list of left-wing mass murder deniers as evidence that, when genocides begin, movements similar to the social justice movement can both drive them to greater extremes and hamper attempts to stop them.

        In a world where half a million or more die from malaria each year, it’s understandable that you might want to focus on those deaths, rather than vague future possibilities of genocide. However, a disturbingly large number of countries contain ongoing genocides, and those countries are by and large the ones which effective altruists have to help. Regarding privilege, it’s obvious that the position of the Tutsis relative to the Hutus before the Rwandan genocide – rich, educated, middle class, and of a different ethnic group – was very much a privileged one. What’s not so obvious is that the DRC could probably afford more mosquito nets and deworming tablets if it hadn’t been plunged into two decades of racial violence in the aftermath of Rwanda.

        It’s very easy to believe that ideologies can’t have terrible consequences from the safety of America, and it’s very easy to build an ideology around criticising American whites, because as a group they’re impervious to harm, and because they have an undeniable history of slavery and colonialism. What will have real consequences is the application of Social Justice terminology and tactics elsewhere in the world. I’m worried that Americans, and other first-worlders, don’t see that socially-permissible racial vilification might lead to horrific consequences.

    • David Moss says:

      “Really, what is the worst that could happen if there is an institutionalised social justice movement like you say? Where people deliberately or subconsciously misinterpret results to skew their implications towards benefiting a marginalised group?”

      You’ve assumed the very thing which Scott was expressing doubts about: that the institutionalised social justice movement is simply about helping up the relatively disadvantaged.

      The worry is that “institutionalised social justice” ends up doing things which are nothing to do with helping disadvantaged groups e.g. taking a case where women are on the whole decisively advantaged relative to men and demanding more advantages; lowering the status of ‘enemy’ cultures just cos; providing an excuse to mock the weak and low status; denouncing the more progressive candidates (Corbyn, Sanders) because they’re not approved by the social justice clique, etc.

    • Really, what is the worst that could happen if there is an institutionalised social justice movement like you say? Where people deliberately or subconsciously misinterpret results to skew their implications towards benefiting a marginalised group? What’s the absolute worst thing? That people become more conscious of disadvantaged groups and implement positive action in their favour? That groups who have had hundreds or thousands of years of institutionalised advantage are now marginally disadvantaged?

      If you skew your interpretations because you think a group is marginalised, and you think that group is marginalised because of other people’s skewed interpretations, and you convince other people to skew their interpretations…how sure are you that the group you think is marginalised is really marginalised?

      More importantly, people aren’t skewing their interpretations towards benefiting those groups. They’re skewing their interpretations towards creating moral outrage. That may or may not benefit the groups. For instance, girls reading these news stories about the supposedly massive discrimination they’d face in tech might respond, quite rationally, by avoiding careers in tech. How is that to anyone’s benefit?

      Furthermore, where’s the “hundreds or thousands of years of institutionalised advantage” for 1st and 2nd generation Chinese immigrants? They’re the ones being overwhelmingly passed over for Ivy League admissions even though they’ve just arrived from a far poorer country.

      • InferentialDistance says:

        That may or may not benefit the groups. For instance, girls reading these news stories about the supposedly massive discrimination they’d face in tech might respond, quite rationally, by avoiding careers in tech. How is that to anyone’s benefit?

        It benefits websites who get paid advertising fees for everyone who clicks their articles. The more they mine the outrage, the worse the underlying problem gets, and the more justified their outrage appears.

    • Dave_M says:

      To be effective in creating positive change in the world you first need an accurate model of reality. Most versions of feminism and other SJ activism actively suppress critical thought, actively suppress the truth if it doesn’t fit their preconceived worldview. They often do more harm than good by pushing their simplistic solutions to complex problems.

  25. Murphy says:

    I have a question about the error bars/confidence intevals/things.

    Which are they? I was under the impression that they scraped the whole of github so confidence intervals don’t make sense. it would be like explicitly counting that you have 102019 bricks in a pile then sticking a confidence interval on it for no damned reason.

    • Decius says:

      Some contributors were not genderable?

      We have 102019 (bricks and cinderblocks), but there are some masonry items that we can’t figure out if they are bricks or cinderblocks.

    • Consider a random process in which PRs are generated and accepted. In this random process, women have an acceptance rate A_w and men have an acceptance rate M_w.

      Now think of historical github as a sampling of this random process.

      The confidence intervals/error bars/etc apply to that random process, and should alter your beliefs about *future* samples from that random process (assuming the world doesn’t change). I.e., after reading this study, you should change your offered betting odds on whether an individual randomly selected *future* female pull request will be accepted.

  26. Decius says:

    Your summary indicates that an automated program scraped usernames, the presence of a profile picture, and other available information to determine apparent gender.

    Did it use image recognition to attempt to determine a gender of the profile picture? Does a random sample of the gender assignment given by the program correlate well with manual scoring?

    • Deiseach says:

      Your summary indicates that an automated program scraped usernames, the presence of a profile picture, and other available information to determine apparent gender.

      Since for my Facebook account my profile photo is a screencap of the God Shiva* I took from an online upload of a Hindi TV serial, I would love to see this programme try identifying my gender based on that 🙂 (For a start, would they count the third eye or not?)

      *If you think I’m going to stick a real photo of my ugly mug online for the world and his wife to gawp at, you badly underestimate my level of reclusiveness.

  27. Dave Berry says:

    Most of the articles that I’ve read about discrimination against women have noted that female approvers/reviewers are pretty much as biased as male approvers/reviewers, from which they conclude there is a systemic bias. So I’m not surprised that this survey notes that women reviewers are as hard on submissions from women. The coverage in the press is another matter entirely!

    • Muga Sofer says:

      Yeah, this is a pretty standard finding, it’s just inexplicably absent from the popular narrative. Similar findings exist for racism.

      • dust bunny says:

        I seriously suspect being prejudiced against a group into which one belongs is simply too difficult a concept for most people to handle. It can be explained to them, and they understand it; it’s not that it’s too complicated. The next week they will have forgotten all about it, or their recollection of whatever was explained has mutated beyond recognition, or their understanding of it is entirely context-specific. The idea that people are consistent and rational is too deeply ingrained in them. They can’t bring themselves to really believe/accept/comprehend that people are capable of holding multiple contradictory beliefs at the same time. People who appear to do so must always be lying.

  28. To your list of pre-peer review comments I would add:

    10. If in the end the analysis fails to find any evidence of gender bias, submit the heck out of the paper anyway until it is published somewhere, anywhere. (Publication bias is a bias too!)

  29. d says:

    I was about to post a slightly snippy correction to a Metafilter comment about the SSC analysis, but actually on closer reading I think they may have a point. They were complaining that Scott’s characterization of women’s submission as being “less likely to serve project needs” wasn’t right, as the report said “less likely to serve a project’s immediate needs”. I was going to say that Scott actually used the word “immediate” in the preceding sentence, so it was hardly a big shift in meaning.

    But then I noticed that Scott summarized these submissions again later as “less useful changes”. I don’t think that’s right. Patches that mention Github issue (or user report) tend to address immediate problems (i.e. they’re bugfixes for specific bug reports or feature requests). Patches that don’t mention a specific issue are more likely to be new features or systematic rearchitecting of the software. They don’t necessarily serve _immediate_ needs, but it’s a bigger jump to say they’re less *useful* or not serving the project’s needs more generally.

    I realize that in both of these contexts, the broader picture is that women appear to be getting submissions accepted which are usually harder to get accepted, so yay women; but the characterization might be a little off. I think you can stick another immediate in the first mention and not lose anything. “Less useful changes”, I don’t know how to fix. Maybe describe them as “less obvious improvements”? Or just fall back on the “less immediately useful”?

    • Kyle says:

      The way the study assumes a “need” is highly flawed. If both the issue and the pull request come from external sources (if they were from internal sources then why open an issue or PR instead of just fixing it?) then most likely it’s the same person opening the issue and offering a fix. Thus it may be a need to the submitter but not particularly important to the project.

      What I’d consider more important or needful are issues that have been open for months or years and are full of “+1 please fix” type comments. Some projects even put bounties on their most needed or hardest issues so who is collecting those bounties?

      (Maybe I’m misremembering, but until like 3-5 years ago didn’t GitHub automatically create an issue for every pull request?)

  30. Deiseach says:

    the researchers wrote a program to automatically link contributor emails to Google Plus pages

    Annnnd crap like this is why I don’t have a Google + page or anything like it. Would it have killed them to ask contributors for permission to search their gender, or ask them to submit their gender in the first place?

    If I want you to know personal details, I will provide them. If I’m contributing something anonymously, then I don’t want you to know that stuff.

    By comparing obviously gendered participants with non-obviously gendered participants whom the researchers had nevertheless been able to find the gender of

    How good was this programme to find gender? If the researchers could find out a contributor was actually Sally Smith from other sources and were able to check that against the result given for the ‘guess the gender’ programme, that’s fine, but if they couldn’t find out who it was and made the best guess as to gender, how good was this best guess?

    If someone wants to tell me that no, they did ask permission and yes, it is a hot-stuff programme that is really very accurate for finding out real gender, then I’ll happily take correction.

    • anon says:

      Asking every contributor would have certainly led to a far smaller dataset.

      • Deiseach says:

        I’ll yield on far smaller, but surely more accurate than “we’ll try a gender-guessing programme” on the non-gendered names? If your point is to try and investigate possible gender bias, then trying “This was submitted by a female, if my interpretation of the username ‘killerbeez666’, profile photo of an octopus unscrewing a jar lid from the inside, and link to pastel-coloured biker leathers on Pinterest is accurate” may perhaps lead you astray in deciding which pile the particular submission goes in for counting.

        • anon says:

          Thinking on it a bit more they could’ve probably still gotten a fairly large dataset by directly asking, mass emailing isn’t that hard.

    • honestlymellowstarlight says:

      This was my first reaction too, but if you post something publically, you post something publically.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      a) Yes, it would have significantly reduced the effectiveness of the study (which is founded on large-scale, automated data gathering) to personally ask each contributor for permission, probably to the point where they wouldn’t have bothered. That’s the reason the used public datasets in the first place.

      b) It’s not as if they were deanonymizing these people. They were making a statistical analysis of public information. Why is the risk of having your public data used as a datapoint in a study so terrible as to be “the reason you don’t have Google+”?

  31. Kyle says:

    It’s pretty easy to find the GitHub profiles of most of the authors. It appears that they worked in these two repos:

    https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/GenderBiasInPushRequests
    https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/ExploringGHTorrent

    Going by discussions on the second repo it seems like the first repo contains the data. So why not make it public?

    I bet this is part of the tool they used to guess a user’s gender: https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/genderComputer

    Also note that Developer Liberation Front’s avatar on GitHub is the clenched fist.

    • Kyle says:

      It’s a private repo I found referenced here: https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/ExploringGHTorrent/issues/3 I don’t think it was ever public.

      Also read the other issues on that repo. I think it reveals how amateur the effort was and how they were fishing for any kind of feminist conclusion.

    • Deiseach says:

      Also note that Developer Liberation Front’s avatar on GitHub is the clenched fist.

      Is that a male clenched fist, a female clenched fist, or a gender-neutral clenched fist?

      • The Nybbler says:

        It’s the Students for a Democratic Society clenched fist. Which is sort of amusing for a group which seems to have only one black member out of 11.

        • Kyle says:

          The clenched first is more of a general symbol of the hard left that goes back 100+ years. Though some anti-communist/anti-fascist libertarian groups also use it but make a point of only using the left fist.

          Also of note is the name of the group: “Developer Liberation Front”. “X [Liberation] Front” is a common name for many communist, fascist, and terrorist groups. Groups named in that format are often associated with violence.

          • Broggly says:

            Yes, that is what the refrance

            They’re clearly not a violent terror group. The issue is whether the joke is that they’re an apolitical group using a name and logo suggesting left wing terrorism, or whether it’s that they’re a left wing group jokingly portraying themselves as more radical and dangerous than they are.

        • vV_Vv says:

          Which is sort of amusing for a group which seems to have only one black member out of 11.

          In fairness if they are Americans one black person out of 11 is not inconsistent with proportional representation.

      • To judge by the angle of the knuckles relative to the wrist, it’s female.

    • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

      Basically any assumption of good faith I had in this paper is gone.

      • The Smoke says:

        After reading the preceding comments, I guess they had at least good faith in the truth of the propositions they set out to prove 😉

      • honestlymellowstarlight says:

        Who cares about good faith, they still got interesting results anyways, this is how the system is supposed to work. The only problem is we don’t kill enough journalists (which is to say, all journalists).

    • Matt S Trout says:

      In order not to leak the names of private repositories, they 404 if you don’t have permissions to them.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      “DeveloperLiberationFront” isn’t that obviously SJ-political a name. I can imagine plenty of innocent reasons for choosing it.

      On the other hand, this does increase the likelihood that they reported this “discovery” to the media themselves, rather than being innocents whose unfinished work was found by someone who maliciously misrepresented it.

  32. Alex says:

    An excellent debunking of a seiously flawed and over used article, sadly followed by a rather unsubstantiated and paranoid sounding rant.

    As you make clear in your arguments against this article, just picking the bits which support your argument isn’t good enough to say that it’s true.

    Real evidence is needed for big conspiracy claims. “media outlets like to use hyperbole” isn’t really evidence of anything.

    I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong that there’s something concerning happening in the media, but please, reseach data needed!

    • Jason K. says:

      I don’t see any mention of a conspiracy.

      It isn’t that there is something unusual going on with the media (beyond their adaptation to the content wasteland of the 24hr news cycle). The media has always been a transmission vector for misinformation and outrage. It is just that they are now content starved and operating on extremely short time windows, so this has been kicked up to 11. This isn’t a conspiracy, just individual actors acting in their own best interests by trying to get as many eyeballs that they can as cheaply as they can.

      • Alex says:

        Jason, yes, I agree entirely, this is the media behaving entirely normally. I was more talking about the claims of the negative impact of the institutionalised social justice movement.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Not sure if you’ve read this blog before, but the rest of the information you need to flesh out the theory is in the 576 other posts here.

      • Alex says:

        I cite every opinion piece ever written on Feministe back at you. Some of them might not be relevant, but you’ll get the general gist after about post 500.

        Seriously though, got anything specifically on this? I’m actually interested in your claim, I just didn’t think it was substantiated properly in the above article.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Previous experience suggests any attempt to provide such evidence will be met by stronger and stronger isolated demands for rigor, until the standard of proof required would make it impractical to prove Reagan opposed Communism. I don’t know about Scott, but I decline to dance to that tune.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            I am actually more curious about the change in gravatar, or whatever the duece they are called.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Unless you set it manually, your Gravatar is generated deterministically based on your email address.

            So if you use one email address for one comment but another for another comment, you will have two different Gravatars.

          • Alex says:

            gmail / googlemail

          • Alex says:

            @TheNibbler I’ve seen the dance too, but it’s not really what I’m about here. I was more disappointed by the sudden claim at the end of such a rigorous argument, and if there are similarly rigorous arguments for this claim (of serious bias / mispractice within social justice friendly media) I’d like to read them.

            My take on the whole social justice thing is that although I’m generally on side with what they want out for world, I find some of their tactics decidedly dubious. As such, a similarly rigorous analysis of this behaviour would make for interesting reading.

          • Gbdub says:

            Alex would appear to be engaging, intentionally or not, in classic concern trolling.

            In the context of the blog, it’s entirely clear what Scott is talking about and I believe his past more rigorous analyses earn him the privilege of a few throwaway lines.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          Scott has written a fair bit about the issues you seem to be describing (i.e. poor incentives rather than malice driving institutional pseudo-malice.) One of the most popular posts on this blog is “Meditations on Moloch” on the topic.

          He’s also written several posts alleging – not unreasonably, although largely anecdotally – that SJ-aligned fake statistics tend to be unusually bad (or, if they’re all uniformly terrible, at least unusually common/accepted), as well as a lot of similar analysis/debunking posts like this one on figures both for, against, and orthogonal to SJ. The debunking is easy to find, very numerous and usually clearly labelled; the allegations are usually in the middle of those analyses, though, and I don’t believe he’s ever rigorously defended this allegation (or even that the evidence to so on a numerical basis exists.)

          And he’s written a fair bit about his political beliefs, including other reasons he’s suspicious of Social Justice and feminism in particular as movements (while wholeheartedly supporting the “true core”, if-you-believe-in-treating-women-as-people stuff.) I think this is the stuff you’re looking for. It’s mostly gathered under the “things I’ll regret writing” tag.

          Scott also wrote a post titled “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor”, which I suspect weighs heavily on his mind when people say his positions on a topic he’s written thousands of words on need to be “substantiated” – especially when, well, that topic is “people are being intellectually dishonest around X”. That said, you are obviously a new reader, and his advice is good.

        • Scott Alexander says:

        • Scott Alexander says:

          • antimule says:

            I think this deserves the post of its own. You should write it.

          • EyeballFrog says:

            Well, that was disconcertingly convincing.

          • Alex says:

            Interesting analysis, and thanks for actually providing tons of evidence. At 1500 comments a post, I get that you probably don’t have much time to do so.

            Some random comments:

            Yeah, the Blue team / Red team stuff seems to be bang on, and a bit scary. They’re also policing the crap out of splitters. As such, a splitter from either camp would seem to be a useful thing to be.

            The Liberal establishment blocking anything in terms of papers which aren’t sufficiently liberal begs questions about the veracity of pretty much anything which has been said in academia (especially social sciences) for quite some time. Scary stuff, I find myself wondering whether what I “know” is true, given this tilt. Maybe I only think the Red Team are nuts because I’m so heavily indoctrinated?

            I wonder if the SJW’s are really so anti-meritocratic, and old-school annoying hierarchy as you paint them? I think the answer has to be “I seriously hope not” and “we’ll see”. It’s a great shame GitHub has gone in that direction, but it’s not an uncommon decision in start-ups which get big. Social Justice is powerful indeed around the geek / tech scenes at the moment, so the effects will be very clear in a few years.

            I think the SJW’s would be extremely upset at being painted as a limb of the Liberal Establishment. The LE sounds like exactly the sort of Kyriarchical Big Organisation which they want to rail against. *They*’re doing the stomping dammit! Whether that actually means it’s untrue, I dunno. They sure as hell stomp on any area of the Blue Team which is isn’t new-orthodoxly Liberal enough (often with little sense of irony), however, they also like to put the boot into members of the liberal old orthodoxy too, so if they’re enforcers, they’re not controlled by the centre.

            Finally: “I can be proud of the Blue Tribe and not too happy about their project of crushing everybody else with an iron fist regardless of the collateral damage”

            Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at. I sort of hope the SJWs get their lovely equal world, but the deeply ironic illiberal-ism of this extremely powerful, and supposedly liberal movement is a bit of a worry.

          • anon says:

            @antimule
            A post of that would only serve to polarize the commentariat (more strongly than other regret posts) without bringing in information that hasn’t been iterated here before.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            #ThingsIWillRegretWriting

          • antimule says:

            @anon

            I don’t see how it can get any more polarized than it already is. Maybe wording can be softened a bit as a post. I still think it is necessary and true. Necessary, because I need something to point to when someone asks “what are you so worried about? Aren’t you just paranoid?”, which frequently happens in such discussions. And it really seems to be true.

          • gattsuru says:

            Some caveats:
            – The Blue Tribe’s arguments about police violence usually revolve at least partially around the incidents driving that response rate. Ie, while the Crawford shooting in Ohio was representative of what would happen if the police were called in on an active shooter regardless of race, it’d be very unlikely for a white guy who shopped for an airsoft rifle before dog food would get called in as an active shooter to start with, rather than maybe called to the store security as a potential theft. (This probably is not a good example, if you look into the local situation in further detail, but it’s at least not as obviously wrong.) This give a story where black people are more likely to be arrested for firearms violations and less likely to be shot during an arrest, because the firearms violations are more likely to be smaller or even pretextual. (And, to be really fair to the Left, some police jurisdictions had an overt policy of pretextual weapons arrests.)

            – The linked meta-analysis about articles being circular-binned is specifically focused on a single racially sensitive topic. It may not generalize, and indeed looking at the specific funnel plots it presents I’m not certain it even exists seriously in that specific realm.

            – I understand what you’re trying to do with the comparison to the Klan, but even by #ThingsIWillRegretWriting standards, I think it was ill-advised. There are so many better options for the metaphor.

          • Chalid says:

            To give just one example, every number and line of evidence we have suggests that the police do not disproportionately target or kill black people compared to the encounter rate (see Part D here and this study) but the conventional wisdom is absolutely 100% certain they do and anybody who questions it is likely to sound like some kind of lunatic.

            Don’t have time to write more here, but this sort of thing shows you *really* need to get of your bubble more often.

            http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/u-s-voters-skeptical-black-lives-matter-poll-article-1.2439090

            “A full 44% of the survey’s respondents think African-Americans and other minorities receive equal treatment from law enforcement agencies and the courts… Slightly fewer — 41% — think blacks and minorities face discrimination. Meanwhile, 15% are not sure… Eighty-three percent of the African-American voters think blacks and minorities face discrimination. In contrast, 50% of white voters said blacks and minorities get equal treatment.”

          • Anonymous says:

            @Scott

            Care to say any more about the ‘collateral damage’? I must admit I’m slightly vexed by the extent to which you agree with the views of the Blue Tribe and yet simultaneously don’t want them implemented. It’s easy enough to say that they shouldn’t be forced on anyone else, except… why shouldn’t they? Isn’t a large part of the Blue Tribe position – and similarly most other positions – that these ideas are better for everyone and really should be imposed whether people like it or not, partly because people don’t know what’s good for them, partly because their absence is allowing some people to hurt others? Should someone who is endangering people with their gun, keeping their money for themselves, upsetting gay people by making homophobic remarks toward them, really be able to continue doing those things because you don’t want to force your Blue Tribe system on them? If you believe these views are correct, why shouldn’t wrong, hurtful, dangerous opposing views be crushed?

            One good reason I can think of: because you’re not that confident that Blue Tribe views really are correct, and want to impose them slowly and carefully. Which would be entirely reasonable. Is that it – and if not, then what?

            EDIT: On further thought… Is it possible that your views on niceness, contra Arthur Chu, are somewhat akin to the ideas you deride in your old post about dystopian fiction? Caring about abstract ideas like FREEDOM! over whether people have enough to eat is an example of misordered priorities. But might you not be doing the same by caring so much about how ideas are presented over whether or not they’re right – not wanting to crush the Red Tribe because crushing is unkind, ignoring the fact that (in your view) their ideas are wrong and dangerous?

          • Jack V says:

            Thank you for writing that. Despite the vehemence, my reaction is much much more “very interested despite not being sure most of it is right” than “angry and defensive” which is a pretty good sign about a rant on a controversial topic…

          • Anon says:

            Funny that you would say “collateral damage”. That’s exactly how being around certain Blue Tribe subgroups made me feel. (Even though I think I lean towards that side myself.)

          • Theo Jones says:

            I’m currently a student majoring in a social science, and based on my experience I would contend the following 1) the ideological polarization in the social sciences is a problem, 2) the worst part of this polarization is not so much the filtering out of conservative ideas (although that does happen), its the lack of filtering out obviously wrong leftish ideas. And thus you get a lot of really shoddy papers getting published, and even getting assigned as readings in classes. And you get some totally non-credible ideas taken as serious “scientific” ideas. And a whole class of students who think such ideas are credible and scientifically based.

            One of the more dangerous turns here is the growth of health care pseudoscience getting bounced around. In my classes within the past year, I’ve had instructors openly sympathetic with ideas like anti-vax and homeopathy.

            Another fairly dangerous turn to the strong opposition to genetic modification and other agricultural tech. Vandana Shiva and other similar types have been assigned as readings.

            And then there the the whole postmodernist “critique” of science.

          • Theo Jones says:

            @anonymous Permalink because there are two anons in the thread https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/#comment-325926

            I can’t speak for Scott, but, the issue here in my opinion is the while the left has many good ideas, it also has some very dangerous ones. And one dangerous or ill considered proposal getting enacted into policy could turn out quite bad.

          • antimule says:

            @ Theo Jones

            “In my classes within the past year, I’ve had instructors openly sympathetic with ideas like anti-vax and homeopathy.

            “Another fairly dangerous turn to the strong opposition to genetic modification and other agricultural tech. Vandana Shiva and other similar types have been assigned as readings.

            “And then there the the whole postmodernist “critique” of science.”

            Holy moly! That crap is still on? How do these people have the nerve to criticize anything?

          • grort says:

            I’ve always taken “90% of media and academia are liberal” to mean “90% of people who are actually paying attention to what’s going on think the liberals are right” which is actually a pretty strong endorsement.

            (It’s a weaker endorsement if you use the phrase “Blue Tribe” rather than “liberal” because it implies the causal arrow goes the other direction. I wonder if anyone has investigated this — are there any cases of people going into media, suddenly becoming much better informed about politics, and deciding the other side was right after all?)

            Your examples are interesting though.

          • grort says:

            Your example about colleges and meritocracies makes me confused. It sounds like you’re arguing that the move away from SAT scores, which is advertised as a way to help minorities, is actually going to hurt minorities. Are you suggesting that this is happening deliberately — ie, everyone involved secretly wants to remove minorities from academia, so they’ve evolved this complex plot to do so, which they’re justifying by loudly telling each other they want the opposite? Or do you just think they’re tragically misinformed?

            My best guess is (1) everybody involved is being more-or-less honest that they want to admit more minorities into colleges, and (2) the move away from SAT scores will help them do that, because it makes the admissions process really subjective, which means they can admit anyone they want.

            It may be that there’s a distinction here between “minorities” and “the lower classes” which I’m not getting.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            @Grort: No, I think it’s just literally that 90% of college staff and journalists are liberal, as mentioned in the studies/surveys I link to.

            No, I don’t think the testing thing is a deliberate attempt to hurt minorities. I think that it’s a deliberate attempt to increase the power of cultural gatekeepers / decrease the ability of people to work outside the system, and that anything that does that (serves Blue purposes) will be declared to be pro-minority, anything that does the opposite will be declared to racist, and what actually does or doesn’t help minorities doesn’t really figure into the calculus.

            For a similar example of how “anti-Blue” becomes “100% white and anti-minority and racist” regardless of what actual minorities think, see this post.

          • Jiro says:

            I am pretty darned Blue Tribe myself – I’m pro-choice, pro-fighting-climate-change, pro-gay, pro-transgender, non-religious, pro-higher-taxes-on-rich, pro-single-payer, anti-gun, ready-for-Hillary, etc

            Except for Hillary in comparison to other Democratic candidates (but including Hillary in comparison to Republicans), these sound all like Blue tribe political positions, not blue tribe in general.

            I’m sore you do eat Blue foods and watch Blue television shows, but it seems odd that you would only mention political positions here if Blue doesn’t just refer to politics.

          • Bex says:

            Oh my god this made me so uncomfortable. This needs its own post.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Dayum, Scott.

            And that’s how somebody who is Blue from birth, agrees with 95% of their goals, and is hell-bent on being charitable feels.

            Imagine how somebody like me, who is thoroughly red, must feel.

          • Raph L says:

            +1 from me on expanding this into a post. It definitely made me think.

            There are definitely voices asking for increased credentialism in programming. It hasn’t made much progress yet, because efforts run along these lines tend to cargo-cult good programming practices, and actually competent programmers would be able to out-compete them dramatically. I suspect it’ll gain more traction, especially in subfields where liability is very important (medicine, transportation, handling money), but it’ll be a very long time before a bright, able programmer is turned away from, say, the games industry due to lack of credentials.

            See Jennifer Granick’s 2015 Black Hat Keynote for an excellent historical perspective and glimpse into the future, addressing liability in software among other themes.

          • Daniel Speyer says:

            The theory that Blue attacks on Grey are to maintain the power of credentialism seems unsupported.

            After all, Grey is weird, beating up weird people is fun, and Blue has *already* created a system of rationalizations to completely deaden their consciences on the subject. No more explanation is needed. Especially not one that requires instinctive superrationality (which is a thing, but has limits).

          • The Nybbler says:

            Ralph, indeed, there are voices demanding credentialism in programming. The IEEE split with the ACM over that very issue (the IEEE wanted a very conventional Professional Engineering program, the ACM thought this would not be useful).

            But I think this rant is tying together a few too many things. It’s not the Social Justice types pushing credentialing, as far as I can tell. Bureaucracy, yes, because getting those horrible meritocrats under “adult supervision” is certainly one of their goals. But not credentialing. I’ve seen any number of rants about how programmers shouldn’t be called “engineers” and how we should have to get a P.E., but not coming from the SJ set.

            And not all credentialing is Blue Tribe. Blue Tribe respects only university degrees, not certificate programs (which are too labor-class; not all Red Tribe, but not Blue either). The hair braiding requirements Scott mentions are often enough opposed by Blue Tribe on the grounds of racism, for instance.

          • Nita says:

            Naively, I’d expect the push for credentials to come from within the profession — to maintain high prestige and high wages.

            There are, after all, complaints floating around about tech professionals being undercut by outsourcing / H1B visa recipients / the manager’s 12-year-old nephew.

          • Adam says:

            The lack of credentialism is somewhat unique to software developers. Roughly the entire rest of the IT-to-end user pipeline, from Dev Ops to Security to Network Engineering to System Administration to Database Administration to tier-one tech support rests upon a system of standardized testing and often product-specific certifications, although these are usually agnostic to university education.

          • brad says:

            @Adam
            I wouldn’t have put security in there. The certification based end of the security world is mostly government, government contractors, or highly regulated by the government.

            High end app sec consulting for example is much closer to the programming model in that there’s a lot of general CS degrees, a fair amount of autodidacts, and certifications are not important.

            DevOps is still gelling and it’s unclear which way it will land.

          • Orwell's Ghost says:

            I want to add my voice to the chorus of people suggesting that this be its own post, but with an attempt to go the other way on sounding paranoid, and also finding a less incendiary analogy than the Klan.

            (Like many people, I wasn’t bothered by it, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell people here that the Internet has a hard time understanding any analogy or comparison as not implying moral equality among the things being compared.)

          • Anon says:

            Replying to anonymous above: I must admit I’m slightly vexed by the extent to which Scott disagrees with the blue tribe yet still calls himself one of them.

          • Adam says:

            It’s a tribe. You don’t get to choose which one you’re a part of. I agree with a lot less than Scott does, but I grew up in a coastal big city full of immigrants, my mom is vegan, my wife gluten-free, I’ve never hunted or owned a pickup truck, I have multiple grad degrees, have been to both an opera and a ballet and actually liked them both. I even used to go to drag shows when I still lived in LA. My two best friends in high school were both gay and I hung out with people who believed they were real vampires. I’m Blue Tribe.

            That unfortunately means many of my friends have socialist leanings I don’t at all agree with and it gets awkward when they start railing against capitalism and I’m sitting there like ‘dude, I work for a hedge fund.’ But they’re still my friends because sometimes they’ve been my friends for 25 years for reasons that don’t have much to do with our respective ideas on optimal tax policy.

          • lvlln says:

            @Anonymous from https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/#comment-325926

            I share Scott’s blue-tribe-is-right-about-99%-of-things-but-let’s-not-crush-our-enemies attitude. While I can’t say for certain why Scott feels this way, the reason I do is that I hold epistemic humility as being dominant over my belief in my blue tribe values. That is, I am as certain as I believe any human can reasonably be certain that blue tribe values are the right ones, which is not very certain at all.

            I absolutely do have a great desire to see blue tribe values implemented in society, but I acknowledge that I may be wrong, just as wrong as the Confederates or Nazis were when they desired to see their values implemented in society. Now, I’m as confident as one reasonably can be that I’m not, but, again, that’s not very confident at all.

            So working off that base, I believe it’s in my best interest to listen to people who disagree with my values, to treat them nicely and with charity, so that I may have more opportunities to find issues in my own beliefs that may be wrong or harmful in ways that I might have blinded myself to. Attempting to crush my enemies not only would make it harder to receive useful criticism from them, but if successful could easily lead to a what-have-I-done moment where I realize that I created lots of unnecessary harm and suffering for a goal that I realize too late wasn’t worth pursuing.

            I don’t see this as some high-minded abstract FREEDOM > food kind of attitude. I see this as a selfish one, an attempt to make sure that I stay on the right side of history. My view is that the Blue Tribe has been on the right side of history for almost every issue (honestly, can’t think of a counterexample off the top of my head), but like all tribes, you’re only on the right side of history until you aren’t. I don’t know Scott’s exact opinion, but I suspect it may be similar.

          • Nita says:

            Interestingly, lvlln speaks of Blues as “us”, while Scott is clearly thinking of “them” (on a deeper level than just adopting a third-person perspective).

            My model is that Scott relates to Blues the way Blue Americans relate to Americans-in-general, which would make him… ultramarine?

          • InferentialDistance says:

            @Anonymous
            Agreeing with blue tribe goals is not the same thing as agreeing with blue tribe methods. When you actually care about achieving those goals, you don’t allow destructive policies to go uncriticized just because of good intent.

            @Nita
            Doesn’t Scott identify as blue-leaning grey tribe?

          • Nita says:

            @ InferentialDistance

            Sure, but that doesn’t fit into my model — and we all know that interesting models are better than boring, messy reality 🙂

          • Anonymous says:

            @llvln

            Interesting. Thanks.

            My view is that the Blue Tribe has been on the right side of history for almost every issue (honestly, can’t think of a counterexample off the top of my head)

            Erm, the Soviet Union?

          • Nornagest says:

            Soviet Union isn’t Blue Tribe. Blue Tribe is an American cultural subdivision that happens to be mostly left-wing; it’s not the Left or even the American left. (Union workers, a traditional Democratic stronghold, are Red Tribe in most respects. Most minority groups are neither.)

            That said, I don’t think modern Blue Tribe is old enough that we can make statements about the right side of history with any confidence — and insofar as we can, it’s not always right. If we go back even to the early Civil Rights era we can find its cultural antecedents being wrong about a lot of stuff, and it only gets wronger from there.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Nornagest

            I was referring to the Blue Tribe’s history of support for the Soviet Union.

          • Nornagest says:

            Fair enough. I think even that runs into the age issue, though; support for the Soviets was widespread among the middle- and upper-class Western Left at various points, but post-1970 (my usual watershed point for modern political alignments) I believe the standard attitude was “great idea, doesn’t work in practice”. The Thirties-era attitude of it being an inherently superior economic system that would steamroll the West was long gone, at the very least, for the simple reason that if it was going to it would have done some steamrolling by then.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Nornagest

            I was not alive at the time, but my understanding is that Blue Tribe support for the Soviet Union was going strong well into the Eighties.

          • NN says:

            Fair enough. I think even that runs into the age issue, though; support for the Soviets was widespread among the middle- and upper-class Western Left at various points, but post-1970 (my usual watershed point for modern political alignments) I believe the standard attitude was “great idea, doesn’t work in practice”. The Thirties-era attitude of it being an inherently superior economic system that would steamroll the West was long gone, at the very least, for the simple reason that if it was going to it would have done some steamrolling by then.

            From what I’ve read, Western liberal support for the Soviet Union was greatly weakened by Kruschev denouncing Stalin and the 1956 invasion of Hungary, and then pretty much killed outright by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. After 1968, remaining Soviet supporters were derisively referred to as “tankies” in the UK, referencing the infamous photographs of Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague.

            Support for Communism or Socialism in general held on for a while (hence all of the Che Guevara t-shirts), but after the fall of the Soviet Union I think that support for anything further left than Scandinavian style Democratic Socialism became a fringe position even among the American Left.

          • Nornagest says:

            I was alive at the time (Eighties, not Seventies), though young. My recollections of it were as above.

            But, y’know, I’m one guy and memories that old aren’t always reliable. Anyone older want to chime in?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I’m not older, but I’ve read a good deal about this.

            By the Eighties, the mainstream left was not at all defending the Soviet Union as a viable model for America to move toward.

            But they were calling for “peace”, arguing that America’s foreign policy was often just as bad as the Soviets’, and very, very, worried that Reagan or someone like him would start a nuclear war. They thus supported policies of detente and rapprochement with the Soviet Union, condemning people who spoke out against them too harshly.

            “The Soviet Union is a horrible, evil, savage dictatorship, and I hope they are erased from history!” was decidedly not a “Blue Tribe” thing to say. That’s why it was so shocking for Reagan to call them an “Evil Empire”. The “Blue Tribe” typically wanted to take a more “cosmic perspective” on things and deemphasize the moral necessity of dismantling the Soviet Empire.

            For instance, you can see this in the pervasive tendency in the media to condemn “both sides” in the Cold War, such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos talking about the foolishness of wars over “ideology” (I don’t remember the exact words, but the message is in there). Or in the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact depicting reckless moves in Nicaragua almost causing a nuclear war (before alien intervention). Or Star Trek: The Next Generation talking about how humanity had outgrown petty concerns like capitalism vs. socialism. You just don’t hear them say something like: “Isn’t it freaking amazing that liberal capitalism finally crushed socialistic dictatorship?”

            In general, any movie depicting the horrors of nuclear war usually had a left-wing message or bias. For instance, the movie The Day After, or even Wargames showing a reckless military putting its jingoism before the safety of the nation.

            In contrast, two “Red Tribe” productions on the issue were the movie Red Dawn and the miniseries America, both showing the consequences of Soviet victory. That is, the right-wing message was to emphasize the necessity of victory at any cost, even the substantial risk of nuclear war. The left-wing message was to emphasize the cost of war, and to call for “peaceful coexistence” while not actually arguing that the U.S. should lose.

            Another incident that was polarized in this vein was that of the little girl Samantha Smith. She wrote Yuri Andropov a letter when she was ten years old, showing concern about nuclear war:

            Dear Mr. Andropov,

            My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

            Sincerely,
            Samantha Smith

            Shockingly, he wrote a response and invited her out to the Soviet Union, where she visited the Young Pioneer camps, etc. The response:

            Dear Samantha,

            I received your letter, which is like many others that have reached me recently from your country and from other countries around the world.

            It seems to me – I can tell by your letter – that you are a courageous and honest girl, resembling Becky, the friend of Tom Sawyer in the famous book of your compatriot Mark Twain. This book is well known and loved in our country by all boys and girls.

            You write that you are anxious about whether there will be a nuclear war between our two countries. And you ask are we doing anything so that war will not break out.

            Your question is the most important of those that every thinking man can pose. I will reply to you seriously and honestly.

            Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. This is what the great founder of our state, Vladimir Lenin, taught us.

            Soviet people well know what a terrible thing war is. Forty-two years ago, Nazi Germany, which strove for supremacy over the whole world, attacked our country, burned and destroyed many thousands of our towns and villages, killed millions of Soviet men, women and children.

            In that war, which ended with our victory, we were in alliance with the United States: together we fought for the liberation of many people from the Nazi invaders. I hope that you know about this from your history lessons in school. And today we want very much to live in peace, to trade and cooperate with all our neighbors on this earth — with those far away and those near by. And certainly with such a great country as the United States of America.

            In America and in our country there are nuclear weapons — terrible weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. But we do not want them to be ever used. That’s precisely why the Soviet Union solemnly declared throughout the entire world that never — never — will it use nuclear weapons first against any country. In general we propose to discontinue further production of them and to proceed to the abolition of all the stockpiles on Earth.

            It seems to me that this is a sufficient answer to your second question: ‘Why do you want to wage war against the whole world or at least the United States?’ We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country–neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government–want either a big or ‘little’ war.

            We want peace — there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.
            I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children’s camp – Artek – on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.

            Thank you for your letter. I wish you all the best in your young life.
            Y. Andropov

            The “Blue Tribe” view was that this was a positive development toward greater peace and understanding, lessening the possibility of war. The “Red Tribe” view was Samantha was an unwitting traitor being manipulated by the Soviets into giving them good propaganda. She was featured on Soviet stamps and prominently shown in the state-run media. (Tragically, Samantha died in a plane crash at age 13.)

          • As far as I call remember, I didn’t really run into fondness for the USSR, though I’ve known a couple of cummunists (I’m on good terms with one of them) and I’ve met a Stalinist.

            However, what I do remember was a lot of fondness for Communist China (Tiananmen ended a lot of that). Now it’s down to fondness for Cuba. I look forward to more information about Cuba coming out. I’m not expecting to find out about hills of skulls, but a lot of oppression of various sorts.

            Also, I’m waiting waiting waiting for people who blame poverty in capitalist countries on capitalism to start blaming the more severe poverty in communist countries on communism.

  33. onyomi says:

    Completely anecdotal, but during the last thread, I briefly thought that Vox Imperatoris was female. I kind of assumed he was male since I just generally assume most SSC posters are nerdy men unless they obviously signal otherwise, and I also interpreted his current avatar as male, when it turns out it was a picture of a woman. When I realized that it was a picture of a woman and he also posted a link to ladies gloves, I briefly thought he was female (but then someone else posted that he was male?).

    This was a weird experience for me, because my immediate gut reaction was to think, “was I too mean to her?” Our interactions have been pretty courteous, I think, but I’ve also disagreed with him many times, on a few occasions a bit snarkily. And, on further reflection I thought “well, even if Vox is female that really shouldn’t have changed anything about what I said.” Yet I also had the inescapable thought that, had I thought Vox were female then my interactions might have been slightly different, if only in tone, but hopefully not content.

    As to how it would have been different, it’s kind of exactly the stereotype: I probably would have been kinder, gentler, more careful yet also maybe subtly more patronizing or less willing to be blunt. I’m not saying that such knowledge should have affected my posting in any way whatsoever, I’m just reporting how I think it might have in reality.

    My prediction, therefore: women online, especially in male dominated spaces, will (much like women in real life…) be treated with a combination of more niceness and consideration but also having to fight harder to earn respect, especially the sort of respect signaled by not handling someone with kid gloves.

    • Jason K. says:

      “I probably would have been kinder, gentler, more careful yet also maybe subtly more patronizing or less willing to be blunt. I’m not saying that such knowledge should have affected my posting in any way whatsoever, I’m just reporting how I think it might have in reality. ”

      Here’s the real kicker: Do you think you would do this less if you weren’t being always told about how oppressed and poorly treated women supposedly are?

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        But that is the very sort of patronizing attitude that men had towards women before it was even conceived that women were being oppressed and poorly treated.

        That is the whole basis of traditional male chauvinism: men are superior to women and therefore they owe it to women to treat them more kindly, more gently, etc. than they would treat a man. (It’s almost exactly the same as the idea behind the “white man’s burden”.) I’ve quoted this before, but take the Victorian author James Fitzjames Stephen, who is such a clear advocate of it:

        Let us suppose, to take a single illustration, that men and women are made as equal as law can make them, and that public opinion followed the law. Let us suppose that marriage became a mere partnership dissoluble like another; that women were expected to earn their living just like men; that the notion of anything like protection due from the one sex to the other was thoroughly rooted out; that men’s manners to women became identical with their manners to men; that the cheerful concessions to acknowledged weakness, the obligation to do for women a thousand things which it would be insulting to offer to do for a man, which we inherit from a different order of ideas, were totally exploded; and what would be the result? The result would be that women would become men’s slaves and drudges, that they would be made to feel their weakness and to accept its consequences to the very utmost. Submission and protection are correlative. Withdraw the one and the other is lost, and force will assert itself a hundred times more harshly through the law of contract than ever it did through the law of status. Disguise it how you will, it is force in one shape or another which determines the relations between human beings. It is far less harsh when it is subjected to the provisions of a general law made with reference to broad general principles than when it acts through a contract, the terms of which are settled by individuals according to their own judgment. The terms of the marriage relation as settled by the law and religion of Europe are an illustration, of course on an infinitely wider and more important scale, of the very principle which in our own days has led to the prohibition of the employment of little children in certain classes of factories and of women in coalpits.

        That certain modern “feminists” are curiously similar to these male chauvinists is ironic, but it hardly goes to show that they established the idea of holding women to lower standards and handling them with kid gloves.

        Anyway, I posted a long series of comments about this in a previous thread.

        • Jason K. says:

          I’m not trying to intimate that feminists started ‘kid gloves’ treatment, just that their behavior reinforces it.

      • Adam says:

        onyomi has mentioned before being brought up in southern genteel culture, which seems far more likely to be the source of using kid gloves on women than complaints by women.

        • onyomi says:

          Though I think it’s more generalized than just in the South, I tend to agree (my father still admonishes me for failing to hold open car doors for ladies, etc.).

          I don’t think one can really lay this at the foot of feminism. Feminism basically encourages treating women like men (whether or not this is a good idea, or can be consistently, fairly applied is another question), though it usually deemphasizes the part where that means sending women into coal mines.

          I think my feeling is more just the traditional patriarchal tendency to treat women with more consideration and less respect.

      • Nornagest says:

        I sometimes suspect that the chauvinist portraits of women as fragile, gentle, neotenous creatures in need of protection and the social justice accounts of women as perennial subjects of domination and victims of oppression come from basically the same place.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      You could pretend any she-commenter in this place is Deiseach and stop feeling bad about being crude whatsoever. Would that help for you?

      • Deiseach says:

        You could pretend any she-commenter in this place is Deiseach and stop feeling bad about being crude whatsoever.

        Hmmm – am I insulted or flattered? I’ll have to have a little lie-down on my fainting couch and eat some chocolate whilst I sob into my lavender-scented lacy hankie and think about it 🙂

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Now I wonder how I’m being read here.

      • onyomi says:

        Male. Because of “le chat.” Which relates to our discussion of gender in language last time.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Shoot. That’ll teach me to not know French.

          • The Smoke says:

            I like that you appreciate the thing with the ^. That’s also the only thing I took away from my french classes.

        • Anthony says:

          I don’t know as much French, but “Maistre” is “master”; in French there’s a different word for the feminine equivalent (probably a cognate of “mistress”).

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I got the name from the fairy tale (with the double meaning of “ultraconservative talk”), and there’s another fairy tale called “the Master Maid”, so I figured it wasn’t strongly gendered. Not sure what the French version is.

          • Lyyce says:

            The word “Maistre” is old French, I strongly suspect that there is only a masculine version, similarly to “Maitre” in the legal context.

            So the feminine version of the surname would be “La Maistre Chatte” which, to be honest, sounds very weird.

          • Mammon says:

            Lyyce: “La Maistre Chatte” is basically “The Maſter Pussy”, and sounds like a medieval BDSM brothel.

            I don’t think there’s a direct feminization of “Le Maistre Chat” that really makes sense.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            A medieval BDSM brothel sounds like a business opportunity somewhere that prostitution is legal.

          • Nornagest says:

            I would be surprised if it hadn’t been tried, somewhere. Probably Germany.

    • @Onyomi: I have another anecdote: as it happens, I was assuming you were female when we had our first conversation – some months ago on a subthread about libertarianism IIRC. (I think I was just anglicizing your name/pseudonym, which was of course stupid.)

      When I later realized I was wrong, I had more or less the same reaction you describe, only backwards. 🙂

      I hadn’t realized before that I think about what I’m writing in a different way depending on the assumed gender of the other party. I don’t think it affects my writing in a particularly bad way, either way round, but it was kind of startling to discover that it affected it at all.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      This sounds like the women-are-wonderful effect:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Women_are_wonderful%22_effect

      I choose to believe it’s classical sexism, though, because that makes me virtuous for not having this reaction.

    • Nita says:

      Here’s a similar anecdote from the opposite side. Back when I didn’t have a mental box for “nonbinary” folks, I came across the same person of undeterminable sex online, on two separate occasions. The first time I thought, “hmm, she seems like a bit of a bitch”, the second time — “ooh, what a fascinating young man”.

      I don’t know if it was caused by my personal preferences (more hetero back then) or unconscious social expectations (“women should be nice”), but noticing this discrepancy was pretty shocking, as I had naively expected my snap judgments to be in line with my (gender-egalitarian, feminist) beliefs.

    • If it’s any consolation, I tend to forget that people have “feelings” or that these might correlate in any way to their genders, and have learned from trial and error that women tend, on average, to like a little more show of emotional friendliness/non-aggression in their conversations than men do.

      Obviously “on average” means “not everyone;” I try to adjust depending on what I know about the person I am talking to. If I don’t know them, I just go with the general tone of the location, because people are accustomed to the tone and if they didn’t like it, they probably wouldn’t be there. So if I am in a forum where people use a lot of smileys, I’ll toss in a couple of smileys; if I’m here, where smileys aren’t common, I leave my posts unadorned.

      Male or female, if Vox Imperatoris is posting here, the the proper technique–unless you know from previous conversation with them that they appreciate a particular style–is to just treat them like everyone else here.

  34. James says:

    Given the way the media predictably spun this paper, it is hard for me to conceive of a level of crispness which justifies not providing this information.

    Such a great sentence.

    • Jacob says:

      Too bad it’s not at all predictable, as the most likely response from the media is tumbleweeds and crickets. Soooo many studies get published only a fraction ever get any press coverage.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        tumbleweeds and crickets would not have been my prediction. This is not an isolated incident, nor is the particular slant they went for unusual.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          In fairness, I have no idea how many studies are pseudo-published in this manner that could potentially be spun into a story like this. Do you?

      • PedroS says:

        “Too bad it’s not at all predictable, as the most likely response from the media is tumbleweeds and crickets”

        Media do often ignore everything which has not been accompanied by a hyped press-release, even in established “high-impact” journals. I am surprised that a preprint got this much attention, but we will never know if that was spontaneous or somehow astroturfed.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      from that thread, I learned a new bit of slang: “eagle librarian” for egalitarian. …Is there a name for the mocking thing where you generate a corrupted homonym of your opponent’s terms?

      • 27chaos says:

        Kindergarten, and social justice, are the only places I’ve seen that used.

        • Muga Sofer says:

          Isn’t “cuckservative” a conservative term for sellouts? That seems similar.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            It doesn’t really seem to be the same thing to me. the homonym thing is annoying, juvenile and dismissive, as opposed to conversation-endingly ugly.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            I am honestly surprised Neo-Cuckservative hasn’t become a label for Hillary.

          • Muga Sofer says:

            >The homonym thing is annoying, juvenile and dismissive, as opposed to conversation-endingly ugly.

            Hmm, good point. It does seem to be used similarly, though.

          • anon says:

            She’s a woman..

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Cuckqueans are a thing.

            [Don’t Google it, if you’re at work]

          • Mr Bones says:

            Muga Sofer:

            Not quite. Initially, we tried out both cuckservative and conservacuck, as those were the two single-syllable parts of conservative that could be replaced while still leaving it recognisable. The goal was simply to take the insult cuck and stick it firmly in establishment conservativism’s side – helped along by the bizarrely commonplace phenomenon of a conservative who has adopted a black child and thinks this will prove to liberals that he isn’t racist. I mean, he is literally bragging about raising the children of black men as his own, in order to impress liberals, who despise him utterly. If you replace “liberals” with “his wife” you have the literal cuckold scenario.

            Racist if you do, cuck if you don’t” hopefully serves to even out the incentives somewhat, and maybe allows people go back to expressing their true opinions on race (in a much more insulting environment, thanks Moloch), rather than letting the slur racist tilt the field.

            In contrast, the person using eagle librarian for egalitarian is not intending to slur their target with the epithet eagle or librarian. (Same goes for gargle gators and freeze peach.) There are two theories to what’s going on with this. 1) In the teacher/student mould, they are authoritarians infantilising their opposition to reinforce their moral right to rule them (how very ageist), or 2) much like kindergarteners they are playing the status game without any sophistication at all: just raw “I’m not taking you seriously!”.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Concuckative would work.

            [Probably should not be giving advice for this]

      • honestlymellowstarlight says:

        FREEZE PEACH, baby

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Muh Soggy Knee, too.

          It’s not exclusive to any group, though some employ it more often than others.

          • honestlymellowstarlight says:

            (it was also a double joke, “free speech” answering the question “Is there a name for the mocking thing where you generate a corrupted homonym of your opponent’s terms?”)

    • Nornagest says:

      Oh, this is bound to end well.

  35. Francisco Boni says:

    The “discussion” section doesn’t do a good job exhausting all possibilities in the psychological literature for this unverified and/or possibly non-statistically significant difference between “women who are outsiders and insiders” when they allegedly show their gender in OSS communities. Surely, they talk about survivorship bias and the averageness and the mean differences of the female skill distribution vs male skill distribution (men are overrepresented at both the bottom and the top under a flatter distribution). There have been anecdotes and samples (specially Bailey and Laub) showing that MtF transsexuals are geeky and drawn to computer programming. Laub and Fisk reported that their SRS candidates included a high number of those who were interested in “mathematics and computer programming”. Knowing this, I find it complicated to capture and infer bias against a group in many situations when you assume that highly accepted and possibly high quality volume code changes made by profiles who fit one set of gender norms or patterns for handles, nicknames or photos are actually being made by people who approximate the female development in the limit during some period, with all it’s differential biological and cultural aspects that make males and females different. Although I think that if the differences in outsider bias in both situations, non-anonymized gender females vs non-anonymized gender males, is significant, this shouldn’t be much of a problem to infer how biased people actually are. If people have individuated information about the subject after knowing the group mean or base-rate that sets the prior, then difference in outside vs inside situations could be a difference in the presence of individuated information (Jussim, 2013-2015) when people approximate bayesian thinking. Without individuated information, people rely on the group mean and it is very possible that people have different perceptions about male and female group means in different STEM areas and work environment. Demographics is important too (Iran has more women entering CompSci courses than Norway who strongly seeks gender equity), perhaps more important than culturally stronger gender norms, when it comes to drawing women to computer programming academically and/or in the OSS community. I don’t think the OSS ethos intersects CompSci sufficiently. It could be harder to measure bias when the first or second impression people have is code that comes along with social media profiles or not, gendered photos or not, possible gendered handles/names or not, and other visual and textual cues. And this is true both for the population of programmers in the github dataset who have accepted/denied people who seemingly fit a set of gender norms as insiders/outsiders through the internet, and for the scripts or methods that tried to infer the gender of the social media profiles associated with the subject’s github account.

    Lawrence, A. A. (2012). Men trapped in men’s bodies: Narratives of autogynephilic transsexualism.
    Lawrence, A. A., & Bailey, J. M. (2009). Transsexual groups in Veale et al.(2008) are “autogynephilic” and “even more autogynephilic”. Archives of Sexual Behavior.
    Laub, D. R., & Fisk, N. M. (1974). A rehabilitation program for gender dysphoria syndrome by surgical sex change.

    http://i.imgur.com/c0gXpQ8.png

  36. Jason Hoyt says:

    Hi I’m co-founder and Chief at PeerJ, where this gender preprint was published in “PeerJ Preprints.” Thanks for the well-thought through blog post! Thought I’d chime in, not about the merits of this preliminary research, but on the debate on use of preprints and science journalism.

    For those who aren’t yet familiar, PeerJ started with just one *peer-reviewed* Open Access journal in biology and medicine. We then expanded to a second peer-reviewed journal in Computer Science. And all along we’ve offered the preprint service called “PeerJ Preprints” (originally in biology/med, and since 2015 CompSci as well). The bulk of PeerJ (the publishing company) is still peer-reviewed research.

    We launched “PeerJ Preprints” because we felt that biology and computer science were ready to embrace what physicists have been doing for 20 years at arXiv, which is preprinting before peer-review. The benefits are: establishing precedence and credit, open science benefiting others, gaining valuable feedback, and if finally published in a peer-reviewed journal then there is evidence that the peer-reviewed paper distribution is wider.

    A more debatable benefit is the time savings of not waiting through 6-24 months of peer-review before findings finally get published. Do you want life-saving research about the Zika virus hidden for months/years in peer-review? It’s double painful when it is published in a subscription paywall journal instead of Open Access. That said, there are major benefits to peer-review, which is why PeerJ started out and maintains peer-review for the flagship journals. As an aside, scholarly communication didn’t start out with peer-review, it developed over centuries and only formally for the last 50 years. However, as physicists & mathematicians have proven over the last 20 years, peer-review doesn’t have to happen first when communicating science.

    The great thing about this gender preprint is the number of eyeballs scrutinizing it are logs higher than the 2-3 sets of eyeballs that will eventually put it under peer-review. When only a few people peer-review research there are always mistakes missed. The big story in science over the last few years is how many retractions are occurring in peer-review literature. The number is astounding and many are calling for something like preprints to correct mistakes/fraud before it gets rubber-stamped as “peer-reviewed.” The attention this preprint is getting is exactly what we envisioned would happen a couple of years ago; if the rest of the scientific literature is preprinted in the future then when things do go through peer-review we’ll ideally have less fraud, errors and more trustworthy results.

    Where journalism fits into this is that “preprints” (not yet peer-reviewed) is completely new to that lot. There are science journalists who know the fields well and the difference of preprint versus peer-review, but mainstream media is still learning. Mainstream media still exaggerates peer-reviewed results as well to a great degree. It is going to take time and blog posts like yours before the growing trend of preprinting is understood by the media.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      > It is going to take time and blog posts like yours before the growing trend of preprinting is understood by the media.

      I would recommend not holding your breath while waiting for that to happen.

      The media is not made up of people who understand things; it’s made up of people who pattern-recognize something that matches up with currently popular biases, copy and paste it into WordPress, and then forget about it completely as they move on to the next target. You might as well wait for nematodes to understand fractional reserve banking.

      • Mr Bones says:

        Alternatively – it takes hardly any time at all before the media understands how to exploit the growing trend of preprinting.

        Most likely scenario: the media won’t stop reporting preprints until the public stops finding them convincing. If the public even is capable of learning to distinguish between preprints and actual findings, the media will simply fail to mention that it’s a preprint – something we’re already seeing happen, so I suspect we are this far in the process.

        What this means is, the media won’t stop misrepresenting anything remotely related to academia as being the Word of Science, not until the public no longer trusts anything remotely related to academia. Journalists are like judges, in this sense: they are important roles that become immensely destructive when their agenda overrides their professionalism.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Thanks for commenting here!

      I think the preprinting is a great idea, as there are a lot of studies I’d have loved to be able to give input on before they got official, but I do worry about exactly this sort of thing happening. I think this study has a lot of strong points, but I also think there are some genuinely terrible studies out there, and that the same thing that happened here could happen with one utterly without redeeming qualities; this could be especially dangerous if it were something like an anti-vax study. I also think this is potentially dangerous to you – as far as I know there’s nothing preventing someone from uploading an anti-vax study to your site and then making it look like you support it.

      I think your policy of putting the big “NOT PEER REVIEWED” ribbon on the top is a good start, but 99% of the exposure is going to come from people who write articles and can choose whether or not to mention that. I’m not sure what else you can do other than put another ribbon saying “IT WOULD BE REALLY IRRESPONSIBLE TO PUBLICIZE AND DRAW CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THIS AT THIS POINT”.

      • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

        > 99% of the exposure is going to come from people who write articles and can choose whether or not to mention that.

        Terms of use are a thing. Whether or not you like the thing, it can be used for this purpose. Like requiring that any republication or use by third parties specifically mention the lack of peer review.

        Sending a couple friendly cease and desist orders occasionally is cheap, and most of those 99% have legal departments that are adverse to editors giving them unnecessary heartburn.

        If you really care enough to make a reasonable effort to enforce it I think the problem is solvable.

        • As much as I dislike the “threaten litigation first” approach, it would work.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            There was a reason I said send a friendly cease and desist order. Okay, maybe it just made me giggle to think such a thing is possible.

            But there is a world of difference between “we really do have a material interest in your compliance with the license we gave you access to our stuff under so please comply with its terms” and “pay us a huge settlement or we’ll bend you over the barrel in court.”

        • John Schilling says:

          IANAL, but I am fairly certain that repeating the conclusions of a scientific paper in a journalistic report would constitute fair use so long as no more than a few sentences of the original text were used. And that fair use trumps terms of use in this context.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            I don’t think it is terribly clear cut, but I am under the impression that licensed access to IP, a nondisclosure agreement for example, is pretty persuasive, at least so far as actual parties to the agreement are concerned. Consider, for example, those jerks with the poorly edited baby parts videos. They are getting bent over the barrel for violating their nondisclosure agreement, despite a sort of legitimate public interest/journalism claim (or at least as good as most of the investigative journalism I’ve ever seen).

            The published scientific paper vs licensed access to pre-published works in progress distinction is a pretty big one, I think.

            As a thought experiment, consider a pre-launch product demo for journalists where, as a condition of attending the event, they agree to specifically mention that the product they demoed was a pre-production version and that the final version may incorporate changes and updates. (a) How binding would that agreement be? (b) How effective would it be?

          • Muga Sofer says:

            That depends; many sites are set up so you have to consent to ToS just to view them, which I believe would trump generic copyright law. IANAL, of course.

          • Shieldfoss says:

            “Consider, for example, those jerks with the poorly edited baby parts videos. They are getting bent over the barrel for violating their nondisclosure agreement”

            Well there’s the rub: There’s no NDA between PeerJ and Journalist X. PeerJ might decide to put one into their terms of use, but as far as I know there still hasn’t been a succesful suit over a violation of a click-through agreement.

        • Shieldfoss says:

          “Terms of use are a thing”

          Technically yes.

          Technically, they’re also entirely non-binding on somebody who hasn’t signed a piece of paper agreeing to them.

          The point of Terms-of-Use is not that you open yourself to litigation if you break them, but rather that the entity posting the ToU avoids opening themselves to litigation for banning you after you break the ToU.

          • imoatama says:

            Terms-of-use are just as enforceable as are signed paper documents, in terms of contract formation . The best example of this would be arbitration clauses, but there are plenty of others.

            IANAL, but Eric Goldman, among others, has documented cases in this area at length.http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2015/02/the-browsewrapclickwrap-distinction-is-falling-apart.htm

          • Shieldfoss says:

            1: Check. Huh, I guess they HAVE held up in court now. And apparently for a WHILE now. I wonder why I thought otherwise.

            2: Those examples are used defensively – that is, once somebody else makes it a legal issue, the entities in question go on to show that you agreed to a contract. While this is technically equivalent to anything else you agree to in a click-through agreement, I wonder if the courts involved would take the same view if they get used on the offense.

    • brad says:

      We launched “PeerJ Preprints” because we felt that biology and computer science were ready to embrace what physicists have been doing for 20 years at arXiv, which is preprinting before peer-review.

      There’s also SSRN for the social science and law (where it is pre-publication rather than pre peer review since law stubbornly refuses to peer review.)

    • Max says:

      Just wanted to say thank you for doing this, as a physicist who relies so extensively on the arXiv that he couldn’t imagine how he’d get research done without it 🙂

  37. I’m a coauthor of a PeerJ CS paper. One of the commenters above described Scott’s post as “informal peer review,” and I need to point out, it does not need to be informal. People tend to have a lot of impostor syndrome about the academic literature, but crucially, you do not have to be employed in academia to be an academic reviewer. Nor do you have to be employed in academia to write an academic paper. I haven’t left any comments or questions on this paper yet (though my coauthor Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson has), but Scott, I would encourage you in particular to create an account and leave the feedback you’ve raised here in the applicable contexts in the PeerJ discussion.

    I don’t know what short- or long-range plans PeerJ has for the inevitable influx of Dunning-Kruger effect, but really it was going to happen someday, and one of the defining characteristics of inevitable things is there’s no forestalling them.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      >one of the defining characteristics of inevitable things is there’s no forestalling them.

      Is it? Death and taxes are both inevitable, but we still have doctors and lobbyists.

    • patches welcome says:

      I didn’t catch the error in your original preprint either, and I actually made use of it to tie ties…

  38. Darwin says:

    The only you’ve said in this whole post that would indicate someone should not get excited about this study is in #7, because the primary finding of this paper is the interaction effect between identification and gender among outsiders, and this is the only place you try to advance an alternate hypothesis to explain this interaction effect.

    Now, I ask you, in the hope of full intellectual honesty: do you believe that the mechanism you proposed to explain this interaction is as parsimonious, elegant, and as supported by previous findings as the author’s hypothesis, a gender bias among the people making pull requests?

    • Earthly Knight says:

      I am confused by your contention here. Are you saying the only possible way a study can be flawed is if the finding reported by the study’s authors can be explained by a hypothesis more parsimonious than the one they themselves advance? If so, this has to be some kind of joke.

      Suppose you want to show that the Fs are discriminated against relative to the Gs in some population. If you are at liberty to gerrymander subsets of the population however you like to fish for the desired effect, you are guaranteed to find it, provided that the population contains at least some Gs. Imagine, for instance, that I wish to demonstrate that whites are discriminated against relative to blacks when it comes to becoming president of the United States. Obviously I will not find a main effect. But I will find a black X Hawaiian-born interaction, that is, 100% of Hawaiian-born presidents have been black. Does this suffice for a showing of racism against whites in presidential elections? Of course not. This is why gerrymandering subgroups in this way (“p-hacking”) is disreputable, and why multiple-test corrections like the Bonferroni are needed in studies like this.

      • Darwin says:

        The example you give *does* advance a more parsimonious alternative hypothesis: that the small, gerrymandered sample is not representative of the larger population (ie, that the authors used a poor operational definition). You will find that any objection to a methodology can be expressed in the form of such a hypothesis, because statistics at it’s base *is* about differentiating between competing hypotheses to explain the data (the most common alternate hypothesis being, of course, the null hypothesis).

        In this case, someone could advance a hypothesis as to why the identified vs unidentified women submitting to Github are not representative of women coders overall (in a way that specifically explains why you would expect this interaction effect), but no one I’ve seen has done so in a convincing way.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          In this case, someone could advance a hypothesis as to why the identified vs unidentified women submitting to Github are not representative of women coders overall

          Your summary of the study’s results is inaccurate; it found that women whose usernames disclosed their sex were more successful if those women were “insiders”, but less successful if those women were “outsiders.” This is important, because an outsider X woman X disclosed sex interaction is a weird gerrymander in a way that a woman X disclosed sex interaction is not– no one would have predicted a priori that being an outsider would make any difference.

          But nevermind. Your thesis, I take it, is this: if in any arbitrary subset of some population the Gs fare better than the Fs, discrimination against the Fs should be assumed unless some more plausible explanation for the discrepancy can be furnished, regardless of how gerrymandered the subset is or how Fs fare in the population at large. This thesis is false. Take all of the members of congress. There will be some weird property, M, which holds significantly more commonly of the black members than the white members solely by chance. M might be birthmonth, location of surname in the alphabet, location of first name in the alphabet, current proximity to an amethyst, whatever. This is true because there are indefinitely many weird properties you can use to define a subset. But this does not do anything to show that whites are discriminated against when they run for congress, even if we do not have in hand an explanation for why M is more common among black congresspeople, even, indeed, if no such explanation exists. It is a fluke, and if you do enough p-hacking, you will always be able to find some such fluke.

          Get it?

          • Darwin says:

            >no one would have predicted a priori that being an outsider would make any difference.

            No one would have predicted that knowing a individual personally and well reduces the degree to which you apply unconscious biases to them in everyday interactions? that’s weird, because that’s a well-established result from the psychological literature on stereotyping and bias which has been well-known for decades.

            As for the rest, it appears that you cannot function within an argument without constructing a strawman to attack. I already agreed with you that the gerrymandering in the example you gave was improper, and explained how this could be expressed as an alternative hypothesis.

            My argument was that your gerrymandering reasoning does not apply to this study, as it does not produce a strong alternative hypothesis in this study the way it did in your example. In your first paragraph, you tried to advance an argument for why it *would* apply; and in mine, I countered that argument. This is our only area of disagreement; you contend that the authors are p-hacking in this specific case, I contend that they are not, and have given my reasoning. If you have a further argument to support your contention, by all means lets hear it.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            No one would have predicted that knowing a individual personally and well reduces the degree to which you apply unconscious biases to them in everyday interactions? that’s weird, because that’s a well-established result from the psychological literature on stereotyping and bias which has been well-known for decades.

            1. Could you give some citations?

            2. How “personally and well” does the average insider know the average repository owner?

            3. Does the bias literature indicate that men actually become biased in favor of women as they get to know them “personally and well”? Because otherwise it fails to explain the effect seen here.

            4. This is a plausible just-so story, but there’s often a plausible just-so story to be found when you’re p-hacking. If, for instance, outsider women had been more successful than outsider men and insider women had been less successful than their male counterparts, the authors might just as well have chalked it up to outsider women’s gender being less salient in the mind of the repository owner. At the very least, the experimenters need to predict in advance of looking at the data that they expect to see the specified interaction. There is no indication that this was done here.

            My argument was that your gerrymandering reasoning does not apply to this study, as it does not produce a strong alternative hypothesis in this study the way it did in your example

            I don’t know what you mean by “strong alternative hypothesis.” The alternative “hypothesis” is that the researchers fished around for some way of subdividing the population that showed women at a disadvantage compared to men. For all we know, that’s what they did.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I actually think that the fact that the authors don’t show whether the finding you referred to is statistically significant, whether it’s significant outside of their subgroup division, whether they did a Bonferroni correction, and whether it remains when controlled for observed gender differences are important in this regard.

      Depending on exactly how people are getting excited, the fact that the effect was observed in women and not in (less in?) men is also relevant.

      As for whether my hypothesis is better than the authors’ – the authors don’t have a hypothesis. They have no idea why gender identification decreases acceptance among men. Yes, I feel like that has important relevance to their claim that they know exactly why it decreases acceptance among women.

      Let me give an example. Suppose that your friend tells you that every morning they eat bananas, and every morning they get sick. You suggest maybe they’re allergic to bananas. Your friend tells you that actually, they get sick even when they don’t eat bananas, but they feel like they might be sicker when they also eat bananas, it’s hard to tell. Now your banana hypothesis is a lot less plausible. Maybe they’re getting sick for some other reason and having a full stomach exacerbates it. In any case, it would be irresponsible to say “Whatever, you do get sick when you have bananas, so it’s clearly a banana allergy, you’re just being stubborn in wondering about another cause.”

      • Darwin says:

        >the authors don’t have a hypothesis. They have no idea why gender identification decreases acceptance among men.

        They don’t have a hypothesis because it’s not germane to their area of investigation, which has to do with differences between genders; factors that affect both genders equally are orthogonal to their interests. That said, parsimonious explanations for that cross-gender difference are easy to come by; CS professionals are more concerned with protecting their identities, people who put more time into filling out their profiles also post more code recreationally whereas peopl who don’t bother to fill out their account info are only creating accounts to answer one or two questions they’re specifically expert/interested in, etc.

        But the point is that all of these hypotheses are orthogonal to gender; they don’t explain the interaction, why women’s accept rates drop more than men’s in the identified group.

        >but they feel like they might be sicker when they also eat bananas, it’s hard to tell.

        What you’re basically saying here is that if you don’t have strong enough evidence to conclude a statistically significant interaction effect, you shouldn’t conclude an interaction effect. I obviously agree, and it’s certainly galling that the authors didn’t report this statistic – hopefully someone will catch this in the peer-review process before the final paper is published. However, the size of the interaction does appear from the graphs to be something like 3%-4%; given that differences of this size are found to be significant elsewhere in the paper, and given that we’re talking about a binary measure (accept/reject) over hundreds of thousands of data points, I would be shocked if it were not significant.

        Again, if it’s not a significant interaction, then my point is irrelevant. But it seems very likely for the reasons I outlined that it is significant, and if so, it’s a very strong indicator of gender bias – unless someone can provide a strong alternative hypothesis, which I don’t believe anyone has. Until this difference can be explained, I don’t think it’s proper to tell people that they can safely ignore this study.

        • Mark says:

          They don’t have a hypothesis because it’s not germane to their area of investigation, which has to do with differences between genders

          But it is germane! Because it’s perfectly possible that the unknown factor X that penalizes gender-visibility in both men and women also accounts for the difference between men and women*. That would be simpler than the sexism hypothesis, since it invokes only one rather than two causes, but it’s less powerful, because we have less reason to expect X would affect the genders in disparate ways. So I’d say the most parsimonious explanation is unsettled.

          * Example: Imagine everyone hates employees of megacorps like Google, and this results in PR’s being rejected more when you can tell the submitter works for one. So people with visible (gender) identities are more likely to get PR’s rejected, because it’s more likely you can tell they work for a megacorp. Now imagine that a higher proportion of women on GitHub work for a megacorp than men. Then “visible megacorp affiliation” entirely explains why visible women are more penalized than visible men. No sexism required.

          • Deiseach says:

            The problem is, “insider” women get accepted more, “outsider” women get accepted less (and that’s not even considering so do “outsider” men) when their gender is revealed.

            Given that it’s more likely that if they can tell your gender straight off the bat, that you work for a megacorp, then that torpedoes the “everyone hates megacorps” explanation. The most parsimonious explanation, at least to me, seems to be that it’s personal bias at work and not gender bias; if X knows Y (a woman) or has heard about Y or Y is a friend of a friend or even it’s just that Y constantly contributes fixes and X knows the name to see it, then Y’s fix gets picked. If X doesn’t know Y, they treat them the same way as Z (a man).

            Furthermore, if X knows Z but doesn’t know Y, they may be more inclined to pick Z’s fix not because Z is a man and Y is a woman, but because they feel they can trust Z’s work more.

          • Mark says:

            “Insider” means that either you’re the project owner or that the project owner has given you special collaboration rights. I would expect that to filter out people who hate megacorps and their employees. (Though to be clear, I wasn’t advancing the “megacorp hypothesis” seriously, just as an example.)

  39. onyomi says:

    Just now my Facebook sidebar has a news story: “Research finds women are better coders than men.” Is this really the world we have to live in?

    • Deiseach says:

      Alas, yes; the only consolation (if it is any) is that “’twas ever thus”.

      Anyway, to cheer you all up: forget AI, the true existential risk is lurking right here.

      Teeny-tiny little clumps of pseudo-brains in jars petri dishes. That are trying to link up neurons and become functional. What could possibly go wrong there? 🙂

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        Actually recently met some of the guys involved with that sort of research.

        The thing is that while they’re fascinating, for some arcane legal(?) reason, they’re not allowed to grow them past what’s equivalent to an early stage of embryonic development. That’s good enough for researching brain cancers and other things like that but nowhere near “They Saved Hitler’s Brain!” levels of brains in jars. I would be very surprised if there was any intelligence whatsoever there.

        But yeah I’m surprised it took this long to hit the mainstream. People are probably going to get really upset about this for a while depending on how the coverage handles it.

        • Deiseach says:

          What intrigued me was the line about the neurons trying to link up. We’re worrying (well, some people are worrying) about computers one day suddenly waking up and being sentient and the next minute they are our God-Emperor Overlord deciding whether or not to turn us into paperclips.

          We’ve got blokes messing about with actual “can turn into proven sentient material” lightly laughing over “Ha ha, it’s trying to connect up and think but that’s not a problem”.

          I’m not saying this is the potential plot of a blockbuster “How Armageddon happened” movie, but this is the potential plot of a sci-fi/horror summer blockbuster movie 🙂

        • Muga Sofer says:

          >The thing is that while they’re fascinating, for some arcane legal(?) reason, they’re not allowed to grow them past what’s equivalent to an early stage of embryonic development.

          I should think the reason is fairly obvious.

          • Deiseach says:

            Makes for an interesting legal/ethical question, though, doesn’t it? If it’s legally permissible (because legally the entity in question is not a person in law and so has no rights or protections) to abort a clumping of brain-cell tissue at a later stage of development – up to 24 weeks (to take the conservative estimate of latest permissible/viability and avoid the whole morass of ‘late-stage’ or ‘third trimester’ abortion), then why should you have to terminate your brain in a jar petri dish at an earlier stage, given that it is not (a) a brain (b) part of a larger organism (c) is not very likely to be able to go on to viability no matter how long you let it develop?

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            It’s not actually that obvious to me.

            It’s not an embryo, or even derived from ES cells, and has never implanted in a woman’s womb. The minibrains are organoids created from a patient’s own skin cells ex vivo. Any existing laws related to abortion or cloning wouldn’t really seem to apply here: as Deiseach says, it’s not and can never be viable.

            If we can make, say, (more-or-less) functional hearts from human iPS cells without it being a huge legal issue then I don’t see why brains should be so different. You could say that your brain is more essential to personhood in an ethical or metaphysical sense but I’m not aware of any rulings to that effect.

        • Deiseach says:

          I would be very surprised if there was any intelligence whatsoever there.

          How about reaching insect levels of – I won’t say intelligence, but cognition? movement of electro-chemical signals through the cells? whatever you want to call it – possibly there? There are people who worry about insect suffering, after all. If you can be concerned for a housefly, why not a tissue culture that is comparable in size and derived from an organism that has a much higher level of sophistication, development and potential when it comes to brain matter?

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Well the snarky answer would be I’m not very concerned for houseflies and neither is the law.

            More seriously, I’m not worried about suffering because neither minibrains nor proper brains have nociceptors and thus cannot experience the sensation of pain. In fact, I’d say that a brain without sensory receptors cannot really be said to experience anything at all. I’m not that well-versed in the metaphysics of qualia but it seems pretty straightforward that there’s not a lot going on in a system with no inputs and no outputs.

          • Viliam says:

            The system without inputs could still suffer from some version of “phantom pain”.

    • vV_Vv says:

      Just now my Facebook sidebar has a news story: “Research finds women are better coders than men.”

      Nice. Is it also available as a photo overlay, possibly combined with the French flag and the lightsaber? 🙂

      Is this really the world we have to live in?

      Internet, you have failed me!

  40. Eli says:

    So basically, people believe things easily when they comport well with their pre-existing beliefs.

    In related news, when the joint probability of a prior belief and a new experiment is high, the posterior probability of the same belief will also be high.

    Not saying this is a good study at all. Saying people are being probabilistically well-founded in taking it at its word.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes; this becomes dangerous when an entire field is biased in the same way, and a person who points out the problems with each individual study can be answered with “But think about all the other studies!”, and nobody will sit still long enough to read the problems with every single study at once.

      • Carl Shulman says:

        “nobody will sit still long enough to read the problems with every single study at once.”

        Randomly sampling several studies and showing serious problems with each is a pretty powerful way to leverage limited effort into stronger evidence about the literature as a whole.

        • Jacob says:

          If they were actually randomly sampled, yes, but anybody who did so would likely be accused of cherry-picking. Possibly for good reason.

          In Learning from mistakes in climate research they randomly sample climate science papers which reject AGW. Find lots of mistakes, bad practices, etc., which I don’t find too surprising, I assume that behavior is rampant in many fields. What they DIDN’T do was look at any pro-AGW papers, and as far as I know there’s no existing study looking at climate science overall, so whatever result they found was guaranteed to support the message they wanted to send (that anti-AGW science is unreliable).

      • JuanPeron says:

        The LessWrong piece One Argument Against an Army seems highly relevant here, although it’s more like “one body of research”. Any single Social Psych study that’s torn apart can be excused by appealing to the larger body of supposedly-good results, simply because no one can tear apart every crappy study at once.

        I initially wrote Social Psycho – does that count as Freudian?

  41. BBA says:

    In a totally different context on another blog, there’s discussion of how good news never gets reported, or gets spun into bad news for another reason. There’s hand-wringing about gaps in intellectual achievement, but when the gaps are closed there’s no celebration. Instead there’s hand-wringing about student loan debt.

    Though my guess here would be that if there’s enough ambiguity you can massage the statistics to support any position. Cue the old Twain-misquoting-Disraeli line about lies, damned lies and statistics.

  42. Zorgon says:

    Just wanted to express my approval for the change to the “recent comments” feature. I’ve been away and didn’t notice that it now does not reset when you post a comment of your own, which is a great improvement in usability.

    • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

      This change is very recent and I love it.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I hadn’t noticed that but it’s great! Thanks Bakkot! (presumably)

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      But it does now (it didn’t for a while) reset the Ctl-Find box back to 1 of X.

      Like, I read down to ‘180 of 199’. I added a comment, making 200 comments. The box reset to ‘1 of 200’ so I’ll have to click all the way from 1 to get back to 180. As Bakkot had it for a short while, after my comment the box would say ‘181 of 200’ so I could progress on down easily.

      • Bakkot says:

        I don’t think that was anything to do with me; searching for text within a page is entirely up to your browser. It may have been to do with something like whether or not you clicked on the page after it loaded, but I couldn’t say for sure.

        edit: that said, you can generally hit (or hold) C-g to go to the next match, instead of clicking, and C-shift-g to go to the previous. This loops around, so you can get to 180 from 1 by hitting C-shift-G 21 times.

    • The recent comments feature has gone back to resetting for me. 🙁

  43. ad says:

    Whenever I hear about one of these studies I wonder “would they have wanted to be seen reporting the opposite result”?

    And if the answer is”no” I start with the assumption that the research is worthless.

    • Darwin says:

      So basically just Ad Hominem then?

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Well, if everyone in the field is similar, it means only the ‘correct’ studies will be reported. That means any situation where studies can give ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ results will display as ‘correct’ so the fact you are being told ‘correct’ is true doesn’t actually provide much information.

        • Darwin says:

          Are you proposing that papers with sound methodology and significant results which do not support a particular political regime will never get published? Do you have evidence for that claim? It seems like a very strong claim, especially considering that there exist anti-dogma journals which are happy to publish anti-PC studies (the places where things like ‘global warming is a hoax’ and ‘gay parents raise dysfunctional children’ studies get published and reported on).

          • Jason K. says:

            I wouldn’t say never, but keep in mind that the people doing these studies have ambitions and careers as well and will chase the money. As most of these researchers are funded by the gov and various non-profits, if you want funding, you play to their interests. It would be totally unsurprising to find that studies which might yield unpopular results are both avoided as subjects and frequently downplayed/ignored when published.

            You wouldn’t expect studies funded by drug companies and the tobacco industry to be negative towards them, would you? Same problem, different ideology.

    • Alex says:

      The problem with your approach is that it creates a dynamic where certain hypotheses will never be believed, even if there is considerable empirical evidence.

      The problem with the atmosphere that’s built up around certain topics is that it makes your approach somewhat understandable, even if still ill-advised.

  44. Karen says:

    Everything in your article is fine. Until we come to this statement:
    ‘The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”’ Then you use this to justify your concern with social justice movements.

    I agree that the media’s response to the study plays up the sexism aspect. (Playing up anything remotely controversial is pretty standard in journalism to get people to pay attention — it’s not just about gender issues.) But your rather twisted response to the media’s response is really over the top.

    I know you were exaggerating on purpose. But many studies like this aren’t about explicit sexism but about implicit sexism. It’s pretty hard to argue that implicit sexism doesn’t exist in our society. It’s been demonstrated in other studies, and it’s been experienced by many people. So often when someone tries to point out implicit sexism, the response from men is strongly defensive, as if they have been accused of being “vile” and deliberately attacking women, though this is not what is being said.

    A little less defensiveness and a little more listening to what is actually being said would go a long way to reducing these sort of conflicts.

    • anon says:

      The study isn’t about explicit sexism, but the media coverage is. The post is about the media grossly misrepresenting the study. The "defensiveness" isn't at the study talking about implicit sexism, it is at the media using it to paint the tech sector as a "vile male hive mind". Hell, the statement you find problematic isn’t even a “twisted exaggeration” Scott made up, it’s a quote from the media, although quoting some media is indeed only to be made in jest.

      In light of this I think your sentence "So often when someone tries to point out implicit sexism, the response from men is strongly defensive, as if they have been accused of being “vile” and deliberately attacking women, though this is not what is being said." is false. That's exactly what is being said, not by the study but by the media, which is who is being criticized here. A response that looks like you were accused of being vile is completely reasonable when you're being accused of being vile.

      Another point: you ask for a little more listening in the same post you dismiss criticism as "defensiveness"?

    • honestlymellowstarlight says:

      “A little less defensiveness and a little more listening to what is actually being said would go a long way to reducing these sort of conflicts.”

      Always, these demands for submission. It’s kinda kinky.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I can’t remember if this is strike six or strike seven, but my miniscule knowledge of baseball rules suggests you are banned either way.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Unfortunately, the media coverage both here and in many other situations like this plays up the explicit sexism angle, as does the women-in-tech movement itself. I am glad you recognize that there is a difference between implicit and explicit sexism, but I don’t think it’s fair to call me “defensive” based on this difference when the media is talking about explicit sexism, the study will be used to support claims of explicit sexism, and the study doesn’t even do a good job showing implicit sexism anyway.

      • Jacob says:

        There’s a cycle-of-horribleness that tends to go around a lot of studies. Overview:

        0. Somebody publishes a study on a topic of broad-scale interest. Could be sexism, racism, cure for cancer, global warming…take your pick.
        1. The study itself probably over-reaches in its claims (particularly in social sciences) although probably not too crazy depending on how you interpret their wording. “Our findings suggest that blah blah blah” is not the same thing as “blah blah blah is definitely true”.
        2. Media picks up story, ditches any hint of nuance, makes broad sweeping claims and often misinterprets the study itself (I often wonder how reliable journalism is in general, I know science journalism is shit but that’s just because I can verify it). Sometimes scientists get in on the game in bad press releases .
        3. People, enraged by the terrible media coverage, attack the study itself. And be sure to read that carefully, the poor media coverage makes people attack the study. Scott you’re pretty good about not doing this, and keeping criticism of media and study explicitly separate, but the rest of the world (blogosphere?) is not.

        So weirdly enough, bad press coverage makes people attack the study (often in unfounded ways), rather than the press coverage.

        Also I assume/hope this post was intended as and will interpreted by the authors as constructive criticism. Which would be great, that’s how science is supposed to work after all.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      Let me put it this way: imagine if a study that showed there are a lot of Jewish people in tech was reported as “tech is controlled by a vile Jewish hive mind” by a Vice reporter.

      Would you conclude that the writer in question meant “there are implicit factors in our society causing this effect (which is vaguely benefiting Jews)”, and complain that Jewish people who reacted “as if they have been accused of being “vile” and deliberately attacking goyim” were being unreasonably defensive?

      As it is, this kind of reporting is what makes it impossible to discuss institutional sexism; the paper found that women discriminated *more* strongly than men, but the hive-mind is still reported as “male”, because something something battle of the sexes.

    • Eric says:

      > as if they have been accused of being “vile” and deliberately attacking women

      You did notice that that “vile male hive mind” line was an actual quote from the Vice article, right?

  45. Bob Smith says:

    It’s all about ethics in science journalism.

    Not about gender bias at all.

    (srsly you guys, if you have an actual problem be honest with yourself about what it is (or maybe you just don’t like half the species having a fair go after millions of years of incorrectly being considered inferior))

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      gr8 b8 m8, I r8 it 8/8

    • honestlymellowstarlight says:

      Journalism is always, inherently unethical.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Allow me to propose an alternative: if you have an argument, make it, don’t just wave a hate totem around and then wildly accuse everyone you’re addressing of self-delusion and various social sins.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Bob Smith is banned. Please read comments policy

      Dr. Dealgood’s response was not constructive, and he gets a warning

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        “You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.”

        (Seriously, Bob Smith was asking for this, but I don’t know if the ban should be indefinite. At least, I would say he ought to be let back in if he apologizes. But Vive le Codex! Vive la Terreur!)

      • BBA says:

        And with this ban, it becomes just a little bit harder to cite SSC in SJ-aligned circles. “See, he’s such a misogynist MRA-sympathizer that he bans someone for a perfectly reasonable callout!”

        Not that I disagree with the ban or anything.

        • Theo Jones says:

          I doubt that anyone who isn’t already thoroughly mindkilled on this issue will care much about this ban. Bob Smith was pretty blatantly trolling.

          • BBA says:

            One person’s “mindkilled” is another person’s “woke.”

          • The Nybbler says:

            You do realize that “mindkilled” is an SJ supporter’s term for it, right? “Andrew Card”, I believe is how he’s known around here.

          • Cabbage says:

            @The Nybbler, it isn’t originally Andrew Card’s (Arthur Chu’s) term. It originates in a 2007 Eliezer Yudkowsky post on Less Wrong called “Politics is the Mind-Killer”; Arthur Chu was making reference to this.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Interesting. Yudkowsky is referencing Herbert’s _Dune_ (“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration”), which is what I’d thought Chu was referencing.

            Mind-killing in this sense is definitely not the same as “woke”. Mind-killing is actively not-thinking things which you would otherwise believe are true, because they do not serve the ends you have chosen. “Woke” would be to have had an epiphany, to have seen previously hidden truth (or alternatively to have discovered previously concealed falsehood)

          • Adam says:

            I would assume a place like this would be full of people who already know this, but just in case, the whole point of the litany is that recoiling from fear is a trait of unevolved animals controlled by base instinct, an instinct that makes them easy to defeat. The first mention I can remember is when Paul Atreides was subjected to the box test, intended to prove that he is ready to face his fears in order to overcome them, to see that they are wrong and irrational so that they will not cloud his mind and paralyze his action in the future when he faces true grave threats.

            If we’re going to take the analogy seriously, it suggests we should immerse ourselves in politics and learn its ways in order to become immune to them, which seemingly informs at least the spirit of rationalism if not its realization in the average practitioner and definitely not its realization in Arthur Chu.

          • onyomi says:

            Coincidentally, at the same time this convo is going on, a friend posts something about severity of insect bites, which leads me to discover the real-life gom jabbar:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvIFO9srUw

          • BBA says:

            I meant more generally – without going into the precise definitions of the terminology – that who’s closed-minded and who’s open-minded is a matter of perspective. We see them as “mindkilled” because they won’t look at data; they see themselves as “woke” and us as closed-minded because lived experiences are more important than anything data can tell you. (Sure, Chu considers himself mindkilled, but he’s an outlier on pretty much everything and you can’t draw any conclusions from him.)

            It’s a fundamental disconnect and I don’t know how to bridge it.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @BBA:

            Yeah. There’s a real gap between the two groups.

            There’s a group that places a high value on personal (often emotional) experience and identity and sees them as a source of moral and epistemic authority. There’s a group that values universal principles and logic and derives moral authority from those things and epistemic authority from those things plus verifiable, preferably large-sample, information.

            Probably most of the people here fall more into the second group. I certainly do. It’s important not to get arrogant though – most humans throughout our history probably fall more into the first group, and that second group does badly when the information is wrong, and has a failure mode of convincing itself that their emotions are logical, even when they’re not.

            And, arguments between the two usually end up devolving into the fact that to the first group, genetic fallacies aren’t fallacious, while the second group goes in the other direction, arguably too far in the other direction.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        Fair enough, sorry about that. No more glib chan-speak.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      I have no idea whether or not saving a comment is possible, but the next time Scott bans some douche not left but right of wing, I want people to remember this post before posting ‘oh my goooood scott is giving in to the SJ people’ en masse.

    • Reality Bites says:

      Haven’t seen any women treated as inferior, I see them getting pampered, catered to, pandered to, looked after, to the point that they are entitled parasites way too selfish to want to even be around them.

      • Cadie says:

        This seems uncharitable.

        Certainly there are a few women – and this type tends to be the most obnoxious and thus memorable – who take unfair advantage of men and use whatever they can (including made-up claims of “inferior treatment” when simply asked to do their fair share) to do as little work as possible and get away with it. Any group has a few bad apples in it, “women” are no exception. But in my experience and observation, the majority don’t behave that way, we just want to show up, work, get paid, and go home like everybody else.

        • John Schilling says:

          Any group has a few bad apples in it

          I do not think that proverb means what you think it means.

        • hlynkacg says:

          I will grant that it is uncharitable, but I don’t think that RB is entirely wrong either, nor do I think that its a case of “a few bad apples”.

          In my own experience, most of what get labeled as “Misogyny” in the workplace is really just women getting treated exactly the way a man would be in the same situation. I don’t really want to play the whole “marginalization Olympics” but I do get the sense that the vast majority of women in general and feminists in particular are blind to their own privileges. You can’t have real equality and respect if you still expect to be treated with kid’s gloves.

          • Deiseach says:

            In my own experience, most of what get labeled as “Misogyny” in the workplace is really just women getting treated exactly the way a man would be in the same situation.

            I don’t know, hlynkacg; is it common (or was it ever common) for – to take an example from a work-experience placement I and another young woman were put on back in the days when I was training as a lab tech, and gender swapping to bring out the point I want to make – for a very much majority of one gender workplace to bring in and hand around gay porn magazines and be talking about men and what they’d like to do to them, phwoar?

            Amy man here want to tell me “Oh yeah, when I was starting out in the post room there were nudie pics of beefcake guys on the walls and the women making lewd remarks and comments about the blue movies they’d been watching the night before, but that’s just how it was and I don’t see a problem”?

            Is that “misogyny”, “sexual harassment”, or just “women getting treated exactly the same as a man would be in the same situation”? Because I realise there is the traditional work culture in places where it’s been majority or solely male, and is heavily blue-collar/working class, but that is changing now.

            Sure, as you go up the ladder to the offices and the whiter the collar, that type of thing gets much less explicit, but it’s still there: when I transferred upstairs to the main lab, there were more women working there (a whole two of them), but there were still similar attitudes in place, e.g. the head of the section had (what at the time I thought was) a very creepy habit of coming up behind you when you were standing at the bench and standing way too close beside you (as in “pushing his groin into your buttocks” close*).

            Was this just another example of “women getting treated exactly the way a man would be in the same situation”?

            Granted, all this was thirty years ago and I hope to God this kind of carry-on is a distant memory of the Bad Old Days, but it took loud-mouthed women kicking up and complaining and yes, feminism, to get these attitudes and behaviours changed, or at the very least if they still remain, to be seen as unacceptable to perform overtly in the workplace.

            It’s different when you’re all of you mostly younger and mostly male, so you haven’t grown up in a world where this behaviour was widespread and considered “Well, that’s just how the factory floor is, you can’t do anything about it, and anyway what is so bad about cheesecake posters and calendars of women as nude as the manufacturers can get away with and not be classified as porn?”

            *Did I complain? No. Why? Young, stupid, inexperienced, didn’t want to make a fuss (the perennial socialisation of women not to draw attention to themselves, to doubt themselves, to think they’re making a big deal out of something that is not that bad), I was on work experience and was afraid to rock the boat in case this got me and the college into trouble and the place would no longer take students on mandatory-as-part-of-the-course work placement, and there were no mechanisms in place back then to let me know there was a procedure to follow, no sexual harassment policies, no HR training days, nothing like that.

            Again, I’d like to hear comparable anecdotes from men here about a boss (male or female) touching you in a manner you felt was inappropriate. Remember, it’s not misogyny or sexual harassment, it’s just women being treated the same way men have been treated, so you guys must have the same stories, right?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Deiseach

            The decision to make your analogy involve gay men is perceptive. Because I suspect that many men really would not care at all if they were in a majority female office in which most of the women flirted with them openly and heavily.

            I’m wondering though – does the utility these men get from being able to have calendars of girls in underwear count at all? Does it count less than other people’s utility? Or is it just that you believe that the gain these men get from being able to have an office environment like this is less than the cost to the women of having to put up with it?

          • Muga Sofer says:

            Anonymous, you misread; in D’s analogy, the women are viewing gay *porn*, not aggressively flirting with gay men.

            To be fair, though, one could argue that these people are showing their porn (seriously?) to everyone, so they are literally being treated the same as a man.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Deiseach:

            Good post!

            @ Anonymous:

            The decision to make your analogy involve gay men is perceptive. Because I suspect that many men really would not care at all if they were in a majority female office in which most of the women flirted with them openly and heavily.

            I think (some men) would like the fantasy version of it, where there are all these hot, submissive women just begging for sex.

            I think they would probably not like the version where their old, ugly boss—whom they have zero desire to sleep with—keeps making unwanted sexual advances. Also the part where if you took her up on the offer, you would never be respected in the office again.

          • Deiseach says:

            Anonymous, I picked gay porn because I really can’t think of porn for women that would involve the same imagery of “men presented for sexual consumption”. The magazines I was talking of were not “Playboy” or the like, and from the little “porn for women” I’ve seen, it seems to be a different attitude (the idea that women like romance? that women are not as visual as men? I don’t know, but the difference is obvious).

            Look at this Marie-Claire magazine survey on “porn for women” – notice the picture they use is of a woman in a sexy pose, not a man. Even when ostensibly for straight women who unashamedly use porn, it’s still pseudo-lesbianism or ‘the male gaze’. It’s not “men as object of desire for straight women”. It’s not “men as object”.

            Granted, I haven’t looked at what porn magazines are out there and not really at anything online (who wants to open that can of worms?)

            If there are porn magazines/sites for straight women presenting men in that fashion, then use that instead.

            As for the “men would love it if women catcalled and made passes at them”, would you really? Would you really love some random person thinking it was perfectly fine to grab your arse, make comments on your appearance, rub up against you in the bus, etc.? Having this happen at any time on any day, even when you’re not dressed to invite offers (i.e. not on the pull at a pub or club on the weekend but trying to get home after a long day at work or walking down the street to do your grocery shopping)?

            So, Anonymous, regale me with that time your older, married boss groped you when you were young and starting your first job and how this was something you loved because hey, what man would turn down sex, or an expression of sexual interest?

            As Vox Imperatoris points out, the fantasy of it is “hot submissive women begging for sex”. How appealing would it be if the man was supposed to be in the role of the hot submissive slut and the women were the sexually dominant ones?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Deiseach

            As for the “men would love it if women catcalled and made passes at them”, would you really?

            Yes. Really.

            The reason I said your analogizing of the lechers as gay men was perceptive is because the crucial point is whether or not they are actually attractive from the perspective of the recipient. What you perhaps miss is that men find a substantial proportion of women attractive, or at least attractive enough to want to have sex with, while I don’t think this is very true the other way round. So I think to make this analogy work you have to take the extra step you did take – specify that those giving the men attention are unattractive. Because, for men, it isn’t true by default, and so unless specified then it won’t be assumed.

            I think the situation experienced by women – being swamped with unwanted propositions by relatively unattractive people – is not how a typical man would view being on the receiving end of lots of attention by average members of the opposite sex.

          • Simon says:

            The only vaguely comparable experience is from when I was young, skinny and had long curly hair. (This was the 80’s, I am now short haired and stocky/fat). It would happen from time to time that I was blocking the way to e.g the bar and being visible only from the back looked sufficiently ambiguous to be taken as female. Unknown male strangers would have no compunction about grabbing me by the waist and moving me out of their path. This would never happen when any other aspect was identifying me as male.

            I was shocked and discomfited at the degree of licence these men afforded themselves to manhandle a perceived female and this is only a ridiculously minor infraction.

          • Adam says:

            This sort of happened to me when I worked a performance job at Disneyland. It was sort of unique as Disneyland jobs go (Innoventions performer, if anyone knows what that is) in that we did one-person short shows and then walked around and interacted with people, and it was an attraction where they could hang out as long as they wanted, not a ride or normal show where you get ushered out and there’s a strict separation between audience and performer. So we had regulars who became groupieish from time to time, repeatedly coming back and damn near stalking us, wanting to hang out after work. This quickly became very annoying, even though none of them were flat-out hideous and none of them were old. I can only imagine it would have been worse if they were actual co-workers and much worse if they were bosses. The clear advantage to being male is you at least never feel physically threatened.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Anonymous says: I think the situation experienced by women – being swamped with unwanted propositions by relatively unattractive people – is not how a typical man would view being on the receiving end of lots of attention by average members of the opposite sex.

            …and I am inclined to agree.

            @ Deiseach, and Vox

            Are the women in your work place not talking about which celebrities they’d like to fuck because the ones in mine certainly are. Likewise, are there not trashy romance novels with half-naked men on the covers strewn about your break room?

            Furthermore the first thing that came to mind reading Deiseach’s example is why aren’t you asking the creepy supe to “knock it off”? I’m not talking about “subtle hints”, or complaining to HR, I’m talking about looking them dead in the eye and telling them to remove their hand before you remove their head. Because fighting your own battles is a big part of that whole “not getting handled with kid gloves” thing.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @hlynkacg

            I don’t want to be rude, but have you ever had a job before? Generally, threatening your boss has quite negative consequences.

          • hlynkacg says:

            8 years in the Navy, another 4 as an EMT/ER Orderly, went back to school, now slinging solder for a medium size tech firm. Held assorted side jobs along the way, janitor, bouncer, handy-man, etc…

            Obviously you shouldn’t be picking fights willy-nilly but I would assert that you will get far better results if you stand up for yourself than if you don’t.

          • Error says:

            “Remove your testicles from my ass or I will remove them for you. With a hand saw.”

            (not realistic. But possibly satisfying.)

            [Edit: Or maybe it is realistic, if you cultivate a reputation for harmless misanthropy. I get away with remarkable threats of violence at my current workplace.]

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @hlynkacg:
            So you’ve never really held an job that wasn’t dominated by blue-collar culture?

            I come from pretty blue collar roots on both sides, but my dad was a college professor. I worked some manual labor jobs in college, have relatives in union jobs in the Midwest. I have a toe back in that world, but mostly I’ve worked office jobs (in the south). It really is a different culture.

            Another thing, on threatening physical violence. In order for it to work, you have to be comfortable that if you are called on it you can deliver some pain. If you have no confidence you can do this, you can’t use that to assert your position. If you threaten violence without confidence, you make your situation worse, not better.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Error
            “Remove your testicles from my ass or I will remove them for you. With a hand saw.”

            I would think first about a very hot heat pad between my ass and the back of my seat, with an option for vibration.

            And/or, a fluffy feminine sweater that sheds on everything.

          • Nita says:

            Unlike most women, I’m so poorly socialized that I can suddenly switch into confrontation mode, and even try to “deliver some pain”, as HBC so charmingly put it.

            But even for me, this switching requires some sort of trigger — a similar switch by the other party, a discrete act of stepping over my boundaries. In my experience, most actual transgressors do literally “creep”, moving slowly enough to make any sort of explosive response from you, at any point in time, seem unreasonable.

            And yeah, I’ve never seen men treat other men that way.

          • Taradino C. says:

            In my own experience, most of what get labeled as “Misogyny” in the workplace is really just women getting treated exactly the way a man would be in the same situation.

            I’ll second this, with the caveat that I’m talking about white-collar workplaces where there aren’t a lot of allegations of, like, groping and overt harassment.

            In my own experience at these places, when something was labeled misogyny, it tended to be along the lines of:

            “I shared a link to an article with my coworkers, as evidence that there’s a Problem and we need to Do Something about it, and they responded by criticizing the article instead of brainstorming ways to Do Something.”

            or

            “My team was having a passionate discussion about our project, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise because everyone was talking over each other.”

            or

            “I said we needed to do more to hire women, and in response someone said we had to be careful because every policy he’s ever seen with that goal has ended up lowering the hiring bar.”

            or

            “I told him I thought the product was broken because of X, and he said ‘No, look, we know X is fine,’ and then he only grudgingly admitted I was right once I collected data proving the problem was X.”

            In other words, the label is often applied to styles of communication and problem-solving that come off as blunt, dismissive, or narrowly focused.

            In those situations, what they’re experiencing is usually no different than what a man would experience in the same situation. The difference is that many men have experienced it their entire lives, with friends and colleagues alike, so they’ve adapted to it: if they want to be heard, they pick a moment and just start talking; if someone dismisses their idea out of hand, they construct a better case and present it again; if someone raises objections that seem trivial, they address the objections and force him to come up with something better or stop objecting. That’s the norm within a certain culture, but when someone from outside the culture encounters it, they sometimes interpret it as hostility directed at them.

          • NN says:

            In those situations, what they’re experiencing is usually no different than what a man would experience in the same situation. The difference is that many men have experienced it their entire lives, with friends and colleagues alike, so they’ve adapted to it: if they want to be heard, they pick a moment and just start talking; if someone dismisses their idea out of hand, they construct a better case and present it again; if someone raises objections that seem trivial, they address the objections and force him to come up with something better or stop objecting. That’s the norm within a certain culture, but when someone from outside the culture encounters it, they sometimes interpret it as hostility directed at them.

            I would add that if for some reason a man isn’t able to adapt to this communication style, then they will end up in pretty much the same place as a hypothetical woman getting shut out of conversations. I say this because I am a man with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and related social anxiety issues resulting in a relatively softspoken speaking style, and in conversations with other men I get talked over all the time.

          • Error says:

            I say this because I am a man with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and related social anxiety issues resulting in a relatively softspoken speaking style, and in conversations with other men I get talked over all the time.

            Similar issue here, although in my case it’s not the speaking style that gets me talked over. I can speak as firmly as I need if I need to, but I hate doing so unless I’ve thoroughly thought through what I’m saying — and by the time I’ve done so, the moment is past.

            The mild autism and the social anxiety are the same, though.

          • Equinimity says:

            I’ve also got the difficulty fitting into the conversational style, due to an anxiety/panic disorder. I get talked over enough that people have forgotten I was present. (On one occasion, someone was to be sent out to remind me the meeting was on, and I managed to finally get a word in to volunteer to go fetch myself.)
            At my current job, I work with a fairly militant feminist, who talks over me and shuts me down in exactly the ways she complains men always do to her. She started out working in blue collar areas, I don’t doubt she had to learn the techniques to keep her job. I’m just mildly amused that the gender dynamic is so exactly reversed in this case, and that no one other than me has noticed.

          • Nita says:

            As someone who tends to talk over people (thanks, dad!), I appreciate gentle reminders that I’m talking to someone from a different conversation culture — e.g., significant stares, verbal cues or taps on the arm.

          • Adam says:

            This seems much more a social anxiety thing than autism thing. If anything, mild spectrum or Aspberger’s is associated with people who engage in extremely long-winded and one-sided conversations with people who don’t actually care about the topic they’re droning on about, which is exactly the problem I have. I talk over everyone and feel a driving need to explain everything and go on and on even when it’s obvious the other person has tuned me out and doesn’t care. I hated watching the movie Adam with other people when he was at the party and kept walking up to random women and telling them about how telescopes work and of course everyone had to laugh at me because that’s exactly what I do and of course they had to name the character ‘Adam.’

          • LL says:

            @Deiseach:

            While working as a dancer on stage I’ve been assaulted by a female client. Upon bringing the complaint to my female manager I was told “That’s just the way women are. Deal with it”. This case occurred while I was dancing at the front of the stage, and one of the women in pervert’s row stood up so that her head was level with my midsection. She wrapped her arms around my lower back, and forced her mouth onto my johnson. She kept it there until I was able to push off backwards over the resistance of her hands linked behind my back. Your mileage may vary as to whether this counts as rape, assault, or a little case of ‘Girls just wanna have fun’.

            Later working in front of the camera for adult film, I’ve had a female coworker (who managed our agency’s sister company and had sufficient sway with my agent that making waves would have been professional suicide) lie to me about her testing status and relevant medical history before performing a noncondom scene. In this case she claimed she had been recently tested and had copies of the documentation for all other partners since (as was the standard in our agency), so that I would agree to participate in the scene. In reality she had been moonlighting as a straight up prostitute and had been seeing clients up until the afternoon of the shoot. Again, the response from management was “Well, a girl’s got to have her secrets, right? Suck it up.”

            I don’t think either of those qualify as misandry as opposed to garden variety people acting badly when they have the latitude to do so. Seriously though, If I’d been female on stage and a guy had touched me like that, he would have left in an ambulance; We didn’t even have security on the male side.

            I do think that both genders fundamentally don’t understand the troubles that face the other. That everyone thinks they obviously have it worse. And that in this case women tend to be really displeased when they achieve equality and see what men actually work through. I’m open to the idea of men being similarly dissatisfied when the find themselves on the other side of the divide, although I’ve never seen it happen personally.

      • Nita says:

        Right. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin saw (and experienced) men being physically violent to the ones they ostensibly loved. Therefore, all men are dangerous brutes, and all sex is rape.

        Edit: Dworkin’s actual conclusions were more charitable than that, just so no one gets the wrong idea.

      • Anatoly says:

        My own data point is that having worked in tech for many years and worked with many women (but far fewer than men), I haven’t seen any special treatment or a demand for such, outside a few isolated cases.

        If you see women in tech as entitled parasites, that is a strong signal to me that the problem is not with the women or the way they’re treated by others.

        • DrBeat says:

          The problem is that those isolated cases are the ones being pushed on us constantly as proof that Men In Tech Are Bad And Threatening To Women. The vast majority of women in tech just wanna do their thing and want everybody to shut up. They don’t constantly go seeking attention and victimhood and do not perceive every difficulty they ever encounter as proof they are hated by evil, threatening men. They’s just regular folks, as most people are.

          But every self-appointed Advocate For Women In Tech — all of the public voices speaking about the inherent misogyny and evil and depravity of nerds, all of the people who have fostered the culture where studies like the one in this article are gleefully trumpeted as proof of how bad and threatening men are, the people who are working as hard as they possibly can with the full support of an incredibly powerful social movement to be thought of as synonymous with “women in tech” — those people are entitled parasites.

          There are really not that many of them, as the ecosystem just can’t support that many. But a whole lot of people are doing everything in their power to broadcast and amplify their presence, ensure they have as much power and visibility as they want and nobody can stop them because to question them is to Hate Women In Tech. So yes, Reality Bites made a grave mistake by characterizing women in tech as entitled parasites — but those entitled parasites and their popular, powerful allies are doing as much as they can to ensure everyone makes that mistake.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m sympathetic to this view, but on the other hand I know at least one competent, non-SJW woman in tech who’s complained to me about harassment from her coworkers. Although she works with some of the only people fitting the “brogrammer” stereotype that I’ve ever actually met.

            To the extent that that’s typical — and I have no idea whether or not it is — I’m less worried about entitled parasites and more about media normalizing her experience in the mind of people like her on the one hand, and people like her coworkers on the other.

  46. Kyle says:

    It’s hinted at in previous comments I’ve made but here I’ll be explicit. If anyone else wants to do their own analysis then…

    a) Here’s the base PR data they used from GHTorrent: https://github.com/gousiosg/pullreqs
    b) Here’s what they used to guess the gender of usernames: https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/genderComputer

    What’s missing:

    c) They talk here https://github.com/DeveloperLiberationFront/ExploringGHTorrent/issues/8 about using gender analysis of avatars but considering that post is from <3 weeks ago I doubt they ever implemented it.
    d) But looking at SQL queries from that same repo it definitely looks like they did implement their G+ gender scraping. However considering how aggressively Google blocks any attempts to scrape their services I wonder how successful their attempt really was, i.e. Google starts showing captchas after tens of requests so did they really successfully scrape millions of G+ accounts?

    • Eric Jorgenson says:

      I have scraped more than a million Google+ pages. It is extremely easy, IIRC there is no rate limiting (in contrast to graph.facebook.com which required loads of proxies).

  47. Sonata Green says:

    The just-so story in point 7 seems backwards. As I read it, it would predict that gendered/corporate programmers should be higher quality => have more pull requests accepted, but in fact the opposite was observed.

  48. Jacob says:

    The sample size in this paper is so large that “statistical significance” is essentially meaningless. The p-values for almost any difference are going to be tiny (like 10^-6 tiny). Bonferroni correction won’t change that.

    The authors did report an overall male vs female difference, it’s the first table. Women have a merge rate of 78.6%, men have a merge rate of 74.6%. Which seems like such a tiny effect to me (4%) that it should be considered equal.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I don’t think you’re right. If you look at the graphs – especially the gender-neutral insider graph – you see some pretty big confidence intervals, maybe 2-3%.

      They didn’t report an overall male vs. female/gendered vs. nongendered difference, which is what I’m looking for.

      While 4% might not really be enough to matter, in the game we’ve been forced to play here even if there’s a difference of 0.00000001% it will mean all men are sexist and “nerd culture needs to be destroyed”, and until we can change that game we’ve got to keep thinking about PR.

      • Jacob says:

        I’m still not quite clear on the analysis you’re looking for, it’s not just overall male vs female?

        Well we can look at the 95% confidence intervals would be from the first table:

        Women: [78.45%, 78.87%]
        Men: [74.56%, 74.67%]

        Anyway, all statistical significance means is that samples truly are different. Given the relative and absolute size of their sample I have no doubt the real numbers are very close to 78% and 74%. It’s just not clear to me that matters in any practically significant way. From a PR standpoint, I would think focusing on that aspect rather than the 0.000001% differences would be good also. I’m much less sure about it though, PR is not my expertise.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      The sample size varies from measure to measure. Fully automated samples are large, but question of whether accounts were gendered was partly manual, so the samples were smaller and the error bars larger. (I think that the gendered sample was fully automatic, thus large. But neutral accounts had to be verified by hand and small.)

  49. Hjort says:

    Nuce breakdown of an interesting study. It’f be fun to ser the actual numbers.

    I mus point out one thing about your article, though. Putting Business Insider, Tech Times and BBC next to Vice, a magazine with a _very_ special attitude and taste for tounge-in-cheek writing, comes off a bit strange, especially when you finish by naming them all “the media” and quoting the harshest and arguably funniest sentence from Vice.

    All the articles lacked balanced and seemed kind of lazy. But one should keep in mind that the cocky writing in Vice sounds absolutely insane when you imagine it coming from their more somber cousins in old media. Those cousins might be lazy and like a sensation, but they are not tin-foil-hatted lunatics.

    • Adam says:

      I think this is part of the problem, frankly. The success of bloggers in general has caused traditional news sources to become more like them, to the detriment of all. Vice magazine publishes some legitimately interesting long form investigative work, but it’s easy to forget it started as a guy taking advantage of Canadian culture grants to make fun of how people dressed and it was years before they ever did anything else. Sneering hyperbole and general meanness built that empire.

  50. Reality Bites says:

    How would it be humanly possible to be worse programmers than men..?
    Software is the lowest common denominator in every project it is involved in.

    Either the tools suck or those using them are inept.
    Buggy crapware is standard operating fare for corporations, ever had to enter your correct password three times to get your stupid android to link to wifi…. thank a dumb programmer. Happy with that clunky inoperable camera link to your blue screening computer??? Thank a inept programmer.

    Updates, hotfixes, patches…. all because someone wasn’t paying attention.

    • Anonymous says:

      To the extent that that’s true, I suspect it may be to do with the factor I mention a couple of posts down. Computing is, I think, done out of passion to a greater extent than other comparable subjects. As such the average competence of its practitioners is lower. You don’t get biology students doing biology outside of classes at anywhere near the rate you get computer science students doing programming outside of classes.

    • Peter Scott says:

      Writing non-buggy software is hard. Have you tried? At a small scale, it’s difficult but doable. At a larger scale, there are roughly three approaches to writing bug-free software: you can (a) put forth Herculean effort, or (b) think really hard about abstractions, and hope you can sneak a glimpse at God’s book, or (c) be Daniel Bernstein. The first method is very expensive, the second requires that you roll well on difficult INT and WIS checks, and the third is not broadly applicable.

      • Agronomous says:

        Writing non-buggy software is hard.

        No it isn’t; here’s my two-step approach:

        1) Get rid of all the managers yammering about deadlines and deferring writing the tests until “after we release” (which technically includes “never”).
        2) That’s pretty much it.

  51. A M Swallow says:

    One thing to watch out for “women propose bigger and less-immediately-useful changes on average”. With insiders this may mean that she is not talking for herself but acting as a secretary for a group. Groups are frequently headed by a Big Boss. Rejecting her change is likely to upset the Big Boss, risky.

  52. Anonymous says:

    A point I’d like to make, that may or may not have been made elsewhere in the thread, is that I think the expectation that cultural factors will play no part in what choices people make is unrealistic. I suspect one factor that contributes to computing being majority male is that boys are more likely than girls to be nerds, and that nerds, being unpopular, are more inclined to turn to computers for company than non-nerds are. This is a cultural factor but pushing in the opposite direction than is usually described – pushing boys into computing rather than pushing girls out of it.

    The problem with this is that it isn’t a pure world of people forming preferences and making decisions completely without any external influence. Does that matter? Is it a problem if Canadians are more inclined than non-Canadians to get into hockey? Is it a problem if people tend to favor their native country’s cuisine, even if, had they been exposed to every cuisine equally, they might well prefer a different one?

    Note that a cultural factor that pushes a boy toward computers is pushing him away from whatever he would have done in its absence – something he would presumably enjoy more. I’m not sure there is any fundamental distinction between pushing a boy toward computers and away from everything else, and pushing a girl away from computers and toward everything else.

    My point is that I think the implications of a general view “cultural factors shouldn’t impact people’s decisions” are wider reaching than they seem, and the view is less obviously true than it seems at first glance.

  53. PGD says:

    Someone may have noted this above, but another thing here is that ‘statistical significance’ is not the the thing to look for when you have a huge sample size. With large sample sizes differences that are trivial in practical significance show up as statistically significant — in the extreme, with a full population, any difference no matter how small is statistically significant. The question really is whether the difference is large enough to have a practical impact.

    Also, it’s interesting to note that the proportion of women in this sample is about the same as the proportion of women in the prison population. Once again, men massively overrepresented at extremes of behavior…

    • Anonymous says:

      Once again, men massively overrepresented at extremes of behavior…

      ‘Extremes of behavior’… Erm, am I missing something? Is submitting code to open source projects really that extreme?

      • Chalid says:

        People who work on technical stuff like to believe it requires unusual genius.

        • The Nybbler says:

          It requires unusual skills. Claiming those skills amount to “genius” appears to be an attempt to strawman the claim in order to discredit it.

          • Chalid says:

            PGD is presumably alluding to the greater male variability hypothesis. Programming requiring “unusual genius” is precisely what would justify invoking said hypothesis – it only has big effects on sex ratios if you’re way out on the tail of the ability distribution.

            Switching the discussion to “unusual skills” is beyond ridiculous. Every profession has unusual skills associated with it.

          • James Picone says:

            @Chalid
            Autism is about five times more common in men, and I think there’s probably some truth to the idea that autism is part of a spectrum and the blending-into-normal end of that spectrum tends to be interested and skilled in things like programming.

  54. Peter Gerdes says:

    Is it just me or is a plausible hypothesis that this study is picking up on a difference between people who use names as logins and those who don’t? After all it wouldn’t surprise me if that was correlated negatively with knowledge.

  55. onyomi says:

    You know what I think goes understudied, so far as I can tell? The problems men encounter when attempting to work in more traditionally nurturing and caregiving-type professions and rules, such as schoolteacher, nurse, or, indeed, stay-at-home parent.

    • Deiseach says:

      2008 article from the Nursing Times. What it can be condensed down to:

      1. Nursing is publicly perceived as a female profession and indeed this attitude is reflected within the profession
      2. Some areas are perceived as more “macho” than others and so more acceptable for men e.g intensive care, mental health as against midwifery, public health nursing
      3. Beginners’ pay is dreadful so this may put men off as they are accustomed to jobs that pay better
      4. Men disproportionately(?) end up in senior/management roles within nursing so they’re less likely to be visible on the wards and of course this contributes to “nursing is a female profession” perception

      Dave Munday, Unite/CPHVA professional officer and a health visitor, says: ‘I think it’s the case that women who go into nursing see themselves earning a better wage than they can in other jobs but men going into nursing would see it as a lower wage. I think pay probably is still an issue to some degree.’

      However, male nurses do in fact earn slightly more than their female colleagues and that gap has widened in the last four years, figures from Income Data Services reveal. Men are also more likely to take on senior positions and are disproportionately represented at higher levels. For example, despite making up a tenth of the workforce, 17% of nurse consultants and 18% of nurse managers are male.

      However, being male is not always an advantage in a profession and, like any minority group, there are times when they face discrimination. Mr Hulatt, who trained in the 1970s, says: ‘My generation of male nurses were exposed to blatant discrimination. For example, you weren’t allowed to do the maternity or health-visiting placements and if you pressed for it, there would have been a question over your motive. Today there’s less overt discrimination. There’s equity of opportunity to do midwifery, for example, but there’s still a covert cultural message that puts a question mark over why males may want to do those things.’

      • hlynkacg says:

        Please remember to tip your meat-shields and body snatchers. 🙂

      • Acedia says:

        Back when I was 19 and trying to decide on my future career I was very seriously considering going into nursing, due to feeling a strong desire to nurture others and to do socially-useful work.

        I spoke to several nurses (all women) to ask for their input and experience. They all, every one, joked about liking the idea of male nurses because it’d be useful to have somebody around to lift heavy patients and perform other feats of brute strength. The first couple of times it was funny and I laughed, the third or fourth time I started to feel worried because it was seeming less like a joke, and after it happened a few more times I decided not to become a nurse, due to a newly-acquired fear of going through a lot of expensive and difficult schooling and training only to be seen as a glorified manual laborer by my colleagues.

        I dunno if any nurses read SSC, but if changing the gender balance of the profession matters to them (it might not, I don’t claim to know), they might want to be a little more careful about making that joke around guys who are considering going into nursing.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          I think that most jobs have a strong menial component to them, hence why they are called jobs. Software developers spend half of their time running messages, doctors spend a massive amount of time writing prescriptions for simple problems, managers spend all of their time just waiting for people to arrive. The exceptions are positions like CEOs and screenwriters, that are essentially impossible to get.

          Of the people I know who were involved in healthcare a lot of them seem to say in earnest what they said in jest.

          • Acedia says:

            Yup, I was and am aware that moving patients and other physical or unpleasant jobs are a significant and necessary part of nursing. I’m genuinely surprised if your takeaway from my post was that I didn’t go into nursing because I think I’m above performing menial tasks. It was about what came across to teenage me as a lack of professional respect for their male coworkers.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Oh, I agreed with the main point of your post. I just thought it was worth noting that most jobs had similar parts, even though they were not advertised.

          • Agronomous says:

            1) I don’t understand “running messages”; can you explain?

            2) What the hell did John Jay ever do to you?

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            1) Communicating the *exact* requirements for a piece of software.

            2) Its a (misquoted) reference to a campaign slogan against a John Jay:

            “Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won’t damn John Jay!! Damn everyone that won’t put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!”

    • onyomi says:

      I guess part of what I’m getting at, also, is: in another post above it is pointed out that stay-at-home dads get no respect–from other men, and especially not from women. I’m sure this isn’t universally true, but I’m sure it’s at least as true as female programmers not getting respect, if not much more severe.

      So where is the movement saying: “women, stop disrespecting men who want to be caring nurturers and stay at home”? It seems like it must be the flip side of “men, stop disrespecting women who put their career ahead of family.”

      And yet I don’t think it’s entirely possible, because women just aren’t as attracted to men who want to stay home and nurture, and I don’t think they can make themselves become so (at least, not with anything short of genetic engineering or something). And men, though they can’t be so picky in many cases, are not as attracted to non-nurturing women.

      This creates a seemingly untenable situation where we’ve decided that power roles should be inhabited by as many women as men, even though men have a much greater incentive to inhabit them. At the same time nurture roles seem to have simply been deemed unnecessary–or, at least, vastly oversupplied in the past, since it’s certainly not as if the number of house husbands has grown to offset the number of full time career women.

      I’m not actually sure what the right course is: continue to try to break down the male-female binary by encouraging people to respect men for taking on traditionally nurturing roles (the side of the equation always passed over), or else return to a more traditional set of values. I know which one fits more easily with human nature, though constant tribal warfare and 50% of men dying at the hands of other men fits well with human nature too. But I do feel the status quo is a bit untenable.

      • Nita says:

        So where is the movement saying: “women, stop disrespecting men who want to be caring nurturers and stay at home”?

        There’s not just one movement saying that, but two — feminism and men’s rights.

        I don’t think aiming this message at women will be enough, though. Most men want the respect of their extended family and peers — basically, of their culture — and monogamously married fathers can’t really compensate for the lack of it by being a “chick magnet”.

        For example:

        One of the things I missed was that you lose a sense of stature, a sense of common ground between myself and other men, a sense of being able to say—”Hey, I’m a man too.” I think a lot of that revolved around not having employment.

      • Adam says:

        I don’t think the way you phrased that is quite right, specifically this:

        “So where is the movement saying: “women, stop disrespecting men who want to be caring nurturers and stay at home”? It seems like it must be the flip side of “men, stop disrespecting women who put their career ahead of family.”

        And yet I don’t think it’s entirely possible, because women just aren’t as attracted to men who want to stay home and nurture, and I don’t think they can make themselves become so (at least, not with anything short of genetic engineering or something).”

        Certainly, you can respect someone without being attracted to them. This actually seems to be one of the bigger beefs with MRA that I see from feminists, that their complaints basically boil down to wanting sex from people who don’t want to give it to them, or even more basically that they can’t distinguish between mutual respect and a mutual desire to fuck each other in their interactions with the opposite sex.

  56. Nita says:

    Yeah, the media coverage is terrible. The main practical takeaway from the study is this:

    If you are a novice male programmer planning to contribute to some projects on GitHub, do yourself a favour and code in Python — the most gender-egalitarian programming language of all. The Ruby community, for instance, is a brutal matriarchy. And don’t even think about submitting JSON files.

    • Error says:

      Why would anybody voluntarily use JSON for anything? Or at least anything intended to be edited by humans?

      YAML forever!

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Never used YAML. Just looked it up.

        The specific number of spaces in the indentation is unimportant as long as parallel elements have the same left justification and the hierarchically nested elements are indented further.

        That’s just awful.

      • Adam says:

        IPython notebooks are technically JSON files, and pretty much the best way to engage in collaborative data analysis. Though distinctly different from pure software development, this is a big part of my own work, and it’s convenient to share results this way because GitHub will render the notebook, making it easy to show even non-technical users what results you’re getting before you move the code that produced the analysis into the production pipeline.

        This gets at another way this type of analysis can be misleading, though. I technically commit a shit-ton of JSON because of this, and sometimes very large html files with embedded JavaScript and CSS, but I don’t write any of it. It’s all auto-generated and it’s only on GitHub as a way of communicating results, not because it will ever be part of a larger system. These probably look like huge commits, but they’re generated by changing one or two lines of real code.

        • Error says:

          Committing generated artifacts fills me with fear and loathing. O_o But despite my hyperbole I don’t really object to json for data exchange. Just for human editing. e.g. JSON config files make me cry.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I think I’m of the “display should be divorced from content” side of the debate. IOWs, making a config file human readable is the job of the editor, not the job of the underlying format.

            Probably one of the reasons why I shivered when I read the YAML description. Making what the computer reads dependent on indent feels like a recipe for really weird issues. But I’m sure people who use them regularly get used to them and love them.

        • Adam says:

          Honestly, they don’t need to be committed. As I sort of started getting at, I include them as part of a larger package that includes source code that actually does stuff, but the generated artifacts are hosted on GitHub solely because they contain reports with test results and visualizations and GitHub will render them, but the only way to get them onto GitHub in the first place is to commit them.

          I’m not sure to what extent they account for these and filter them out of the analysis, but heck, entire websites are hosted as GitHub pages, requiring you to commit things like blog posts.

    • Kyle says:

      I didn’t look at their breakdown of languages before but they’ve made a mistake there too.

      For example, if a pull request changes 10 lines in .js (javascript) files and 5 lines in .html files, we include that pull request and classify it as a .js change.

      So then imagine a PR like the following:
      – changes 5 lines of Ruby/Python/etc
      – documents the new feature with 10 lines of Markdown/RST/etc
      – adds a test that includes 20 lines of database fixtures in JSON/YAML/etc

      To me this would be a very high quality PR but they classify it as “non-programming”. Such comprehensive PRs like this would be kind of rare in the hobbyist sphere but in the corporate world they’re almost required.

      Also are these 20 file types all the study looked at? If yes, then how do they explain having such a bias towards web languages? If no, then what did they do to exclude binary files, images, documentation, fixtures, etc?

      The commits which change the most lines are possibly not going to come from the best programmers. Your artists and translators will not commit often but when they do it will be for massive changes that have already been signed off elsewhere.

      • Kyle says:

        Also something that would be very easy to test with this dataset is whether or not women mostly stick to “easy” front end stuff like UI (html, css, js, etc). Why did they break down PRs by language and gender but then not test this common sexist stereotype? Did they get the wrong answer?

  57. borabosna says:

    Excellent post, thank you.

  58. Gary says:

    Almost any comparison of men and women’s traits gives different results.
    And almost none of them necessitate there being something wrong. I wish people would stop obsessing over this stuff. Just put in controls everywhere possible to remove any kind of discrimination and then let reality unfold as it will.

  59. Moin Qidwai says:

    “A commenter on the paper’s pre-print asked for a breakdown by approver gender, and the authors mentioned that “Our analysis (not in this paper — we’ve cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

    The fact that there were 2.5 Million pull requests by men and only 150000 pull requests by women, can be taken as an indication of one of the following:

    1. There are more male programmers than female programmers on Github, or
    2. The number of pull requests per male programmer is 16 times more than per female programmer

    If we take the statement (1) to be true than just the fact that male programmers were harsher on other male programmers and lenient on female programmers plays a huge role in the study. Since there are more males reviewing male contributions than females reviewing female contributions, it is obvious that the above difference in acceptance rate is going to be observed.

    But even if we take the (2) statement to be true than given the fact that male programmers are making so many contributions could itself mean that they are more focused on quantity vs quality compared to female programmers leading to lower acceptance rate, hence not necessarily an indication of general weakness in programming ability, rather a consequence of intended male actions.

    • Nita says:

      (1) is a fact.

      Basically, it seems like a major source of bias is sexual orientation. What can we do about that?

      • Moin Qidwai says:

        There isn’t much we can do about that, as Francisco pointed out below:

        “One of the corollaries of evolutionary biology: intra-sexual competition is hell if compared to inter-sexual competition in most competitive contexts (mating and beyond).”

        Hence when conducting a study as the one in question, I believe such facts need to be taken into account and the conclusion must be drawn in accordance with these facts rather than just saying “X is better at Y than Z”,it is massively misleading and hence should be avoided I believe.

    • Francisco Boni says:

      “women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

      One of the corollaries of evolutionary biology: intra-sexual competition is hell if compared to inter-sexual competition in most competitive contexts (mating and beyond).

  60. Russ Tuck says:

    The last two authors are listed as faculty: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/directories/faculty.php

    The rest appear to be students (undergrad and at least one grad student).

  61. Agronomous says:

    They had literally millions of data points, and proceeded to use all the data? Argh! If archaeologists did the equivalent, they’d be crucified!

    If they had taken half the data at random, we could have tested their conclusions against the other half! Now we have to wait for GitHub to generate another million data points (contaminated by the press this story got)….

  62. Jaime says:

    I’d be interested to know the numerical value of the 1%.

    It would also be interesting to see how the data changes if the number of women were equal to the number of men submitting pull requests, ie/ 250 million men compared to the 150K of women.
    Obviously, that 1% would increase substantially.
    In essence, while disagreeing with the research this paper you posted actually proves the data correct in the original research paper.

    Edited To Add: Oh, never mind, I see my point has been mentioned by others quite a few times…

  63. Orphan Wilde says:

    So a community (Open source) that, by and large, emphasizes the community over the individual, is more likely to accept more-anonymous contributions than contributions which are tied to individuals?

    That is, I’m not surprised that named contributors are less likely to have their contributions accepted. There’s the de-emphasis of the individual that occurs on an ideological basis as mentioned above, and then a less-defined ideology which is common on the internet that anonymity is not merely acceptable, but a good thing. Anybody contributing under a name is lowering the trade value of anonymity.

    • Nita says:

      de-emphasis of the individual that occurs on an ideological basis

      Individuals who are named jsmth instead of John.Smith are still individuals. People do keep track of who’s who in the free and open source software worlds, and individuals with the highest prestige (e.g., Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Michael Meeks) are as non-anonymous as it gets.

      In fact, it’s the proprietary software developers who often remain nameless, faceless and uncredited in the products published by their employer.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        You’re arguing with a position which isn’t quite the one I represented. That a username belongs to an individual isn’t the same as a username representing that individual, first; and second, arguing that the best-known people are the least-anonymous is… well, I fail to see the point of that argument at all.

        As for your latter statement – the same is true of any sizable open source library. (As a rule, if I know the author of open-source code, I know it so I know whose name to curse into the night.) And there are reasons for that, two of which I’ve already named.

        A third reason is that a handle is a thing that you own; Orphan is my handle, one of many, each disposable because it is what I say (or code) that matters, and not that I said it. An identity is a thing that owns you.

  64. Nathan W says:

    “women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong.””

    Perhaps female programmers who are more confident in their abilities as a programmer, and who are therefore also more likely to ask better questions, are more likely to reveal their gender.

    That would explain everything. And it’s even likely.

  65. Rob Baillie says:

    Great review of the material (which I also found very interesting and leaving me wanting more). I would like to point out that I was fairly pleased with the BBC article which, whilst having a *slightly* misleading headline (Women write better code, study suggests), it linked to the source paper in the first paragraph, and the fourth and fifth paragraphs were:

    The paper is awaiting peer review.

    This means the results have yet to be critically appraised by other experts.

    I thought that deserved mentioning.

  66. bob says:

    I think the fact that only 6% of the pull requests come from women show that they’re lazy and aren’t pulling their weight. Come on, gals! Linux is the foundation for much of civilization today. We’re not talking about acceptance rates– which are often higher for women– we’re just talking about requests themselves.

    So get off the high horse and quit complaining. Start leaning in and actually helping with some of the coding that needs doing.

  67. rossry says:

    9. Please release an anonymized version of the data; it should be okay if you delete all identifiable information.

    “all identifiable information” should be taken to include “request/approval history”, and possibly even most of the fine-grained aggregations Scott would want. (cf. deanonymization of the Netflix Prize dataset)

  68. Peter Bloem says:

    I’m sure nobody will ever get this far down the comments, but just for my own peace of mind: whether or not the confidence intervals overlap has little to do with the statistical significance of the observed effect. In fact, confidence intervals can overlap by as much as 30% and still, the effect can be significant (for a two-tailed t test, I’m sure Binomial is similar).

    For more information, see “Researchers Misunderstand Confidence Intervals and Standard Error Bars” by Belia, Fidler, Williams and Cumming.

  69. For whatever it’s worth, there are a number of programs that can take a chart (image file) and provide somewhat better than eyeball level estimations of what the original numbers were…

    While I hate to provide a Sourceforge link, it’s late…
    http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/

    There are a number of workalikes that are also open-source or without cost should you find them useful and care to look.

    Otherwise, nice breakdown…