Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy

I wouldn't want to try supporting a family of three on $10k/year

I wouldn't want to support a family of one on $10K/year. But I think the context of this discussion is that the middle class feels the need for two incomes and so the wife works instead of being a housewife.

Yeah, I know, people consider my barely basic¹ cooking skills exceptional merely because I happen to have a Y chromosome. That's male privilege for ya.

1. At least that's what my System 1 tells me, and I can't think of a way to find out whether the impostor syndrome applies short of having someone who doesn't know my gender taste what I cook.

For sure. My apologies if I somehow gave the impression of disagreeing with that. The second half of what I called the "relevant question" above is of course the real key here, and it sounds as if maybe we agree about that.

So your theory is [...]

Nope. (What did I say to make you think that?)

My position is as follows.

• There may well be differences in average performance between men and women in various intellectual tasks, in either direction. Indeed, there are some specific categories of tasks where the evidence for such differences seems strong; the most famous example is probably "mental rotation". The difference for mental rotation is large but not enormous (about 1sd); my understanding is that all other sex differences found in scientific studies are smaller, and there are differences going in both directions.
• It seems unlikely to me that there's a big general cognitive deficit on either side. I believe girls are currently doing better than boys in pretty much all subjects at school in my country nowadays; in the past it was the other way around; so whatever differences there are (in this kind of task) must be smaller than the size of difference that can be induced by cultural effects. Of course this is consistent with deficits in very specific areas, with variance differences that affect how many really stellar performers there are of each sex, etc.
• There may well be differences in variance between men and women. These differences might be fairly big, but it seems unlikely to me that they're large enough to make huge differences at "ordinary" ability levels.
• Once you start looking at the tails of the distributions, I expect them to be quite far from being Gaussian or even symmetrical. There are a lot more ways for things to go badly wrong than for them to go exceptionally right, after all. So I am skeptical about inferences from differences at the "low" end to differences at the "high" end.
• There are certainly a lot more men than women in prison, especially if you look specifically at crimes of violence. However, lumping this together with variations in ability seems like a wilful embracing of the halo/horns effect; it seems like much of it will come from variations in sociopathy, enjoyment of violence, and other such characteristics that needn't go along with worse performance as (say) a scientific lab manager.
• For those last two reasons, any inference that looks much like "there are more men in prison, so we should expect more men to win Nobel prizes in physics" seems extremely suspect to me. Still more "there are more men in prison, so we should expect more men to make good lab managers".
• Putting all the above together: there may be well be differences in competence between men and women; they may well be bigger at the highest levels; I wouldn't expect the differences to be enormous except maybe at the very highest levels where variance differences can be a really big deal.
• All of that is independent from the question of whether there are sexist attitudes -- by which, for present purpose, I mean: whether there are systematic biases that make men get evaluated better than women relative to their actual ability, likely performance, etc. Or, for that matter, worse.
• It seems to me that there is a lot of evidence that there are such sexist attitudes, generally favouring men over women. We've had a lot of discussion of one study which seems to me like very strong evidence for such attitudes in one domain; I posted some links to some others. There's a pile of anecdote too, but of course the way that looks may simply reflect what anecdotes I happen to have encountered. (I think the available anecdotage is at any rate evidence that sexist attitudes in both directions exist.)
• The possibility of real ability differences has some bearing on how to interpret the apparent evidence for sexist attitudes, but in at least some cases -- e.g., the study we've discussed so much here -- it seems to me that it doesn't make much difference, because to make the evidence not be strong evidence for sexist attitudes it would be necessary for the ability differences to be (what seems to me to be) unrealistically large.
• The relevant question for most practical purposes is not the statistical difference between men and women in some particular kind of ability, but the statistical difference conditional on the information usually available when hiring (or when considering promotion, or when allocating places at a university, or whatever). Nothing I have seen so far gives me reason to think that these differences are large, even though the information in question is limited and unreliable.

(To get quantitative for a moment, let's suppose everything in sight is normally distributed. Some underlying ability: male and female both have mean 0, but s.d. 1 for men and 0 for women. Some measure of ability equals the actual ability level plus noise with mean 0 and s.d. 1. Actual job performance looks like underlying ability plus other factors with mean 0 and s.d. 0.5. Then conditional on measured ability being +2 (i.e., well above average but not stratospheric), mean predicted job performance is about +1.0 for male applicants (with s.d. 0.87) and +0.8 for female applicants (with s.d. 0.80), a difference of about 0.2 (male) standard deviations. Definitely not zero, but not exactly huge either and a lot smaller than the noise. I have no idea how realistic any of the numbers I've assumed here actually are, and would be glad to learn of credible estimates -- though of course this is a toy model at best whatever numbers one plugs in.)

If you think that an argument is good just because you think its conclusion is true [...]

I agree, that's a very bad sign. On the other hand, there's nothing very alarming about thinking an argument is more persuasive when you agree with its premises. And often the premises and the conclusions are related to one another. That seems to me to be exactly the situation here.

Premise: There pretty clearly isn't an enormous cognitive difference between men and women that makes women much less competent at brainwork, so much less competent that a moderate amount of information about a person's abilities leaves a lot of male-female difference un-screened-off.

Argument: If indeed there isn't, then the best explanation of findings of the sort we've been discussing is prejudice in favour of men and against women that has substantial impact on hiring.

Conclusion: There probably is such prejudice, and it probably leads (among other things) to underrepresentation of women in many brainwork-heavy jobs.

(Note: the premise, the argument, and the conclusion are all sketchy approximations. Filling in all the details would make the above maybe 20x longer than it is.)

I find the argument somewhat persuasive. This is partly because I find the premise plausible; some people might not (e.g., because the evidence they think they have regarding the relative abilities of men and women differs from the evidence I think I have); those people will find it less persuasive.

The premise in question is not the conclusion of the argument. It is not equivalent to the conclusion of the argument. It neither implies nor is implied by the conclusion of the argument. It is, for sure, somewhat related to the conclusion -- e.g., by the fact that they are premise and conclusion of a short and simple argument -- and doubtless there is a correlation between believing one and believing the other. I do not find this sufficient reason to think that finding the argument more credible if one accepts the premise is any sort of cognitive error.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your argument somehow. I confess I don't find it perfectly clear. Would you like to make it more explicit what error you think I am committing and why you think that?

Even if men and women are on average equally qualified that doesn't mean that a specific subset is.

I agree and am not aware of having said or implied otherwise. One of the many modifications that would be needed to turn the argument-sketch above into something unambiguous and quantitative would be to replace "between men and women" with "between men applying for lab manager posts and women applying for lab manager posts". If you think this makes an actual difference in here, I'd be interested to see the details.

For a hiring manager it's not important whether there's causation. Correlation in the data set is enough.

Depends on the details, of course, but mostly yes. Once again, though, I am having trouble working out what I've said that suggests I think otherwise.

I argue that your arguments are wrong.

It looks to me as if that's because you are treating them as if they are intended to be deductive inferences when in fact they are inductive ones.

At no point have I intended to argue that (e.g.) it is impossible that the results found in this study are the result of accurate rational evaluation by the faculty in question. Only that it is very unlikely. The fact that one can construct possible worlds where their behaviour is close to optimal is of rather little relevance to that.

Google did find that academic performance is no good predictor for job performance at Google.

Among people actually hired by Google. Who (1) pretty much all have very good academic performance (see e.g. this if it's not clear why that's relevant) and (2) will typically have been better in other respects if worse academically, in order to get hired: see e.g. this for more information.

I conjecture that, ironically, if Google measure again, they'll find that GPA became a better predictor of job success when they stopped using it as an important metric for selecting candidates.

you argue as if scientific studies nearly always replicate

Not intentionally. I'm aware that they don't. None the less, scientific studies are the best we have, and it's not like there's a shortage of studies finding evidence of the sort of sex bias we're discussing.

The question seems like it has a false premise, namely that women and black people haven't made progress in overcoming those things. In fact the treatment of both groups has improved tremendously over, let's say, the last 50 years. Which is roughly what we might expect if in fact much of the difference in how they'd been treated before was due to bias.

(It's probably also what we'd expect if the difference was not due to bias and these groups gained in political power for some reason other than having their genuine merits recognized better. So I'm not claiming this as positive evidence for that bias. But your argument, if I've understood it right, is that the bias theory must be wrong because if it were right then the treatment of these groups would be improving -- and in fact it is improving. I'm not aware of any reason to think it's converged to its final state.)

I fail to see why it should be policy to cater to people who are clearly being unreasonable.

For one thing, because being unreasonable is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where everyone is always reasonable. So if doing something predictably results in a bunch of people being upset, then it might be better to avoid it even if it would be better for everyone if they weren't upset by it.

For another, because what's "clearly unreasonable" to one person may be "clearly reasonable" to another. It may seem "clearly unreasonable" for a woman to have a problem with having her appearance complimented by her male colleagues. But if what she's found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women's) appearance, and never on their ideas, while the reverse happens to the men around her ... why, then, I have some sympathy if she gets frustrated by yet another compliment on her appearance. (It might in some sense be better for her to focus not on the compliments on her appearance but on the absence of response to her work. But actual things that actually happen are easier to see and more psychologically salient than absences, even when the absence is the bigger underlying problem.)

The problem is that it causes people to treat it as an archetypical example.

Only people who are -- how shall I put it? -- clearly being unreasonable. One might prefer not to make policy on the basis of people who are clearly being unreasonable :-).

Seriously: yes, I agree that that's a potential problem. The obvious solution seems to me to be to make it as clear as you possibly can when you're talking about central examples and when you're sketching the boundaries. Unfortunately, I bet there will always be (clearly unreasonable) people who don't take any notice and either mix the two up or pretend to. I'm not sure much can be done about that.

something like a 10 point higher IQ.

I just grabbed the latest LW survey data I could find, selected (1) rows with "United States" as country and something other than a null for IQ and (2) all rows with something other than a null for IQ. (Note that this doesn't include any sort of selection on the basis of reliability of IQ score.) I got means of 138.3 for the larger dataset (472 numbers, stddev=13.6) and 140.7 for the smaller (249 numbers, stddev=13.5). I wouldn't call that "something like a 10 point higher IQ".

the intuition that the factor of the name should be zero

What intuition that it should be zero? The question is whether it should be very large, not whether it should be exactly zero.

I've already explained why the difference would need to be very large for these results to be correctly explained by saying that the rating faculty made accurate allowance for real male/female competence differences. If you missed that, or you think I got it wrong, or it didn't make sense, do let me know.

women have less variation in intelligence than men

That could indeed (if the numbers work out) explain a difference in success at the very highest levels in the absence of prejudice. But this sort of effect is far weaker away from the very tails of the distribution, and the particular study we're taking as an example in this discussion is not concerned with the very tails of the distribution. Further, my understanding is that GRE scores correlate somewhat better with intelligence than they do with job performance (see, e.g., this post which has a few references to the primary literature), and I would expect them to do a pretty good job of screening off differences in raw intelligence in this case.

Women are worse at taking criticism.

Evidence? (I have to say it looks to me as if people are bad at taking criticism, and I haven't noticed a big difference between men and women; but I've not studied this and will be glad to learn.)

a lot of stuff about the kind of hierarchies men and women tend to form.

I'm afraid that's not specific enough for me to form any idea of how it would justify a drastically lower assessment of the likely competence of a woman than an identically-credentialed man as a scientific lab manager.

Have you actually been observing the relative abilities

Relative abilities as such are pretty much unobservable. I've been observing the relative performance. But only casually and qualitatively; if you have a pile of useful data then by all means point me at it.

is your reaction [...] to hit yourself for having a "sexist" thought?

No, not at all. I notice both men and women doing things badly and acting emotionally all the time, and feel no particular impulse to self-punishment when I do so. -- Is it your usual practice to assume that people who disagree with you are off their heads, or have I said something to give you that impression particularly strongly in my case?

(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am assuming that you didn't mean "hit yourself" literally; of course if you did then it's an even weirder thing to think I might do.)

Also, Azatoth123 is knowledgeable about modern physics at a deeper-than-teacher's-passwords level (see e.g. the thread where he and I were trying to disabuse Thomas of his misconceptions about special relativity), as was Eugine.

1:1 he is, but I don't object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn't actually sound that egregious to me.