it's not that women are more aggressive, it's that they're perceived as more aggressive relative to expectations (by both male & female managers).
also, it's much more acceptable to challenge a woman's authority than it is a man's. when all you want to do is get things done, this social norm slows you down. you have to explain, persuade, and butter up your peers more as a woman. this is just one way that these subtle biases can lead to divergent outcomes (seeming to be less effective and successful in this case).
Let me understand: you think nothing of value can be determined from this study even though my entire newsfeed on facebook is full of my friends in all industries sharing it as exactly in line with their experiences?
You have a sampling bias in the types of people you associate. Facebook applies a filter to posts which selects for things that are popular with a wide swath of your friends and which support your political/social views (as guessed by their profiling tools).
That something blows up with your friends on Facebook is usually a better indicator that it's polarizing drivel than that it's a well thought out, impactful study, since that's what the machines (essentially) optimize for.
The author posts the data, then calls for further study. Isn't that the very basis of science? She admits fully its potential for inaccuracies and wonders aloud about its flaws. Isn't that what peer review is for? The women in tech say it feels true, and it matches their experience. So why isn't the Hacker News Community demanding a peer reviewed study and supporting it, and financing it? Why does it instead choose to ignore its substance, and tear down its conclusions based on its already admitted flaws?
Truly, the persistent and relentless attempts on the part of some Hacker News denizens to discredit any science about bias in technology is disappointing. Any and all attempts to quantify the problem are met with such resistance that it belies the community's own assertions about its objectivity.
Looking at the data, I don't think the author did anything with it than see initial numbers matched her feelings, and then called on people to undertake a massive, actual study because she just know this is it.
I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.
I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.
I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.
The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.
Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.
There is almost no science in studies like this. There are so many variables, that you'd need to collect hundreds of thousands of data points to narrow down the influence on just a couple of variables... and even then, you can't be sure you've found something significant and meaningful. To do science, you need controlled experiments, and these are practically impossible to do with people. Even the well-known psychological "experiments" have been disputed in the recent years [1] [2].
I don't think nothing of value can be determined from the study, but I do think what clairity said can't be determined from the study. It really is entirely possible, going strictly by the findings here, that ornery women are overrepresented in this area in much the same way that upper-class white women are underrepresented among convicts.
Your experience may tell you different, and your experience may very well be right — I am definitely not qualified to say either way. I was just bemoaning that what many people seem to want to get out of this study — whether there's a difference in the way men and women are perceived in essentially identical situations — isn't actually in this study.
one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented.
your desire to espouse that alternative hypothesis is another subtle form of bias that discounts an otherwise uncomfortable potential conclusion (and it's uncomfortable for both genders). which is not to put it all on you because many people (all?) carry this bias to some extent. it would really help if folks were simply open to the likelihood of bias running through us without feeling like we're all bad people because of it.
(this is the same subtle bias that urges media to "balance" the climate change issue by giving the deniers equal airtime. sure, the conclusion that climate change is due to people has a (very) small chance of being wrong, but let's spend our energy finding solutions, not trying to poke little holes in what is likely a real and serious problem.)
> one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented.
I might be setting myself up to look dumb, but I don't realize that. Obviously there's something causing the phenomenon, but as far as I can tell, the data does not contain any good clues as to what it is. It could be that people perceive women's actions differently from men's. It could be that the women in question actually are more abrasive in general than their male peers and the people's comments are an accurate reflection of reality. It could be that people perceive abrasiveness equally, but they are more likely to complain about it from women because they have lower expectations of men.
I'm not espousing any of these ideas — and I'm definitely not saying your explanation is wrong. Like I said, I don't feel qualified to support any hypothesis here. But I don't see how this study supports any hypothesis more than the others. Where do you see it?
yes, i wasn't really commenting on the study (the conclusions of which are not surprising) so much as trying to extend the discussion since folks may not discern the subtle underlying mechanisms at work.
it's like staring at pages of math trying to find that off-by-one error. it's much easier to see when it's pointed out.
also, it's much more acceptable to challenge a woman's authority than it is a man's. when all you want to do is get things done, this social norm slows you down. you have to explain, persuade, and butter up your peers more as a woman. this is just one way that these subtle biases can lead to divergent outcomes (seeming to be less effective and successful in this case).