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[smjjames]

In a sense, you could say that, yeah.

[Egan_BW]

So... IQ measures your ability to take tests?

The better you do on the test, the better you did on the test.

[overseer05-15]

IQ tests are tests that test how well you test.

[pisskop]

I always did well on tests.

[Egan_BW]

I get the high numbers on tests but I'm a damn big idiot about some things.

[Avis-Mergulus]

-snop-

One problem I have with this (forgive me if I'm making assumptions myself) is that you seem to be silently assuming that this distribution has biological and not societal causes. I would offer a purely hypothetical explanation for these observations - basically, as men are generally placed under higher pressure to excel academically, more of them end up cracking under the strain or developing an aversion to things they feel they're being forced to do, therefore dropping to the left tail of the bell curve, and more of them actually end up conforming to this expectation, therefore rising into the right tail. The idea that this is necessarily some sort of "uncomfortable truth" seems to be blown out of proportion to me.

NB: I'm not saying all of the above to justify repression of scientific discourse. I'm just trying to address a sort of undercurrent that may or may not be actually present in what you were saying. If it was not present there, just think of it as supporting the conversation.

[Reelya]

I didn't say anything about biological causes, but the causes are almost certainly in childhood and not in hiring practices. e.g. if someone comes out of high school and there is a significant gap in high-scoring SATs and other metrics, then that's the basis of what you're judging people on. The "real cause" at that point is kind of moot. At college and later levels, if you don't have the skills then you can't do the work, it doesn't really matter why you don't have the skills.

e.g. if African Americans don't have the educational backgrounds that lets them be effective astro-physicists should you solve that by lowering entrance requirements for astro-physics fields for African Americans (e.g. standard Affirmative Action)? There are in fact a number of good arguments about why this approach is prone to actual backfiring.

Early childhood disparities (whatever the cause) aren't fixed by adult-age band-aids. They mean well but can actually backfire. e.g. say that you give preferences on entry into a course, because few African Americans have gained the skills needed to do that course. The way you do that is to remove some of the lowest-scoring white people from the group, and add extra black people. e.g. you're raising the bar for white people while lowering it for black people. The problem is then - what does success look like in the outcome class? You now have racial banding on SAT scores even if no such banding existed in the original population sample. It can actually add to the perception of racial differences in ability.

e.g. remove the 10 lowest-scoring whites from a class and add 10 black people who scored below the previous minimum. Instead of a smooth bell curve with people of both races represented along it, you now have two clusters with a big ability gap between them. It's well intentioned, but it doesn't necessarily achieve what it says on the box. But it makes white liberal do-gooders feel good about themselves.

[hector13]

But the skill at that point is taking tests, or at least remembering the information well enough to take the test.

[Avis-Mergulus]

I didn't say anything about biological causes, but the causes are almost certainly in childhood and not in hiring practices. e.g. if someone comes out of high school and there is a significant gap in high-scoring SATs and other metrics, then that's the basis of what you're judging people on. The "real cause" at that point is kind of moot. At college and later levels, if you don't have the skills then you can't do the work, it doesn't really matter why you don't have the skills.

Ah, understood.
However, the veracity of this doesn't by itself imply dishonest hiring practices are not a significant factor, does it? It could very well be both.

[Reelya]

The evidence of dishonest hiring practices is mixed. e.g. in the civil service in australia, when they removed gender signifiers from promotion information it actually reduced the number of women promoted, so they abolished the new gender-neutral practices. Because it helped men. That ... in itself is biased.

Jonothan Haidt also reports on a big study where they sent out resumes to science faculties with male or female names on them, the female names received twice as many invites for an interview. That's because everyone is feeling the lack of women and pretty much every science faculty has diversity targets. So if you give them a female name with the same credentials pretty much everyone is on that: we want you!

The thing is, proponents of the "they're against women" often cite research that finds the other situation then blames discrimination without considering alternate explanations, while they "censor by omission" research that finds contrary results. That's highly unscientific. A full worldview needs to accomodate and explain all relevant research, not just the ones you like.

[Avis-Mergulus]

The evidence of dishonest hiring practices is mixed. e.g. in the civil service in australia, when they removed gender signifiers from promotion information it actually reduced the number of women promoted, so they abolished the new gender-neutral practices. Because it helped men. That ... in itself is biased.

I can agree in this particular case, yes.
Far as I can tell, whether men or women are likely to be promoted sort of depends on whether the field they're in is considered to suit their gender role. Maybe civil service is considered to be an office lady sort of thing in Australia? Myself not living there, I'm unaware of the local attitudes. Do you have a link to where you saw that, so I can read it in my spare time?

[Reelya]

Higher management is definitely not considered ladies' work. The reason for the bias is that it's a government institution and they have diversity targets, so pretty much everyone at the higher levels wants to push women and minorities up if they can, to meet their targets. Purely merit-based hiring then backfired because it reduced the pro-diversity bias.

What was wrong was the assumption that women weren't being promoted because of sexism as the primary reason. They figured that the men in management were "keeping the ladies down" for ... no apparent logical reason other than being assholes (whether conscious assholes or subconscious assholes). While in fact, the opposite was true, rather than being subconscious assholes trying to keep women out, management as a whole feels the effects of targets and organizational goals, which includes pushing women up the talent pipeline, because it makes your reports look better. Those are concrete things that middle-management worry about, they couldn't give a flying fuck about "keeping women out" because it serves no personal purpose, whereas meeting your targets does.

[Dunamisdeos]

As a middle manager I can attest that I have exactly zero time or spare willpower to give any fucks whatsoever about the gender of who gets hired.

I don't care if you are male, female, or a sentient aquatic squid. If you can answer my phones with one of your clammy little tentacle arms and I don't get complaints then I don't give two shits. Or one shit, even. I feel the same way about who my boss is. If you can keep this place running I don't care because I have shit to do and nowhere in my list of shit to do is "worry about [employee/boss] gender".

I promise that the people at the top who are hiring my manager and their managers also don't care for the same reason. I'm sure that there are assholes out there that DO care but I have not found them to be the norm. I know we do try to take diversity into account but its a tertiary concern at best. The idea being that the more perspectives we have in the office the better solutions we come up with.

[Reelya]

It also doesn't make good business sense. The private sector is competitive, if you're making business decisions based on things that aren't relevant to the bottom-line then you're going to be out-competed by those who are more practical. So biases which don't make business sense are going to be damped down in the long run due to the necessities of competition, and this is a fractal thing, competition works at the personal, department, inter-department and inter-business levels, and no less in private business than in public institutions.

Wage gap for the same job doesn't make sense either. If women will do the "same" job for 77 cents whereas you need to pay men $1.00 for the same level of performance, then any sensible business would set a single pay rate of e.g. 80 cents and have about 90% women doing the job. The men would just be cut out of that job market completely, since they are below par in cost/performance. Any business which did pay more so that they could hire men for that role would either go out of business, or attract more highly-skilled women. e.g. if you did pay the full dollar, you could either hire an average male or a 20% above-average female, so even if you paid more to attract men, you'd still find that the women coming to you were exceeding the performance level of the men. The theory of women paid significantly less for the exact same work doesn't make much common sense.

Basically it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for their to be pervasive bias against skilled women, because that merely gives your competitors access to a more cost-effective skill pool, and loses you money. it's like saying you don't hire people call Steve, then wondering why Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are working for your competition. If one company isn't hiring high-skilled women it's just an opening for other companies to get ahead.

[martinuzz]

International students trying to find accomodation in the Netherlands are quitting their studies, and returning home desillusioned, because they can't find accomodation to live in the Netherlands. "I thought the Netherlands were a progressive country", "but it feels like 1920, with signs saying 'no blacks, no gays, and no Irish', an international student comments.