Reply to How can we combat deep misogyny?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "How can we combat deep misogyny?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]It's apparent that it runs incredibly deep in this country, where a woman's professional status is put under a significantly higher scrutiny than a man's, or the standards for which she could be put in the same professional level with a man (or higher) are impossibly unrealistic. She will never be "enough" even compared to males with mediocrity. [/b]

If we can somehow avoid talking about politics, can we please have a serious discussion about how deep misogyny runs in America (and yes, much more than many other places--or at least in different ways) and how we can successfully combat it? Is it possible? What do you think works well in other countries? What can we do here?

[/quote]

I honestly see exactly the opposite in the professional world.  Leadership goes out of its way to promote female and URM candidates, often with qualifications that generally wouldn’t merit consideration.  If a group is all female/URM it’s considered a good thing, a group that’s full of white guys is a problem that needs to get fixed.  I just want to work with the most qualified person; I really couldn’t give a crap about anything else.  I’ve had my female boss (who’s absolutely amazing) explicitly tell me that she will favor female candidates to “overcome” the unconscious bias she’s sure they’re experiencing in hiring.  Luckily she also has very high standards so everyone we’ve hired has been good, but this message going the other direction would get someone fired.

I remember a few years back when a tech recruiting company was trying combat “sexism” in their online hiring tool.  Female candidates were ranked lower in technical competence and had a lower rate of getting callback for jobs, even though the process was largely anonymous.  They surmised that since people could tell the gender of the person over the phone, that’s where the bias crept in.

They ran an experiment using software that would alter the gender of the speaker; I listened and it was absolutely amazing how well it worked.  They kept a control group where  the voices went through the algorithm but the gender didn’t change to account for digital artifacts.

They found the following:

1) Digitally processed voices without a gender swap showed no changes.
2) Men modified to women had higher scores and callback rates than unaltered.
3) Women modified to men had lower scores and callback rates than unaltered.

So, the takeaway that there was bias, but it was bias against men and towards woman, even though the initial impetus for this was the “obvious” bias against women.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics