Female Characters

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mariomario42
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Re: Female Characters

Postby mariomario42 » 09 Jul 2014, 21:46

Duckay wrote:
mariomario42 wrote:For the rest, there are men that are aggressive. There are men who are submissive. Same for girls.


Can I note, by the way, that it comes across as passively sexist to refer to "men" (a word we use for adults) and "girls" (a word we use for children) in your point? This is infantilizing women.


Just to clear this up before I head to bed (can discuss more later), but I added the "Same as girls" part to it after I wrote talking about the "boys club". I'll apologize, but I'd like to keep in mind that it's a tad absurd to assume a synonym is labeling or saying something about a large group of people.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 09 Jul 2014, 23:57

mariomario42 wrote:
Dismissing a group of people that focus on their ability to understand an comprehend by some "invisible silencing" and "omnipersistent" force playing a larger factor than simple judgement of character and ability is silly. I'm part of the engineering group, and when it comes to engineering ability, it is on intelligence. There can be outside judgements and gossips that a wide variety of people, male and female, participate in since it's human nature. If people talking bad about others is the issue, there's a lot more to it.

In a real world environment, there are never equally qualified people. There is always a factor is separate people. For the rest, there are men that are aggressive. There are men who are submissive. Same for girls.



If you're going to respond to a post that contains extensive citations, please actually read the citations, and provide your own counter-citations, otherwise you're just assuming your opinion is correct without gathering any data - which is exactly the problem. If you go back and click on the links I placed in my post to corroborate my statements, perhaps you'll be a little less confused.

One of my linked research articles outlined a study where professionals in the sciences were given resumes only distinguished by the gender of the name on the resume. They rated the women as less competent and less valuable then the men. It's a fairly common methodology in the psychological and sociological fields. If you don't understand how to interpret psychological research, I can provide links to some basic undergraduate psych/soc background information, as it seems that you may not be familiar with some of the base principles. Please let me know if you need help. If you'd like links to more studies dealing with quantitative examinations of gender bias, I can provide some. Feel free to ask!

mariomario42 wrote:
This again is a bunch of assumptions that some "boy's club" has a bigger influence on an individuals life than loved ones, personal interest, and skills.


No, it isn't. That's the point of my the studies and surveys I linked throughout my last post. You see those little underlined sentences? Click them, read the articles, and come back with any questions you might have.

So we have a study that demonstrates that identical resumes submitted with male names get better responses on average than identical resumes submitted with female names. Using averages in this way is standard practice in research of this kind.

Need more evidence? I'm happy to provide it. See this article about the different experiences for engineering students the US vs India. India has a better gender ratio for engineering students, 1.96 vs 4.61 in the US. In the US women in engineering report feeling isolated and experiencing a lack of respect from their peers. In India, women in engineering don't report these experiences of feeling disrespected or isolated while in engineering programs.

While correlation is not causation, we have several varieties of evidence on my side, and none on yours (unless you want to provide some sociological surveys or psych studies of your own). There's evidence that identical resumes are rated lower if they have a female name written on them. There's evidence that women are allowed to speak less in class (again, see my original posts) and we have evidence that women in a country with a lower ratio of female engineers are more likely to report feeling disrespected by their peers than women in a country with a better ratio of female to male engineers. This is how conclusions are built in the psychological and sociological scientific communities: by doing multiple studies on diverse aspects of a person's experience, and trying to identify patterns. Right now, the vast majority of research out there supports the theories I've outlined here.

mariomario42 wrote:
CulturalGeekGirl wrote:The problem isn't deeper than the boy's club, the boy's club is deeper, larger, and more omnipresent than you could possibly imagine, and you've been trained your entire life to be psychologically incapable of noticing it.

The boys' club created the perception that computer programming isn't for women. They did it on purpose.


This sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I'm gonna treat it like one. Sorry.


Don't apologize to me, apologize to the Smithsonian and Stanford University!

Once again, when I post a fact, and there's an underline, it usually means I posted a link to a relevant source. In this case, it was the Smithsonian referencing an article by a Stanford historian. If you won't accept the Smithsonian or Stanford as valid sources for historical information, then I honestly don't know what kind of a source you would trust.

So either you dismiss all claims you disagree with without reading the relevant research, or you believe Stanford is party to an elaborate historical conspiracy. I mean, they publicized the research you're treating as a conspiracy theory, after all, and they continue to employ the woman who wrote the article. Ominous!

But hey, if you DO think that the Smithsonian and Stanford university are collaborating to create an elaborate conspiracy theory to re-write the history of computer science, then Nicolas Cage has a map he wants to sell you.

All kidding aside, if you want to know more about the history of computing and the specific actions that directly lead to fewer women programmers, visit your local library and see if they have the book The Computer Boys Take Over, by Nathan L. Ensmenger, which documents many of the things that I've referenced here, including how literal boys clubs (fraternities) were able to obtain the answer sheets to popular programming aptitude tests in the day, giving members of their club a distinct advantage when applying for programming positions.
Last edited by CulturalGeekGirl on 10 Jul 2014, 02:56, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Matt » 10 Jul 2014, 00:37

CulturalGeekGirl wrote:snip


Woah dang. You're my f-in' hero. Wow.

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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 10 Jul 2014, 03:59

J_S_Bach wrote:...if they took the time to flush out characters...
Inner grammarian twitches violently - Click to Expand
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby Garwulf » 10 Jul 2014, 06:14

My pseudonym is Ix wrote:'Overwhelming majority' doesn't come into it- they were all men. Not only did women not fight, they would almost certainly have not been physically able to- armour was heavy stuff and only those who had spent their entire lives training (noblemen) were able to wear it and be able to fight effectively. A few odd rebellious women might have made it into the ranks of the common folk, but they would have been rare (fighting meant you weren't there to work the land, and your family could well starve), and in any case wouldn't have worn armour. There simply was no such thing as female armour- and even if there was, it would have had exactly the same breastplate as male armour because otherwise it would have been a) weak and b) nigh-on impossible to forge.

The one exception to the rule is Jean d'Arc, but it is worth remembering she was a common girl who had spent her life working the land (so she was stronger than most noblewomen) who offered her services when her country was ruled by a clinical madmen and was approximately two inches from total annihilation. The Dauphin was desperate by the time she came along, and probably would have let a baby lead their troops into battle if he thought God had sent them. Even then, she didn't have to fight in her armour- she was more of a general in the modern sense, being a totally inexperienced fighter but a surprisingly amazing strategist who would sit back and direct her troops in maneuvres that completely surprised the English and sent army after army routing. If she wore armour at all, it would have been an oversized man's breastplate- she was eventually burned at the stake not for war crimes but for dressing as a man, betrayed by her own countrymen.

Sorry about that, my inner history nerd took over


Sorry, but as somebody who actually has a Bachelor's degree in Medieval Studies, this just has me wincing...

First, armor in the Middle Ages wasn't that heavy. In cases where it topped 40 lbs., this was weight that was evenly distributed across your body, so wearing and moving around in it wasn't that bad. Even plate armor in the 15th century wasn't that heavy. Now, once the 16th century rolls around and gunpowder becomes more prevalent, the armor gets heavier because it needs to be bullet-proof...which makes it too heavy to use, and this is why you start to see full coats of plate reduced to breastplates in actual wear. So, any adult human being could wear armour in the Middle Ages.

Second, while there were defined gender roles back in the Medieval period, they are not necessarily hard and fast. The further away you get from the nobility, for example, the less stratified gender roles are (the simple reason is this: if you're a peasant in a subsistence economy, taking the time to be sexist = starvation). So, a noble lady did have a perceived role, which was domestic (she more or less ran the household). If, however, her husband the knight (or lord) was away on Crusade, for example, and the castle came under siege, she was capable of (and perhaps even expected to) leading the defense of the castle in the same capacity as her husband. So, these roles could switch back and forth, depending on circumstance (EDIT: And, as somebody else mentioned earlier in the thread, there's no shortage of women taking on roles that later became considered male - so, plenty of give and take).

There are two things you also need to realize. The first is that the Medieval mindset was very different from our own. We care a great deal today about individual rights, and standing out as an individual to claim these rights. However, if you went back to the 12th century and tried to tell a bunch of villagers that they had individual rights, they'd look at you as though you're from another planet. The Medieval worldview was very much one that determined value based on how well one fit into their place in society, so what a peasant cared about was being the best peasant they could be, and so on upwards. A feudal contract was not slavery - while the peasant had obligations towards the lord, the lord had obligations towards the peasants, and these were taken very seriously. The Magna Carta, I think, marks the beginning of the long road moving from this mindset to the mindset of the Enlightenment (where the individual mattered far more than society).

(And yes, I am simplifying to a stupid extent. There are plenty of counter-examples in, say, Viking-era Iceland, etc. But bear with me.)

The second is that our perception of women as the "weaker" sex really comes from Medieval courtly literature, which placed women on pedestals and suggested that they were too good to work. Over time this idea developed from women being above certain tasks to being incapable of certain tasks. So, by the time Mary Wollstonecraft writes her Vindication of the Rights of Women, the perception of women has become that of a delicate china doll (unless, of course, you're a peasant or working class, in which case you get to do the same factory or field work as the men).

And, I'm not going to do much more than touch on the religious aspects, save to say that back then, "sent by God" mean a LOT. It was a deeply religious society, and back then you did not have to be desperate or insane to believe that claim.

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mariomario42
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Re: Female Characters

Postby mariomario42 » 10 Jul 2014, 06:31

I'll do a quick reply about the "favor hiring or mentoring them over equally qualified women" study before I head to work.

In briefly looking it over, I see two major faults in the study.

1. Sample Size

n=127, and since they couldn't have they same people look at the same resume, it was 63 and 64 for each. Now let's look at the variable. For each, eg race, I would want to double the sample size to compensate. Something like 5-10 per would be sufficient, but this study is well under. 2^6 is 64 and I definitely believe there are more factors than that at play. Race, gender, age, location (they looked at 4 colleges), annual earnings, and position at the college.


2. Answers

They provided the subjects with a 1-7 scale. Jennifer was $26,508. To John it was $30,328. The standard deviation was $6,382.14 from a total average of $28,373.02. This relates to the first part by the sample size not being large enough.

Link

Gotta head off now, but to add, the demeaning tone just isn't necessary.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 10 Jul 2014, 06:51

Garwulf wrote:The second is that our perception of women as the "weaker" sex really comes from Medieval courtly literature, which placed women on pedestals and suggested that they were too good to work. Over time this idea developed from women being above certain tasks to being incapable of certain tasks. So, by the time Mary Wollstonecraft writes her Vindication of the Rights of Women, the perception of women has become that of a delicate china doll (unless, of course, you're a peasant or working class, in which case you get to do the same factory or field work as the men).
Well, there's also the scientific backing of the "women being weaker" idea. However, there are many caveats to that that most of the general public forgets.

Scientific fact: Women are, on average, physically weaker in upper-body strength than men.

Issues to consider:
There is significant overlap between the two, and the averages aren't that much different.
Being physically weaker is not some sort of "handicap" especially considering that women, on average, have other strengths over men, such as pain tolerance and dexterity.
And the most important one... Every individual is different.

Were I to bet you $5 that you couldn't find a "completely average" person, I believe I would win that bet, because I don't believe they exist. Everyone has abnormalities of some kind.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Garwulf » 10 Jul 2014, 06:52

CulturalGeekGirl wrote:Very good post snipped for space that everybody should read.


If I might add to this, back around 2001 video game coverage basically consisted of strategy guides, reviews, previews, and as far as I recall, two outliers. One was my Garwulf's Corner column (2000-2002), which was a computer games issues column, and the other was Biting the Hand, by Jessica Mulligan (1997-2003), which was an industry insider column.

The thing is this - Jessica started her career in developing video games as a man, and later got a sex change operation. So, she first was a member of the boy's club, and then got to see it as an outsider. And, what she wrote about it was pretty revealing - she has stories about days at the Games Developers' Conference ending with a mass trip to the local strip clubs, for example.

While it's not surprising the boy's club is still in force a decade later, it is pretty disappointing.

Anyway, for those who want to read it, her archive is here: http://www.skotos.net/articles/bth.html

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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby Garwulf » 10 Jul 2014, 06:58

AdmiralMemo wrote:
Garwulf wrote:The second is that our perception of women as the "weaker" sex really comes from Medieval courtly literature, which placed women on pedestals and suggested that they were too good to work. Over time this idea developed from women being above certain tasks to being incapable of certain tasks. So, by the time Mary Wollstonecraft writes her Vindication of the Rights of Women, the perception of women has become that of a delicate china doll (unless, of course, you're a peasant or working class, in which case you get to do the same factory or field work as the men).
Well, there's also the scientific backing of the "women being weaker" idea. However, there are many caveats to that that most of the general public forgets.

Women are, on average, physically weaker in upper-body strength than men.

Issues to consider:
There is significant overlap between the two, and the averages aren't that much different.
Being physically weaker is not some sort of "handicap" especially considering that women, on average, have other strengths over men, such as pain tolerance and dexterity.
And the most important one... Every individual is different.

Were I to bet you $5 that you couldn't find a "completely average" person, I believe I would win that bet, because I don't believe they exist. Everyone has abnormalities of some kind.


Well, there's a considerable difference between in general not having quite as much upper body strength and being perceived as unable to do a man's job. Where this perception gets truly ridiculous is when you consider that in most cases throughout history, the working classes had no shortage of women doing "men's" jobs. I have a funny feeling that if we looked at the history of the middle class, most of the perceived gender roles would come from copying the aristocracy for status purposes ("Oh, Lord McGuffin's wife doesn't work? Then mine won't either!")

As far as physical strength goes, though, I think women tend to catch up to men pretty quickly. My wife and I are both fans of American Ninja Warrior, and this season we've already had at least two women make it all the way through the qualifiers and up the warped wall (compared to last year, where none did).

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Re: Female Characters

Postby AdmiralMemo » 10 Jul 2014, 07:17

Oh yes, of course. That's what I was trying to say, too.

I was just trying to make the statement that there are some people who take a heavily-qualified scientific statement, remove all the qualifiers, and attempt to use it as a justification for their actions as beliefs, when it's all bull-honkey. They make up their mind and then find any little thing that fits their world-view and use it to say "See?! See?! I'm right!" while ignoring anything that is contrary.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Garwulf » 10 Jul 2014, 07:49

AdmiralMemo wrote:Oh yes, of course. That's what I was trying to say, too.


Well, sir, I reserve the right to agree with you and expand on your point regardless of what you might think or feel about it! :-)

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Re: Female Characters

Postby Master Gunner » 10 Jul 2014, 12:45

Extremely relevant article on the (under-)representation of women in gaming.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 10 Jul 2014, 13:53

mariomario42 wrote:I'll do a quick reply about the "favor hiring or mentoring them over equally qualified women" study before I head to work.

In briefly looking it over, I see two major faults in the study.

1. Sample Size

n=127, and since they couldn't have they same people look at the same resume, it was 63 and 64 for each. Now let's look at the variable. For each, eg race, I would want to double the sample size to compensate. Something like 5-10 per would be sufficient, but this study is well under. 2^6 is 64 and I definitely believe there are more factors than that at play. Race, gender, age, location (they looked at 4 colleges), annual earnings, and position at the college.

Link

Gotta head off now, but to add, the demeaning tone just isn't necessary.


I think you're confused again, this time about study design in the field of sociology. It differs significantly from study design in other fields, because they won't let us raise children from birth in a featureless white room with no outside influence (yet.)

Often, it is impossible to control for all variables, so instead it's standard practice to examine the likelihood that other variables significantly impacted the one you're trying to study. You'll see in the paper you link frequent references to p values. I'm not a statistics professor so I'm not qualified to teach you about those, but perhaps this basic statistics educational page will help.

Then, the paper utilizes standard analytical procedure in the field, as outlined in the Analytical Strategy section. Basically, all your concerns are clearly addressed by the text describing how they had similar concerns, and used methods standard in the field to compensate for them in the best way possible at scale. Smaller-scale studies like this are often used as a stepping stone, with the hope of securing funding for future studies with a larger sample size. One of the difficulties facing these studies is the fact that this problem is not taken seriously, and funds to do the kind of gigantic multi-variable studies you would like are often hard to obtain. So the field has developed methods for smaller-scale studies that attempt to make them as effective as possible... techniques that are clearly outlined in the paper, if you have any background in this kind of study design or analysis.

Which is, unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges the field faces - most people's understanding of these things is woefully inadequate, and even when the paper thoroughly outlines the standard inferential statistical approach and accounts for potential variables through type II analysis, most people lack the background to understand what those things mean, or how they're utilized in pretty much every major study of this kind in the field.

What's even more disheartening is how much more frequently these "armchair analysts" come out of the woodwork when the study in question is about inequality. I continually see unscientific market research surveys (often with sample sizes smaller than this) touted as gospel when they conform to the assumptions of their audience, while well-designed studies that meet all standard measures of rigor in the field like this are reflexively contested by anyone who wants to deny the reality of sexism.

There are other factors as well, of course, and similar studies with similar designs that focus on those; here's one that employs a similar method to evaluate possible racial bias in employment in general - and yeah, that's a huge factor as well. But when I first learned of this study, I saw the same kind of uninformed armchair analysis from people who wanted to believe that racism is over and we live in a meritocracy.

I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, but as someone who works in software and has a background in psychology, it's difficult to see people continuing to live in denial in the face of the steadily mounting evidence piling up from all corners - surveys, statistical analysis, case studies, historical records. That's why I don't just link one study, I link several studies, a review of the literature, a historical account, and more.

I'm not asking people to unquestioningly accept research, but at the same time it's really important to evaluate studies using the standard practices of the fields in question, and then base your conclusions on both the data of the study and the data of multiple other kinds of scholarship that are readily available to you. Once people start actually accepting evidence that counteracts their uneducated assumptions, change can come quickly. In 1999, when a survey demonstrated that female professors in MIT received less money, smaller offices, and fewer committee assignments then men with similar objectively-quantifiable qualifications, the college president admitted that he had always assumed that these claims were part reality and part perception, but he was also able to objectively process the evidence presented to him and conclude that the college was being far more biased than he would have guessed. He quickly put into practice a policy designed to alleviate these inequalities.

A desire to deconstruct any research that contradicts your previously held views is especially pernicious in the social sciences, where smaller survey sizes and difficult-to-eliminate variables are a fact of life that scientists have developed diverse techniques to mitigate. So when someone who has only a passing knowledge of the field wants to pick a particular study apart, they try, and we waste our time teaching study design and statistical analysis basics that I honestly learned in high school.

So don't be that guy. Be the president of MIT.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby mariomario42 » 10 Jul 2014, 19:07

I do have a preference for scientific study over sociology, drawing conclusions after the fact is a lot more beneficial, but I have a perfect understanding of how studies work, and have taken classes on statistics. The math behind the type II beta calculation can be fine, that doesn’t make it immune from the overall study design being flawed. I can do 100 tests about what 1+1 equal, and if every single answer is 3, the math says it’s correct, but the person doing it didn’t know how to add.

If this is a stepping stone study to get more funding, then sites like the NY times shouldn’t be publishing this as an end all. I look at all studies with an eye of questioning, and I might not be an expert, but I possess more than enough rational to look at data and decide what it is saying without people trying to tell me what conclusions to draw.

----------

And I can’t say there’s probably many studies out there designed to observe what I’m saying, I don’t have the time or resources to hunt down the ones out there. I’m doubting a department is jumping to fund such a thing.

But here’s a Gallup poll showing some numbers. It asks a very specific question and has a decent size for sample size. I see with a lot of studies and polls out there, they leave broad questions as “have you face discrimination at work/college?” and yes, technically the dick who made a sexist joke six months ago can qualify as that, but I've seen some saying it's over 50% because of this wording. That doesn’t help anyone. Looking at those Gallup numbers, of course there is discrimination still out there, as some old guy with different values is in power, but in no way a ruling force. The problem is when people try to connect all these separate things together. Here’s a good article discussing some of the finer details of differences between genders in the workplace. I wish that specific article linked to sources, but from what I know about the author, it is in the books.

In something that is as complicated as the human population, I’m not going to jump into this overarching ideas that have these vast, but flawed supporting material. I’m going to take it slow, understand how components work, and build the road on facts and reasoning. If there’s counter arguments or improvements, as in a study over a Gallup poll, I will go back and fix it. That’s how I work.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Matt » 10 Jul 2014, 20:02

mariomario42 wrote:I’m going to take it slow, understand how components work, and build the road on facts and reasoning. If there’s counter arguments or improvements, as in a study over a Gallup poll, I will go back and fix it. That’s how I work.


You mean, like the scientific field of sociology, which arrived at the study you're deriding through exactly the process you just described?

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Re: Female Characters

Postby empath » 10 Jul 2014, 20:15

mariomario42 wrote:I do have a preference for scientific study over sociology...


*pinches bridge of nose and sighs*



Anyways, great video; funny, topical, and valuable to shine a spotlight on some sincere problems in both the industry and society in general.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby mariomario42 » 10 Jul 2014, 21:14

Matt wrote:
mariomario42 wrote:I’m going to take it slow, understand how components work, and build the road on facts and reasoning. If there’s counter arguments or improvements, as in a study over a Gallup poll, I will go back and fix it. That’s how I work.


You mean, like the scientific field of sociology, which arrived at the study you're deriding through exactly the process you just described?

-m


When did jumping to conclusions to publish papers that the statistics don't back become facts and reasoning? Must have missed the memo. There can be proper process, and the current setup in universities care more about publishing than if it is properly backed by fact. If it's not a poorly executed test, it's a purposeful manipulation of questions and scenarios to back running hypotheses. Both are scary situations, and I would not call it scientific in the slightest.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 10 Jul 2014, 22:11

mariomario42 wrote:
Matt wrote:
mariomario42 wrote:I’m going to take it slow, understand how components work, and build the road on facts and reasoning. If there’s counter arguments or improvements, as in a study over a Gallup poll, I will go back and fix it. That’s how I work.


You mean, like the scientific field of sociology, which arrived at the study you're deriding through exactly the process you just described?

-m


When did jumping to conclusions to publish papers that the statistics don't back become facts and reasoning? Must have missed the memo. There can be proper process, and the current setup in universities care more about publishing than if it is properly backed by fact. If it's not a poorly executed test, it's a purposeful manipulation of questions and scenarios to back running hypotheses. Both are scary situations, and I would not call it scientific in the slightest.


If anyone's purposefully manipulating facts to back running hypotheses, it's you. You've admitted you don't understand the statistics in question (since the study outlines and addresses every single issue you raise in the page of advanced analysis you yourself linked), you've stated that you don't consider sociology a science, and now you've said that you value a gallup opinion poll that asks people whether or not they THINK something is happening over any actual assessment that determines whether or not a thing is happening.

One of the primary problems we encounter when studying sexism is that often men and women just do not notice that it is happening, because they're trained from a young age that being interrupted and talked over by boys is normal, or they think that sucking it up is just the way things have to be. Some of the papers I've referenced earlier in this thread make that very clear, but it's just as clear that you have no interest in reading any papers you disagree with, and that you will never actually attempt to engage with any data that supports any hypothesis other than the one you entered this conversation with.

See, the one study I posted that you don't like isn't the only study I posted. There's the one about engineers in india. There's the one about staff at MIT that the president of MIT himself agreed was valid despite low sample size. That's because people who are actually experienced in all aspects of science know that we do, in fact, have scientific methods that we employ in these kinds of studies.

Then you post a Forbes article that doesn't cite any sources, because it agrees with you. Better mysterious numbers with no citations and baseless, vague, unverifiable supposition than scary, scary p values you don't understand and a complex survey design that actually has to compensate for real world variables.

But hey, at this point you've stated that you're willing to dismiss the entire university system of America as hacks who are only looking to publish because it's easier to do that than to actually attempt to understand the techniques of a scientific discipline you're not already familiar with.

If you can't read the paper you yourself linked and understand how the people doing the study very deliberately compensated for exactly all the potential problems you bring up, then it's clear that you're just fundamentally unwilling and/or incapable of understanding the science of sociology. You might as well just officially declare "hey, I've decided to utterly dismiss an entire scientific discipline because I'm unwilling to attempt to understand its methods, I am derisive of the thousands of professionals who have spent their entire life refining those methods, and the results its peer-reviewed studies produce conflict with my worldview."

Which, hey. I've known enough people who have completely dismissed entire branches of science in my life. I've known plenty of conspiracy theorists who claim that universities are trying to publish studies that aren't backed by science in part of a weird "get rich off government grants and lie to the PEOPLE" scheme. I've seen tons of people saying that anything science that isn't experimentally tested in a lab environment can't be trusted. I just didn't expect to find one on this board.

Though it seems like they come out any time anyone mentions racism or sexism in pretty much any forum, so I guess nowhere is safe anymore.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 10 Jul 2014, 23:09

Perhaps not talking down to other posters could yield better results. Perhaps coming from points of assumed superiority is one of the reasons we have trouble having healthy, constructive discussions. When spoken to as equals people often don't feel like they're being attacked and better discussion is possible.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby Matt » 10 Jul 2014, 23:40

Oh holy shit dude.

The posts that CulturalGeekGirl has made so far have been detailed, well researched and extremely approachable.

If you've been reading them as condescending and assuming superiority, that's entirely on you.

-m
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I am not angry at you.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 10 Jul 2014, 23:57

No Matt it's not on me. The posts by culturegeekgirl have been detailed and researched but I was referring to veiled insults inside of posts by more than one poster. I've also gotten that feeling from a few of your posts as well Matt.
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Re: NEW VIDEO - Female Characters

Postby JayBlanc » 11 Jul 2014, 00:23

AdmiralMemo wrote:Scientific fact: Women are, on average, physically weaker in upper-body strength than men.

Issues to consider:
There is significant overlap between the two, and the averages aren't that much different.
Being physically weaker is not some sort of "handicap" especially considering that women, on average, have other strengths over men, such as pain tolerance and dexterity.
And the most important one... Every individual is different.

Were I to bet you $5 that you couldn't find a "completely average" person, I believe I would win that bet, because I don't believe they exist. Everyone has abnormalities of some kind.


Now, statistically, the recorded difference between Men and Women in strength, is insignificant. I mean that in the way that the medians of the distributions will be so close that environmental noise will blur them together.

And even when you look at the far outliers of professional athletes, the differences are tiny. Small enough to matter in professional athletics, but an entirely academic matter of seconds and 3% differences.

There's one kind of significant problem here... Physical ability is not entirely innate.

There is the assumption that you have to be born an athlete, that it's all in your genes... But the truth is that training and conditioning from childhood makes up almost the entire amount of difference between an professional athlete and a regular joe. And so there comes a question...

Is the tiny athletic difference between men and women innate, or is it the result of cultural norms imposing on how they are trained and conditioned?
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 11 Jul 2014, 00:58

J_S_Bach wrote:Perhaps not talking down to other posters could yield better results. Perhaps coming from points of assumed superiority is one of the reasons we have trouble having healthy, constructive discussions. When spoken to as equals people often don't feel like they're being attacked and better discussion is possible.


The reason we're having trouble having healthy, productive discussions is that you want us to treat the opinions of someone who does not believe sociology is a science as valid during discussion of a sociological phenomenon.

I started out this discussion treating people as equals, and the first response to that essay was someone ignoring the information I had presented. Instead, they stated unsupported opinions and straight up called information I pulled from a Stanford article about the history of gender and computing a "conspiracy theory."

That was the first attack in this debate.

Now, my original post did summarize some information in an active, lively tone, but I didn't think I said anything particularly untoward in that original link dump post. It was the socio-historical equivalent of someone on tumblr saying "the McCarthys were dicks;" talking about terrible historical realities with jocular ire. Because there were, for real, several professional organizations who believed that since women's work is often devalued, if programming continued to be seen as women's work it would be less respected than it would be otherwise and... instead of working to eliminate sexism, they worked to eliminate women from their field, freeing up more jobs for men within their social circle. That's a literal boys' club who literally purchased ads and established tests that sought to place more people in their circle into positions previously held by women. There's also evidence that answers for the main programming evaluation tests were obtained by fraternities early in their use, and the purpose of those banks of fraternity tests were to give the men who belonged to those fraternities a literal advantage over others. That's another literal boys' club, taking deliberate action to literally cheat women out of programming jobs. Most of these facts can be found by following the link in that original post, though I'll admit the first link was a Smithsonian analysis of a Stanford summary of research in the field, but the book where it's most thoroughly documented is not available for free online. I took it out of my library a while ago, though, and you may be able to too.

Or maybe you view the fact that I say "sometimes people think they're being unbiased, but they're not!" as an attack. Well... it's not an attack. The fact that most people are not conscious of unconscious bias and internalized social norms is well-documented. It's like the classic study from the 80s where they found that 93% of drivers consider themselves above average. Our inability to accurately assess our own skills and our own biases is called the bias blind spot. So from the standpoint of someone in the social sciences, "I don't think I'm biased, therefore I don't think bias exists in my field" demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of a fundamental scientific principle in the relevant field.

There's no good way to tapdance around that. It's as facepalm-y to someone in the social sciences as someone saying "dinosaurs are basically just big crocodile lizards who died like a million years ago, right?" would be to someone in archaeology. I imagine an archaeologist who heard someone say that might end up using... sarcasm. Dramatic irony. All the tricks!

Now, there's no shame in thinking that the dinosaurs were lizards. There is SOME shame in walking into a discussion where people are talking about how we've found closer links between dinosaurs and birds than ever before, and saying "I don't think that's true. Dinosaurs aren't birds, they're lizards!"

Saying "Huh, I used to think Dinosaurs were lizards. Can you explain why people think they're birds now?" is far better for everyone involved, there's no shame in having outdated or inaccurate information, as long as you're willing to learn. But that's not what happened here. If people had said "I don't notice much overt sexism at all, is there something I'm missing?" or "I'm not sure why you think there was a deliberate plan to push women out of programming, care to elaborate?" we wouldn't be having this problem.

A lot of scientists think that the social pressure to humor the guy who shows up and says "Can we stop talking about birds? The book I had when I was eight said Dinosaurs are LIZARDS" is harmful to scientific debate, especially in the US. Some people even think that attitude is responsible for the low level of awareness of certain scientific phenomena in the US. What's more, we're beginning to believe this may be because men are rewarded socially for this kind of behavior - entering a conversation confidently attempting to dominate it with his viewpoint, even if it's not the more informed one. This leads to less aggressive guys getting less opportunity to contribute to discussions. If we stop socially rewarding people who attempt to dominate conversations with unsupported arguments based on unfounded self-confidence in the universal correctness of their own views, we might hope to give everyone a chance to compete and reduce our tolerance for people going on shows and just... saying things that aren't facts, while another guy says things that ARE facts.

The other half of the problem is that women or less aggressive men have been taught to do the opposite: to not speak up, even when they possess expertise. So a friend of mine proposed the rule of science politeness: if you enter a conversation about a field of study where you aren't up to date with the research, and you have a differing view, demonstrate an awareness of that when you speak.

Let's say you guys were having a conversation about, I don't know, building a top-of-the-line streaming PC. I don't know anything about that, so I wouldn't come in here and say "I heard you should ustream on the twitches! Make sure to have MANY RAM." But if the conversation went into more familiar waters and someone said "get an AMD processor instead of an intel" I wouldn't say "Intels are better," even if I think they are based on something I read a few years ago. Instead I'd say "Huh, a few years ago I heard intels are better, did something change?" That allows me to make my opinion clear and offer information, but I'm not behaving as if I have up-to-date expertise in a field I'm only marginally familiar with.

Basically, I'm bad at tolerating those who enter a scientific conversation without acknowledging that it's possible others might have more expertise. I have even less patience for those who both state unsupported non-facts and mock people who disagree with them. I think that behavior is associated with maladaptive social norms that we need to eliminate in favor of a conversational style more based on honestly assessing one's own level of expertise and sharing information based on that assessment.

Still, I probably would have been a little gentler if I hadn't been called a conspiracy theorist first.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby J_S_Bach » 11 Jul 2014, 02:12

It's not a secret that many people in the scientific community look down upon "soft sciences" like sociology and psychology. At the two Universities I have attended (Mount Allison University and Saint Thomas University) they were often scoffed as the sciences that liberal arts students do. Because in the majority of studies done under the umbrella of sociology it can be difficult to maintain a strict group of variables and constants, in other fields of scientific study if you can't clearly demonstrate your constants and variables as well as being able to replicate the experiment with similar results the experiment is deemed unscientific. Sociology has the problem of having such a large sample size of very diverse societies. Place of birth, home life, education, etc. so many variables that can't be monitored as closely as other fields of study. Correlation and causation are scrutinized more closely than the "traditional sciences" But that's a whole different issue, and something that sociologists and psychologists have been hard at work to change.

How I see it we have issues on top of issues. We're all a group of keyboard warriors slugging it out in the forum but from what I've seen the majority of members haven't had opinions that are DRASTICALLY different from one and other. From what I've read it seems that everyone agrees that the representation of women in the video game industry (both in the games and the actual companies that make the games) is disgustingly poor. Hopefully the uproar that was caused by this years E3 we'll start seeing steps taken in the right direction. It's a long road ahead, hell, remember the Nintendo and Tamodachi life debacle? There is a lot that needs to be changed but in my own life I have seen huge strides taken in promising directions. Gaps between men and women closed, mumble mumble something encouraging.
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Re: Female Characters

Postby CulturalGeekGirl » 11 Jul 2014, 02:49

Sure, soc and psych are looked down upon a lot, and viewing them with a degree of skepticism is normal. Heck, a lot of the time I'll read a study, look up the methodology, and say "NOPE!"

Still, I found it particularly troubling that a names-on-resumes style survey, one of the most bog-standard survey designs. a design that actually comes the closest to being able to minimize the impact of potentially confounding factors, was easily dismissed for reasons that make little to no sense. I've always found those studies easy to explain to people unfamiliar with the discipline, and this is literally the first time I've ever had someone of any level of education fail to understand how and why that specific variety of study works, and I've used that study (and the related study on race) literally hundreds of times in lectures and discussions. So that threw me off, for sure.

I'm from a biology background myself, actually. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but looking back on notes and journals from my schooling, I realize I went into psychology because my adviser and professors for that discipline were less rude and dismissive towards me than my biology professor. Instead of processing it as "this is sexism" I processed it as "psychology is more fun and I'm better at it" despite the fact that my levels of expertise in both fields were comparable. But because I started out on a pre-med track, I understand some of the "physical vs social sciences" turf wars. Then again, as a biology major, I got a lot of "you're not a real scientist" guff from chemists and physicists. It's a real thing.

SO yes, we're all keyboard warriors, can't we all just get along? Well, getting along without maintaining constant vigilance against sexism that we can't consciously perceive is a recipe for an end to progress. A lot of the great strides we've made are strides against visible sexism: in the 70s, a professor could say "I think no girl should ever be a programmer" and not get fired. Now, they'd be fired. Progress.

But if you only progress until you've eliminated the most egregious violations, then you've usually stalled out far short of the goal of actual equality. For instance look at the testimonials from female MIT professors after they started their initiative to increase equality that I linked earlier.
I was unhappy at MIT for more than a decade. I thought it was the price you paid if you wanted to be a scientist at an elite academic institution. After the Committee formed and the Dean responded, my life began to change. My research blossomed, my funding tripled. Now I love every aspect of my job. It is hard to understand how I survived those years – or why.


Augh, lady genius, I share your decades-old feels.

Women who suffer from this kind of discrimination are often told they're exaggerating, or taught to assume it's their fault. In cases where sexism isn't visible, it's treated as if its non-existent. So helping people understand the concepts underpinning these unconscious biases is vitally important.

When you stop seeing the problem, it doesn't mean the problem is over... it just means that it's no longer clearly visible. It's like how you can't stop taking antibiotics as soon as you stop having symptoms, you have to finish the course.

We all agree that visible sexism needs to be eliminated. But while we're agreeing on that, we should also be spreading the word about how we can fight hidden racism. Otherwise we'll end up where MIT was in 1994 - we'll think we're being the best, the most progressive, the most equal... all while the steady improvement in opportunities for women stalls out.

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