One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought
In order to claim that our system 1's conclusions based on someone's sex, i.e., what you're calling "unconscious sexism", is indeed a bias you need to establish that it leads to false conclusions, as opposed to our system 1 merely noticing that a lot of things correlate with a person's sex. Nearly all discussions of "unconscious sexism", including the linked article, simply and falsely asserts that sex doesn't correlate with anything important. For example, the linked article says:
Increasingly, scientific evidence demonstrates that the sex of an individual can reliably predict some aspects of their career experience, i.e. there is evidence of systematic discrimination against women.
Observe that it doesn't even bother to mention the other explanation, that the sex of an individual correlates with traits, such as intelligence, relevant to his or her carrier. Despite the fact that we have good evidence that this correlation does exist.
My understanding is that the correlations in question persist, and are not small, when those other things are either controlled for or taken out of the picture. For example, here is an informal writeup of a PNAS article finding evidence of bias favouring male over female job applicants when everything about the applications was exactly the same apart from the name.
There are even clearer examples of gender bias on the unconscious level. The fact that women are hired at equal rates as men by orchestras if, and only if, the audition is behind a curtain and everyone enters barefoot so the hiring committee cant tell gender by footstep sounds is the most damning I can think of right now. Because that is a straight up test of competence at the only skill relevant for the job, and applicant genitalia still sway supposed experts unless extreme measures are taken to blind them to that factor. Basically, at this point there is such a huge pile of evidence that human beings are just completely incompetent at screening out utterly irrelevant factors that I would judge it sensible hiring policy in any field to have the job interview behind a curtain and a vocoder.
... Fuck it, I'm using that in a story. It fits right into a certain culture I'm building. ;)
when everything about the applications was exactly the same apart from the name.
Does that include e.g. the likelihood of the applicant going on maternity leave in the near future?
I wasn't merely arguing that if there were such a large difference everyone would admit it. I was also arguing that if there were such a large difference we'd all know it. Obviously this argument will be more persuasive to people who (like me) think it's clear from observation that there isn't so huge a difference between men and women, than to people who don't.
Just by way of reminder: we'd be looking for a difference large enough that, knowing
the difference between male and female suffices to make a difference to their estimated competence of 0.7 points on a 5-point scale. That would have to be either a really really enormous difference between men and women, or a really weird difference -- weird in that whatever it is somehow manages to make a big difference in competence without having any effect on academic performance, test scores, or reported faculty opinions. Which presumably would require it to be quite narrow in scope but, again, r...
Would that "everything" include things like [...]
They took the exact same application, sometimes with male-looking names and sometimes with female-looking names, and asked faculty for their opinions about them. The female versions were rated substantially (and significantly at the 0.001 level) worse for "competence", "hireability" and "willingness to mentor this student". The gap in estimated competence was about the same in size and significance as the gaps in the other metrics, which to me seems to indicate that differences in fear of a wrongful termination suit didn't contribute much if at all. (On looking at the relevant bit of the paper, the authors agree and have some statistical analysis that allegedly supports this view.)
When asked roughly what starting salary they'd offer the applicants, the "female" applications attracted ~12% lower figures.
(The details are all there at the other end of the link I gave.)
are you sure the other information was enough to completely screen that out?
I'm not completely sure of anything, ever. But: The information included: age, degree granted and university that granted it, GPA, GRE score...
I think that "microaggression" is a poor term, it adds negative connotation and restricted usage to standard, if subconsciously biased, human behaviors. The article uses another one, "implicit bias", which has exact same meaning but without the baggage.
In my experience, "implicit bias" and "microaggression" aren't used to refer to the exact same things — although I can see the analogy.
"Implicit bias" refers to a measurable unconscious tendency to favor one group over another, even when one doesn't have any explicit beliefs justifying that favoritism. For instance, if you ask someone, "Are green weasels scarier, stinkier, or otherwise less pleasant than blue weasels?" and they (honestly) say that they do not believe so ... but when you look at their behavior, on average they choose to sit further away from green weasels on the bus, that could be described as implicit bias. They claim that they are not repelled by green weasels, but they measurably act like they are.
We might link implicit bias to Gendler's concept of alief), or to Kahneman's concept of a System 1 response.
"Microaggression" describes a social exchange that — without deliberately attacking or insulting a group — reinforces negative stereotypes about that group, or an assumption that the group is lower-status or beneath consideration. A few examples:
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project?
Yep! I've been in the industry for fifteen years, and you've almost certainly benefited from stuff I've worked on. But you're acting hostile, so I don't care to give you any more stalker fodder.
As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I've worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a "heads down gotta look busy" attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.
Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can't ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don't ask questions when they should.
The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It's the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people's capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.
(Oh, and everyone's code has to be double-checked.)
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That's logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn't belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn't belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn't belong.
Looking at this comment section... wow. Yes, regularly encountering people who behave like Azathoth at work would be a level of (not really micro) aggression that could easily drive me out of a company, and I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin. Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence. Doesn't matter if she has a physics degree from Caltech, no, her professors probably just passed her out of sympathy. Doesn't matter if she's written good code in the past, no, her references must ...
I think the article makes a strawman:
Academics hold tightly to the view that progress in our system is meritocratic. Hiring, decisions about article publication, citation of the work of our peers, the awarding of research funds, raises, promotions and more are determined, we believe, rationally, as a result of the objective evaluation of clearly stated requirements for advancement.
I don't think most academics think that either hiring decisions, publication decisions or citation decisions are 100% based on explicit criteria. Indeed anybody who doesn't ...
Looking at this comment section... wow. Yes, regularly encountering people who behave like Azathoth at work would be a level of (not really micro) aggression that could easily drive me out of a company, and I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin. Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence. Doesn't matter if she has a physics degree from Caltech, no, her professors probably just passed her out of sympathy. Doesn't matter if she's written good code in the past, no, her references must all be assumed to be lying for mysterious reasons.
Hypothesis: Azathoth and people with the same attitude encounter few competent women at work because if said women can get a job somewhere else, where they won't be constantly assumed less competent than their achievements demonstrate, they do so.
The bit about quotas increasing the quality of the female applicant pool to the point where they don't even need to be used is counterintuitive and interesting. Myself, I've always avoided any college/company/etc I thought might have a quota because I want there to be no shadow of a doubt that I've earned what I have, but I'm aware I'm far from being a representative woman.
Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence.
That seems wrong. Woman do get hired from time to time because an employer considers them to be competent and Azathoth doesn't object to that status quo.
I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.
Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."
This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.
http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.
Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.