Women-Are-Wonderful Effect | Hacker News Reader

Women-Are-Wonderful Effect

en.wikipedia.org

15 pointsbongoman379 comments

The most interesting part of this article is that the effect was found experimentally, but the "criticism" section involves only argument and theory-based papers. Who writes theory that goes against experiments instead of designing experiments that refute a theory?

> This bias is suggested as a form of misandry/'benevolent misogyny', the latter being a concept within the theoretical framework of ambivalent sexism.

I like how it is explained away as a latent "woman-hating" directly in the Wikipedia article when clearly it is anything but.

You do understand the word "benevolent", don't you? Have you read the linked article on "ambivalent sexism"?

sexism is inherently not only about "women-hating". You making that assumption is showing your bias, not the bias of the wikipedia article.

It seems like most important part of an academic career is coming up with clickbait names for things.

"The God particle" or the "Women are wonderful effect".

I've now read the Wikipedia page and it's still unclear what they actually demonstrated and to what degree we can actually have faith in what they found once we figure out what that actually was, never mind what conclusions are safe to draw from it.

Personally, I absolutely love those sort of creative and playful names. They make the subject more interesting and they are far easier to remember than some other boring name.

Maybe it's "clickbaity" yes but isn't that a good thing in the realm of knowledge? It's not like I'm paying to read that wikipedia article or to learn about super-massive black-holes.

The fact that the Wikipedia article doesn't contain a lot of information or that the subject hasn't been researched enough has nothing to do with the name IMO.

> finding that both male and female participants tend to assign positive traits to women

Pretty simple to summarize imo

If that's such a good summary, why was I surpised when reading the abstract of the cited paper?

> Although research on competence judgments has not shown a pervasive tendency to devalue women's work, it has demonstrated prejudice against women in masculine domains (e.g. male-dominated jobs, male-stereotypic behavior). This targeted form of prejudice is consistent with the generally more favorable evaluation of women than men obtained in attitude and stereotype studies because this positive evaluation derives primarily from the ascription to women of nice, nurturant, communal characteristics, which people think qualify individuals for the domestic role as well as for low-status, low-paying female-dominated jobs. Women's experiences of gender discrimination and feminist protests concerning a contemporary backlash against women reflect women's inroads into traditionally masculine arenas, especially their efforts to gain access to high-status, high-paying male-dominated jobs, which are thought to require characteristics stereotypically ascribed to men.

A bit unrelated but this made me wonder. Single and double blind experiments might protect the experiment from a researchers bias but that is only during the experiment. Wouldn’t an implicit bias also potentially effect calculation as well as handling of the data gathered from the experiment, meaning that published results could still be impacted by biases.

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