- The Armed Protests Outside Brock Turner’s Home Are Dangerously Counterproductive
“The protest outside Turner’s home is the latest example of a weird sort of cognitive dissonance that has recently emerged among progressives around issues of criminal justice.” - Lauer’s Pathetic Interview Made Me Think Trump Can Win
- Strange Horizons Articles: Boucher, Backbone and Blake – the legacy of Blakes 7, by Erin Horáková
This made me really want to rewatch Blakes 7. - Slate Star Scratchpad — Everything in Medicine Is Like This
Why perfectly safe patients have to be declared dangerous so they can have an ambulance ride they don’t want or need. - Gawker, Money, Speech, And Justice | Popehat
The problem isn’t just vengeful billionaires. - Why Scandinavian Prisons Are Superior – The Atlantic
“‘Open’ prisons, in which detainees are allowed to live like regular citizens, should be a model for the U.S.” - No, it’s not the fans’ responsibility when Marvel cancels a comic book, geez.
- In Defense of Melissa Click, Now at Gonzaga University
People should be able to recover from one relatively harmless mistake. (Note the word “relatively.”) - When tech firms judge on skills alone, women land more job interviews – CBS News
The increase was reportedly enormous, from 5% to 54%. I can’t find the actual study online, however, so I’m not certain it’s valid. - Corso Zundert 2016 is a Dutch flower parade that features floats made from millions of dahlias.
- U of Oregon Removes Name of Klan Leader From Dorm
But Dunn was the low-hanging fruit; there will be much more resistance to renaming Deady Hall, named after the founder of U of O, an outspoken proslavery racist who later was an important figure fighting anti-Chinese racism. - Rebecca Sugar, Cartoon Network’s first female creator, on writing LGBTQ stories for kids | PBS NewsHour
- Unpaid Labor in Texas Prisons Is Modern-Day Slavery
- The the Standard European Paper Size System is a beautiful thing.
- Phyllis Schlafly in her own words: Her many opinions about women, sex and equality – Salon.com
- U.S. politicians love to attack China and Mexico for stealing jobs. Germany could be next.
Germany’s trade surplus comes not just from great products, but also from undervalued currency and low wages. - Film studio Warner Brothers has asked Google to remove its own website from search results, saying it violates copyright laws.
“It also asked the search giant to remove links to legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon and Sky, as well as the film database IMDB.” - Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
- Report: Amazon To Open 100 Pop-Up Stores In Next Year – Consumerist
- For the first time ever, America’s uninsured rate has fallen below 9 percent – Vox
- Fannie’s Room: Another Men’s Issue for MRAs to Solve*: Workplace Feedback!
- Phyllis Schlafly is doomed to represent the feminism she hated.
- Did Democrats Unfairly “Demonize” Republicans Like John McCain and Mitt Romney? (SPOILER: No.) – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Reframing the Minimum-Wage Debate
Long but interesting article from a pro-MW perspective. Pour yourself a cup of coffee first. - Advice Goddess Blog
- Examining the Missing Anti-Abortion Footnote
- The Politics of Hair — Crooked Timber
“I recently learned something that I had been totally ignorant about: black and Creole women pre-Emancipation were required by law in many places to wear a headwrap in public….” - Undocumented Immigrants Pay Billions in State and Local Taxes : Immigration Impact
- How Horses Think
“To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.”
Re #9 — I’d certainly be interested in seeing that study, particularly as I saw another study with a very different conclusion (very interesting in other ways): http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/
These don’t necessarily contradict each other. Interviewing.io was testing hiding gender in interviews while it sounds like Speak With a Geek was testing hiding it in applications/resumes, so it could be that employers rely on biases more when they have less information. Or it could be that it’s hard to remove all the cues that might trigger bias from an interview (like apparent lack of confidence).
Note that English, like all languages, has gendered dialects. Someone with a deep voice speaking grammatically feminine English sounds “off,” and of course, feminine.
yrs–
–Ben
I recommend reading the full article. Gendered dialect could be a factor but it’s not obvious to me why that would disappear among those who did more than two interviews.
Here is why it obvious to me how discrimination against female gendered presentation would produce that result:
1) Let’s say women who have some gendered interview characteristics other than a high voice are rated worse than they would be if they seemed more masculine (and even worse if their voice is lowered so they seem like an unmasculine man).
2) Let’s say they realize that they are being rated unfairly through this particular interview interface.
3) Let’s say that people are more likely to quit if they do badly because they are treated unfairly than they are to quit if they do badly because they screwed up. This seems reasonably likely, since screwing up is fixable by practice, but someone else’s discriminatory behavior is much less fixable by practice, and practicing in a discriminatory environment isn’t necessarily helpful- remember, this study uses practice interviews, not actual job interviews, so the only benefit to the applicant is learning how to interview.
If those postulates were correct, then we would expect:
1) women to do worse on average on initial practice interviews (because some women present more femininely),
2) the women who fail on the initial practice interviews to drop out more frequently (because while some are doing badly because they messed up the technicals, many are doing badly because the interviewer downrated them for being feminine), and
3) the women who don’t quit after doing badly to no longer do worse when their vocal range is shifted (since they are the ones who did badly on the technicals, rather than because they were too feminine, so when they are shifted to a low voice they have fewer tells of femaleness).
Also, that article replaces claim 3 above with the claim that women are underrepresented in computer programming jobs because they just don’t have enough stick-to-itiveness. That is a pretty obnoxious and ridiculous argument.
Listening to the samples of the voice modulation on that page, the one where the woman’s voice is made to sound like a man sounds like an extremely stereotypical gay man, at least to me.
The part about women leaving after two bad interviews — I’ve seen the same thing happen academically. At my old job, someone ran the numbers on pretty much every piece of data we had about calculus pass/fail rates, and one of the big things that stood out was that male students who got a D (the required grade for staying in a STEM major was a C) would take calculus again, sometimes three or four times, until they got that C. Female students who got a D would almost all change majors to something in a non-STEM field. Even female students who got a C would often leave STEM.
Also, link #21 seems relevant here — men tend to keep thinking that they’re doing great even after repeated feedback telling them that they’re not.
Charles, the interviewing.io site does not normally do voice modulation; they introduced it as an experiment for practice interviews. The dropout rate difference was not related to the voice modulation experiment, and wouldn’t have been from only practice interviews. So given that, you’re explanation doesn’t make much sense.
Ruchama,
“Listening to the samples of the voice modulation on that page, the one where the woman’s voice is made to sound like a man sounds like an extremely stereotypical gay man, at least to me.”
Interesting, it did not sound that way to me, but it is a rather short clip to judge by. In any case, I doubt the relevance of this because tech companies have not in general had the same difficulty in recruiting gay men that they have had in recruiting women.
“Also, link #21 seems relevant here — men tend to keep thinking that they’re doing great even after repeated feedback telling them that they’re not.”
Yeah, I noticed that too. Although there is a subtle difference here — #21 is about men thinking they’re great in the face of feedback telling them otherwise, whereas the interviewing study and your calc study are about men thinking they can be great in the face of feedback that they aren’t yet. In principle these are different things, though they seem to typically go together.
You’re right, I was misreading that.
I remain highly skeptical of that article’s conclusion (and its model of stick-to-itiveness), which posits stick-to-itiveness as a simply trainable trait, rather than as a complicated response to a discriminatory environment: “it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.”
Also, while the article does seem to exclude discrimination based purely on identification of gender (“This person I’m interviewing is a woman, so I’m rating her lower”), it does not exclude discrimination based on gender presentation or gender associated traits, as long as the aspects of gender presentation or associated traits that are discriminated against are relatively consistent. If women who are discriminated against are more likely to drop out, then the women who don’t drop out are less likely to be discriminated against, and voice modulation does not remove the traits that are discriminated against. (This is basically my previous explanation minus the parts that specifically relate to dropping out of doing practice interviews.)
Yeah, I suspect it’s a much more complicated issue than they seem to think, but I thought it was an interesting result nonetheless.
It is an interesting result, and it at least shows what is going on in that context is not as straight up sexism as the resume name switching or the blind symphony auditions demonstrate.
ConDRAGulations to RuPaul’s Drag Race! “I was quoted earlier, a few months ago, as saying that I’d rather have an enema than an Emmy… thanks to the Television Academy, now I can have both!”
Alas that The Lady Chabis didn’t live to see it….
“In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay describing his view of how the economic future would unfold. At the time, the world was caught in a deepening depression. ‘We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,’ Keynes noted in the opening to his essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’….
Keynes believed that, once the world had overcome its depression, growth would resume and living standards would return to the upward path they’d been on previously. He acknowledged that rapid technological improvement would cause some short-term discomfort (‘a temporary phase of maladjustment’), but urged readers not to lose sight of the big picture:
Time spent working would dwindle to perhaps fifteen hours a week, and then to nothing. And the main problem humanity would face would be just what to do with itself in a world of abundant leisure.
Keynes’s forecast of progress in living standard has proven correct. [R]ich economies have already experienced at least a fourfold improvement in living standards. It seems likely that some will, by 2030, have enjoyed an eightfold rise. Where, then, is the abundance? Where is the life of ease? Where are the fifteen-hour work weeks?
….What we have not managed to do is to allocate the fruit of our production evenly enough to allow broad-based reductions in work hours. We haven’t done that because it is politically a very hard thing to do…. The rich and privileged don’t want to subsidize the poor. The poor may conclude that what redistribution the rich offer leaves an impossibly huge, even unfair gap in the incomes of the haves and have-nots. The poor may also not be content with an economy in which they are effectively unnecessary, kept at peace by a hand-out from the state. [T]he incentive for clever or ambitious individuals to work … might be lost, leading to stagnant growth….
[Why didn’t Keynes anticipate these problems? For 150 years], workers asserted their power and won: the right to organize into labour unions, expansion of the franchise to men without property and (eventually to women, establishment of labour-oriented and socialist parties. By the end of the second World War, workers’ victory over their employers seemed near absolute….
But political winds shifted. Communism provide a poor way to organize an economy. Technological progress and trade slowly shipped way at the power of organized labour. The prosperity of the post-war decades created a propertied middle class – increasingly well-educated and white collar – which over time grew ever less sympathetic to the priorities of the Labour left. [I]ntellectuals like Milton Friedman made and increasingly vocal case for a different, more market-oriented sort of economy. And, finally, the exhaustion of the unprecedented, glorious post-war economic boom and the arrival of the disappointing growth and high inflation of the 1970s crated the conditions for a political break….
Most of us … were born into a world in which this break had already begun. We inherited an idea of work that reflected this long struggle….
Yet … history has not ended; …the political battle over the spoils of economic growth has not ended…. A new political break looms.
[Thus will emerge] a battle between ideas – some new, some recovered from history’s dustbin. It will be an individual struggle – what the hell should I do with my day? How and what do I teach my kids about a life well led? How do I provide for my family? And a societal one – how should we tax the fantastically rich? What does the state owe a middle class whose incomes have not grown for most of the last two decades? How welcoming should residents in advanced economies be to those who wish to move there from other countries in search of better lives, or to poor places that want to sell their goods and services to rich consumers? (And similarly, how passively should the world’s poorer countries accept an isolationist, or nationalist, turn in richer countries?) If we can’t offer our children meaning and identity in work, how do we channel their energies toward healthy alternatives, rather than ideological extremism, or social nihilism?”
Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans (2016) at 9-12 (citations omitted).
Does anyone notice that about this Politico article tries to fat-shame Donald Trump?
Re: #1: This is a thing that happens, and is happening right now, of course. It’s also worth noting that a bunch of feminist and anti-sexual-violence organizations are taking a position against it. Especially since many of the organizations in question are based at colleges, and campus social justice activists, in contemporary narratives, are often the ones vilified for going haywire and screwing things up.
I get why it does happen, though. People are limited in what tools they have available to them. Right now, the way that US society shows that it takes offenses seriously is by giving them harsh sentences, where “harsh” is defined by the baseline that we’ve become accustomed to for other kinds of crimes. There’s no contradiction in opposing mass incarceration, even wanting to dismantle most or all of the prison system, and becoming angry about a case like Turner’s because you accurately read it as illustrating society not taking sexual violence seriously if it is committed by certain people or under certain circumstances. The issue then becomes what you do with that anger. The bad signal sent by the relatively lenient sentence doesn’t mean that the right thing to do is to push mandatory minimums. Or to go after the judge – for reasons related to personal experience, that particular approach scares me and makes me not trust the people who use it.
I don’t know if anyone else reads the sidebar links and therefore follows Daniel Larison’s coverage of the war on Yemen, but I basically haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else.
Yemen is undergoing an intentionally created famine, as well as being heavily bombed. The Saudi coalition has targeted critical transportation infrastructure, repeatedly targeted hospitals until MsF was forced to pull out entirely, and has maintained a blockade. All the while, the US has provided intelligence support and has routinely flown refueling missions for Saudi planes to allow them to bomb more effectively, without any concern for what they are bombing. Mid-way through the war, we sold Saudi Arabia replacement munitions because they were running low, and we are about to do so again. There is a group of House representatives who have opposed the new arms sale, but they need the support of more representatives.