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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A measure aimed at boosting female employment in the workforce may actually be making it worse, a major study has found.
Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to "hit pause" on blind recruitment trials, which many believed would increase the number of women in senior positions. Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications. It is seen as an alternative to gender quotas and has also been embraced by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Victoria Police and Westpac Bank.
In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs. The assumption behind the trial is that management will hire more women when they can only consider the professional merits of candidates. Their choices have been monitored by behavioural economists in the Prime Minister's department — colloquially known as "the nudge unit".
Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic who oversaw the trial, said he was shocked by the results and has urged caution. "We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist," he said. "We found the opposite, that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist."
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:46PM (11 children)
I see room for improvement. I believe the hypothesis was that women experience discrimination for no other reason than they are women. What inherent biases and assumptions does that statement contain? Is that really all we were trying to test?
I ran through a quick list of privileges that womyn-born-womyn enjoy in Western cultures up there, right above your comment. Might those privileges confuse the hypothesis that “women experience discrimination for no other reason than they are women?” Can we deconstruct what a woman is?
Are we really trying to test the hypothesis that the female mind is equally capable of professional pursuits as the male mind?
Well, that suggests some steps. Some of these have already been performed.
Q!#</olG}#$%]]],][@#+++NO CARRIER
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:04PM
No, as usual you are unable to follow the plot and wandering in the direction of a thread hijack to your favorite subject.
The question before us is simple: Is the observed reality that equal numbers of men and women are not employed in various fields a result of bias? If the answer is yes then affirmative action and / or other policies to address the problem are justified and if not, imbalances are not a problem that can be solved at the HR Dept level and continuing to discriminate against males is pointless, unproductive and unjust. Some of your thoughts might apply to other areas of society but those are outside the scope of this study and the discussion thereof.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:14PM (7 children)
Instead of the brain being gendered, maybe it's the chemical soup that gets run on the brain hardware? I'm not asserting, I'm wondering.
I've been thinking this in the context of testosterone studies and the effects that chemical has on people's choices, let alone physical characteristics. Anyway, I keep trying to make a software analogy but it doesn't really fit -- that chemical soup is not analogous -- but it may be that it inhibits/enhances this or that generic program running on the brain. Anyway, in this imperfect analogy, the brain would be constant, but the chemical mods would be responsible for any number of differences in preferences exhibited by most males and females. Sort of like how a computer might be wired up with sensors and perform different actions as a result of varying inputs. For example, if a temperature sensor reads a certain value, it kicks on a furnace till that sensor reads some other value. The various hormones would be the air-temperature rather than the software or hardware. Anyway, just musings from someone whose last experience with biology education was Bio 102 about 1988, so put no stock in it.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:58PM (6 children)
In some documentaries on transgender people that were undertaking sex change treatment using hormones experienced that going from male sex to female got their thinking kind of clouded. While another person doing the reverse got them to in their mind think constantly on sex. However if spatial capability can be modified this way is more uncertain because the fundamental changes are likely to take place in the womb according to other studies.
So yeah chemistry affect the brain. How and the results may not be straightforward however. As a side track there are medications that can open the learning window that children have in adults.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @01:37AM (2 children)
Can you please identify that wonderful class of drugs and name the leading candidate in it please, I sincerely want to know.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday August 11 2017, @01:43AM
ditto
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 11 2017, @07:04PM
Artificial testosterone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @07:28AM
Some people, like kaszz, seem to be able to attain the same result without hormone therapy.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 11 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
It's interesting. You kind of have to experience it for yourself. I wouldn't say estrogen makes the mind clouded. It's different. It's like living your whole life with tunnel vision, only being able to see the thing you're currently looking at directly, and then suddenly being granted peripheral vision. You can still see the details in focus, but the world is more complete. (To be even more abstract, it's like living in Kansas one's whole life, being taken to Oz via tornado, and discovering vivid, brilliant colors for the first time.)
(It also doesn't make you crazy. I was crazy to begin with! According to the hot crazy matrix" [youtube.com], which I understand is a very accurate, scientific, and highly advanced model of romance from a heterosexual man's perspective, trans women tend to be below a 4 crazy, which is a trait so far unobserved in cisgendered women. I, of course, am somewhere around a 8 or 9 crazy!)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @04:47AM
Trans women would be born with a male brain so thus not crazy as per the matrix logic. Presumably only parts of the brain went male otherwise the whole trans issue would not exist.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 11 2017, @12:01AM (1 child)
Transgender people and those born with the "wrong sex" may provide some quantifiable insight into this.
Now I'm off to our monthly witch burning! :-)
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 11 2017, @03:27PM
Yeah, good idea! We should find some people like that! They might have something to add we hadn't considered before!