Alice Dreger's Straight Talk (Ahem) on Sex and Gender

Tom Bartlett, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, reviews Alice Dreger's recent book on the desultory effects of political correctness in the sciences. And Barron Lerner does likewise at Forbes. 

For background, here is an article in the Pacific Standard from 2014 by Alice Dreger in which she says interesting things about sex and gender (not just the usual yada, yada, yada). (Short version: sex and gender are partially socially constructed, but not entirely, and social justice warriors ignore this at their peril. I should note that Dreger does not use the politically loaded / emotionally charged term 'social justice warrior', but this is my 'short version' of her article, so I feel some creative license on my part is permissible. Gosh darn it; this explanatory note has now effectively rendered the adjective 'short version' false, or at least highly misleading, which gives me reason to rewrite the initial sentence so it no longer includes the politically loaded catchphrase 'SJW' in my description of Dreger's thesis. But I lack the motivation to do so. Sigh. Political debates are draining, dispiriting, and lead to a deep-seated psychospiritual ennui, beneath the superficial adrenaline rush of engaging in an in-group/out-group conflict. But what is to be done? You can take the primate out of the savanna, but you can't take the savanna out of the primate. Because the primate is not socially constructed like that. At least not entirely.)

A Tale of Gender and the Monty Haul Problem

This article tells the story of the time Marilyn vos Savant presented the solution to the Monty Haul problem in her column in Parade Magazine, and was widely derided by readers, including some accused her of erring on account of her using "female logic" and other gender-based criticisms.

For those not familiar with the Monty Haul problem, this diagram from Wikipedia provides a helpful summary of the problem and its solution:

Imagine you're a contestant in a game show. The host, Monty Haul, presents you with three closed doors, and asks you to choose one of them. Behind one of the doors is a new car, but behind the other two doors are goats. You choose door #1. Monty Haul then opens a door which he knows has a goat behind it--door #3. He then gives you a choice: do you want to stay with door #1, or switch to door #2?

Many people think that the chance that the car is behind door #1 is the same as the chance that it is behind door #2--namely, a 1 in 2 chance. But, in fact, there is a 1 in 3 chance that the car is behind door #1, and a 2 in 3 chance that the car is behind door #2, so the solution to problem is to switch to door #2.

The diagram above shows why. When you make your initial choice, there is a 1 in 3 chance that the car is behind door #1, and a 2 in 3 chance that the car is behind doors #2 or #3. When Monty Haul opens door #3, which he knows has a got behind it, the chance that the car is behind door #3 drops to 0. This means that there is now a 2 in 3 chance that the car is behind door #3.

It's true that people find the Monty Haul problem to be counter-intuitive in general, but the article presents evidence that Savant was attacked because of her gender in particular. Some of her scathing, verbally abusive critics were academics with PhDs (who later had to eat a nice hefty slice of humble pie).

The comments section of this article is also intriguing; a fellow going by the nomme de web of "RaguxCixot" is valiantly attempting to prove that the standard answer to the Monty Haul problem is false, despite all attempts by well-informed fellow commenters to prove otherwise.

As far as I can tell, RaguxCixot is making a very basic error: he is assuming that there is a chance that Monty Haul will open a door which reveals the car, rather than a door which reveals a goat. In other words, Ragux is ignoring the stated assumptions in the thought experiment in order to reach his conclusion. To be fair to Ragux, when the Monty Haul problem is stated, the assumption that Monty Haul will never open a door to reveal the car is not always clearly or explicitly stated. Nevertheless, Ragux is being so enthusiastic in his stubbornness that he is either exasperatingly dense (given his evident understanding of probability) or else one of the most clever trolls I have ever seen. (There is at least a 1/3 chance of the latter, of course.)

What Makes Teams Work Well?

According to researchers Anita Wooley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher Chabris: it's not average team IQ, it's not extroversion, and it's not feeling motivated to work.

So what is it? Three factors: (1) equal contribution from all team members; (2) ability to keep track of what others feel and believe; and (3) proportion of women on the team.

That's right: gender equality in team membership was not a factor for success. The more women on the team, the better the team tended to do.

This was at least partly explained by the fact that women tend to do better than men on factor (2): the ability to keep track of what others feel and believe (called Theory of Mind), which includes as an important sub-factor the ability to read complex emotional states from faces (Reading the Mind in the Eyes).

The authors initially conducted a study using only face to face teams, and then conducted a follow-up study which tested both face to face and online teams. The initial results held up, including the importance of the ability to keep track of what others feel and believe. (Indeed, it was the online study that made them realize that factor (2) consists of more than just Reading the Mind in the Eyes, because this is not something that the online team members were able to do; this led the researchers to postulate the importance of Theory of Mind for team success.)

I have a pedagogical interest in this result, since I have started to use team-based learning in all of my classes. But this research is important for all human organizations . . . probably for all humans, period.

There May Not Be Widespread Discrimination against Women in Certain Academic Disciplines after All

The authors of a recent study published in the journal Science argued that "women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent" (Leslie et al., "Expectations of brilliance underlie distributions across academic disciplines," Science 347 (2015): 262-265).

This study has been widely reported on without much criticism, but Scott Alexander appears to have undermined the central claim of the study by showing that the proportion of women in STEM fields tracks very closely their relative performance on the GRE tests used to determine admission to STEM programs. In other words, according to Alexander, there is not evidence of discrimination against women trying to enter STEM fields in the first place.

Because it is outside of my area of expertise, I am unable to determine if Alexander's numbers or statistical analysis are accurate, but I think this is worth sharing anyway so that other people can examine his arguments.

Here is Alexander's figure showing the relation between average GRE quantitative score and percent women in a discipline; he says that the correlation between these two factors is r = -0.82 (p = 0.0003).

Discrimination against Women's Speech at Work

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant (pictured) have written an article for the New York Times on a body of research which seems to show systematic discrimination against women's speech in professional settings. One example from the article:

This speaking-up double bind harms organizations by depriving them of valuable ideas. A University of Texas researcher, Ethan Burris, conducted an experiment in which he asked teams to make strategic decisions for a bookstore. He randomly informed one member that the bookstore’s inventory system was flawed and gave that person data about a better approach. In subsequent analyses, he found that when women challenged the old system and suggested a new one, team leaders viewed them as less loyal and were less likely to act on their suggestions. Even when all team members were informed that one member possessed unique information that would benefit the group, suggestions from women with inside knowledge were discounted.