StackOverflow to becoming more welcoming. 👏
For me (cis het dude with monster-sized Asian tech privilege), learning to StackOverflow properly was certainly a learning experience, and I have the closed questions to prove it. I've also gotten enough useful feedback through it (and other StackExchanges, like GIS and statistics) that I try to give back by "mentoring" & showing how to improve the question.
Downvoting unhelpful comments is a great start. I see that too much.
Now I am taking these Implicit Association Test (IAT, a bias test):
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp
'Your data suggest a slight automatic association for Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.' 😢 it was a *lot* easier for me to hit the right key for
- "male OR science"/"female OR liberal arts" than
- "male OR liberal arts"/"female OR science".
I personally live by Vera Rubin's principles and this is something to think about.
@taoeffect They had a section about that on the results page—basically, order does matter but only a bit: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html#faq6
"One very common question is about the order of the parts of the IAT. The answer is yes, the order in which you take the test can influence on your overall results. But, the effect is very small."
I don't usually have a lot of hope, but I'd hope that they'd control for this obvious issue and I was glad they had.
@taoeffect Sorry just saw this.
Ya, I don't have reason to doubt that ordering at least doesn't move the results much, and as a population study, it's pretty definitive that there's awful bias.
But it's frustrating that people (including the authors) present it as a good way to measure *your personal N=1 bias*, which, if your experience generalizes, it isn't.
(In general, population results are useful—"% risk of cancer"—but most people want a personalized answer—"MY risk of cancer".)
@taoeffect Oh how pernicious! So on the population-scale ordering might not make a big difference but on an N=1 level, treating the test as a personalized result (which the site definitely suggest you do, right?, the StackOverflow blogger was shocked with his results, and one of the FAQs is "What can I do about an implicit preference that I don’t want?"), ordering might make the results too noisy to be of any use 😩. They probably shouldn't market a population research tool for personal uses…
@22 I was intrigued so I tried to do the test but it made my browser crash on the very final submit. When I restarted it said that my session had timed out. 😭
@22 That said, my main problem with the test was that I kept on putting Geology under Arts :/
@wim_v12e but see Greg’s discovery and our discussion at https://mstdn.io/@taoeffect/99932063183837447
In a nutshell, we hypothesize that individual N=1 personal results might be very noisy (which does not subvert the population-level finding, that bias is endemic).
Dr Vera Rubin's three basic assumptions, that I've verified (well, the first and last, I yield to the census people for the second):
1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.
2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.
3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.
(via https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/26/507022497/vera-rubin-who-confirmed-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88)