An intersectional Schrödinger's cat of disrespect

Bethany Brookshire makes an admirable confession.

New post: I took the data on this. It turns out...I was wrong. https://t.co/e9vQZYbbYg https://t.co/L584hkKd9O

— Sci Curious (@scicurious) January 30, 2018

She had made an earlier observation.

Monday morning observation:

I have "PhD" in my email signature. I sign my emails with just my name, no "Dr." I email a lot of PhDs.

Their replies:
Men: "Dear Bethany." "Hi Ms. Brookshire."

Women: "Hi Dr. Brookshire."

It's not 100%, but it's a VERY clear division.

QED - men are disrespectful of women's accomplishment and status.

The tweet, as I had half suspected, took off. As of this writing, it has more than 2,000 likes and 550 RTs. This thing had gone viral.*

The replies put their fingers on what I was feeling. I can’t help but feel that men get automatic respect more often than women. That an email from a woman is often read, by men, as an email from a little girl. Other women felt the same way.

But then her inner scientist began pestering her. She had tweeted an anecdotal impression when in fact she had the data readily available. As a scientist, shouldn't she rely on the data over her impressions? Like a good scientist, she went to the data. Here is what she found.

Click to enlarge.

78% respond with her first name; the distribution is split evenly between men and women.

11% respond with no salutation (straight into the substance of the email); 68% men and 32% women.

7% respond with her professional apellation (Dr. Brookshire); 63% from men and 37% from women.

2.6% respond with her social appellation (Ms. Brookshire); 57% from women and 43% from men.

Contrary to her impression, of the 10% who acknowledge her with a choice between a formal professional versus social appellation, women are more likely to choose the social appellation and among those choosing the professional appellation, the greater majority are men rather than women. In other words, men are much more respectful of acknowledging her achievements than women.

So a great object lesson in the importance of relying on data rather than impressions. As (Dr.) Brookshire acknowledges, she was probably the victim of confirmation bias and recency bias. Confirmation bias is an indication that Brookshire has a negatively prejudicial bias against men for reasons that are not supported in the data.

Kudos to Dr. Brookshire for both behaving scientifically and for having the courage of revealing her mistake.

But I wonder if there might be a missing dynamic. It would be easy to write-off Brookshire as yet another postmodernist social justice obsessed left wing victimhood seeking journalist. Easy, but pretty certainly incorrectly. She, from this sample case of one, appears smart, self-aware, and brave. So why would she have the impression that men are disrespecting her when her own data shows that is not the case.

I wonder if this is not a class issue rather than a gender issue. And a class issue conflated with network effects.

I don't have the numbers, this is a thought exercise only.

Let's say Brookshire is very bright; 130 IQ, two standard deviations above normal. Only about 2% of the population have an IQ at or above 130.

Let's also say that she is attuned to expect that men will not acknowledge her educational accomplishments. That is what she has already documented.

Let's grant that among her co-workers, they are all +/- 10 IQ points of one another. She is in a milieu that is 120-140, all with college degrees, almost all with advanced degrees and most with PhDs.

Within that group, men are more ready to acknowledge her educational achievement than women but it is only ~10% of the population that make an appellation distinction, and the number of men exceeding women acknowledging her PhD is only 6.

From a sample set of 268 scientists, that is 6 more men than women acknowledging the PhD. A real result but a tiny effect size.

Where I am going with this is that Brookshire doesn't spend all her time only with high IQ scientific professionals. If she did, she might not have had the preexisting bias that men don't acknowledge her PhD since they so clearly do. Where else might she get that impression.

I am guessing that that real but small effect size of men preferentially acknowledging her PhD is being drowned by a larger pool than the 268 scientists.

How many other people does she deal with in a year, how many of them are men, and how many of them perhaps are in some way, intentionally or not, conveying some level of disrespect?

As an example, how about this scenario. Say Brookshire works in an enterprise environment (academia or business) where there is IT tech support. Maybe she interacts with tech support a dozen times a year. Tech support tends to be predominantly male. They also tend to be markedly dismissive of all tech support users: "Have you tried rebooting the machine?" If you are bright and credentialed, most interactions with tech support are at least exasperating if not insulting, whether you are male or female. Might you, as a woman, have a preponderance of disrespectful interactions from male technicians which appear to be because of gender but are in fact because of the nature of their job (they deal with a lot of clueless people and that is their default assumption until proven otherwise?) I would guess that is probably very likely.

There are innumerable such fields which tend to be predominately male, which require technical expertise that is usually separate from credentialed expertise, where expertise is not conditional on high IQ, and in which service providers within the guild tend to look down on customers as unknowing beings: plumbing, electricians, construction, car repair, IT technical support, maintenance people, logistics, security, etc.

By socio-economic status (SES) most these individuals are much lower than academic journalists. While they may be experts within their domain of knowledge, they certainly do not have comparable educational credentials to a PhD. Certainly they are male dominated trades. And certainly there are plenty of instances where the domain knowledge expert is disdainful of the consuming public, regardless whether the public is higher IQ or better credentialed in terms of education, or male or female.

So how many interactions does Brookshire have in a year with people outside of her professional high-IQ high-credentialed environment? I don't know but I would be comfortable guessing that it might be as many or more than 268 and that in those high-expertise low-credential environments it might not be uncommon for her to experience male disregard of her achievements. Not because she is female or because she has a PhD, but because she is part of the ignorant public who know next to nothing compared to those with a narrow domain expertise.

Under this scenario, it is not unreasonable that a high-IQ, well-educated woman might might detect numerous (estimated 100%) instances where she is not treated as a peer expert and misattributes that disrespect to her intellectual peers. There are actually two misattributions. She falsely believes the male tradesmen are disrespecting her because she is female. This forms a predicate bias which she projects onto her actual male peers.

Her experience might be real but based on a class issue and not based on the behavior of male peers. The male peers are actually recognizing her PhD at greater rate than her female peers. In her non-SES interactions she probably does have plenty of negative disregard from males but not because she is female but because she is a part of a group whom all technical experts have a tendency to look down on - customers with little domain knowledge.

Her male peers are not disrespecting her at all, in fact the opposite.

Her perception of male disrespect for females might have an evidentiary basis that her analysis does not pick up but which is in fact still false. She, like everyone, is being disrespected for not having adequate domain knowledge, and not because she is female. The intersectionality of domain knowledge, education credentials, high IQ, class and Gender - it is an intersectional Schrödinger's cat of disrespect. It is real but not for the reasons she perceives.