People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why?

JohnGawel · 2021-10-22T13:30:16+00:00

They find that people find a preference for women as less morally wrong (5.5 points), the effect being particularly strong when the scenario where the woman is being discriminated against is shown first (11.8 points). There was also an order effect: "[d]espite seeing two identical scenarios, respondents judge the behavior of the manager in both scenarios on average 6.4 points more morally wrong if they first saw the scenario with the discriminated woman (11.1 points vs. 4.7 points)." 38% of respondents were classified as pro-women, 38% of respondents as neutral, and 24% of respondents as pro-men. Pro-women respondents felt more strongly than pro-men respondents (22.4 points vs. only 12.3 points).

To investigate if statistical fairness discrimination ("a process in which people use the gender of the victim to draw inferences about other characteristics which matter for their fairness judgments") can explain these effects, respondents were told that the man and the woman have worked equally hard in their career (same effort), the man and the woman would suffer equally bad from not getting the job (same suffering), the job is an industry where there is no gender discrimination (no discrimination) or that all of these three effects apply (all constant). Overall, the authors "saw no meaningful or statistically significant effect for any of our three groups of respondents". They found that "[t]hree of the four point estimates (same suffering, no discrimination, all constant) even suggest that the information treatments increased respondents’ pro-women attitude" and that "[r]espondents with an initial pro-men attitude in the base scenarios who were randomly assigned to the control group now find discrimination against women slightly more bad: They show a positive pro-women attitude of 1.7 points." The scenarios of the control group only differed from the base scenarios in the location of the job (urban area, suburban area, rural area, major city).

Quite a bit of a read. Since they didn't find that statistical fairness discrimination can explain why people judge discrimination against women more harshly, that implies to me that this bias against men is inherent. This would also be consistent with what other studies find and lends support to the theory that humans evolved to care more about the well-being of women. What do you think?

JohnGawel · 2021-10-22T13:28:33+00:00

Abstract:

Previous research has shown that people care less about men than about women who are left behind. We show that this finding extends to the domain of labor market discrimination: In identical scenarios, people judge discrimination against women more morally bad than discrimination against men. This result holds in a representative sample of the US population and in a larger but not representative sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) respondents. We test if this gender gap is driven by statistical fairness discrimination, a process in which people use the gender of the victim to draw inferences about other characteristics which matter for their fairness judgments. We test this explanation with a survey experiment in which we explicitly hold information about the victim of discrimination constant. Our results provide only mixed support for the statistical fairness discrimination explanation. In our representative sample, we see no meaningful or significant effect of the information treatments. By contrast, in our Mturk sample, we see that providing additional information partly reduces the effect of the victim’s gender on judgment of the discriminator. While people may engage in statistical fairness discrimination, this process is unlikely to be an exhaustive explanation for why discrimination against women is judged as worse.

Experiment:

In our base treatment, each respondent is shown two scenarios (in random order) in which a manager discriminates, and is asked to evaluate managers’ decisions on a scale that ranges from 0 “very morally wrong” to 100 “very morally right.” In one of these scenarios, the manager discriminates against a woman, and in the other against a man.

People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why?

Crosspost "People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Statistical Fairness Discrimination Can Only Partially Explain Why." from /r/science:

Comments

Title	People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why?
Author	JohnGawel
Upvotes	21
Comments	2
Date	October 22, 2021 1:24 PM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/AntiFeminists
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/antifeminists/comments/qdgvm8/people_judge_discrimination_against_women_more/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/AntiFeminists/people-judge-discrimination-against-women-more.1082458 https://theredarchive.com/post/1082458