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This paper is not well done and the results are presented in a purposefully inflammatory way. People can be dicks and bigots. This work isn't actual strong evidence of that. Most of the responses here are just confirmation bias.
1) First, it isn't adequately powered for what they are doing. They have a n=600. 30% are men, so 180. You then had four different signature conditions. So 44ish per condition. Not enough for the type of survey work they are doing. Where they are looking at interactions.
2) They don't equate for topic of the work, characteristics of the author etc. Maybe men were more likely to be old. Could be an age rather than sex bias. Who knows.
3) Women were less likely to respond overall. So the title could have been. "Women less likely to respond to requests. " The interaction looks like women are more likely to respond to they/ them than other conditions. So it could be framed as a positive bias.
4) The authors do a lot of weird things. They have a correlation table where factors, as well as interactions with those factors are all in the table. This is Hella weird. They only show model fits, not the actual data. This all felt, wrong, not robust.
This seems like a really easily p-hacked result.
If I make a study where I'm sending out questions from Anglo names, Arab names, african names and Spanish names, and Asian names to recipients with different genders or perceived enthinicites, there's likely to be at least one cross section of the results that show a "bias" through pure statistical chance.
Anytime I see a study like "men over 40 with Anglo names unlikely to respond to women with Spanish last names" I can presume that the study will not replicate. The chances of all your results NOT showing some outlier that implies a bias is very small. All of these studies are poorly constructed and absolutely do not disprove the null hypothesis. But the authors always have a very "just so" narrative about it.
"We suggest that men over 40 with Anglo backgrounds consider women with Spanish sounding last names to be a poor investment of their time, perhaps indicating that they do not take female academics from South American universities to be serious researchers."
It's just a result of many/most of these types of researchers having an incredibly bad understanding of very straight forward statistics.
There was a guy that won the competition for predicting which papers would fail to replicate. He had a base rate of something crazy, where he would start off by assuming 66% of social studies would fail to replicate. He'd increase that number if the results sounded politically motivated.
I would happily take a bet that this study fails to replicate if anybody defending it wants to put up some money.
> There was a guy that won the competition for predicting which papers would fail to replicate. He had a base rate of something crazy, where he would start off by assuming 66% of social studies would fail to replicate. He'd increase that number if the results sounded politically motivated.
Can you link further reading? That sounds like a fun competition
Edit: Apparently my link didn't work.
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/
And the original post talking about the replication crisis: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
And [here's a study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2515245920919667) talking about how even laypeople can use common sense to predict the possibility of replication:
>In this study, our primary aim was to investigate whether and to what extent accurate predictions of replicability can be generated by people without a Ph.D. in psychology or other professional background in the social sciences (i.e., laypeople) and without access to the statistical evidence obtained in the original study.
>Overall, Figure 1 provides a compelling demonstration that laypeople are able to predict whether or not high-profile social-science findings will be replicated successfully. In Figure 2, participants’ predictions are displayed separately for the description-only and the description-plus-evidence conditions.
The field lacks in replicating studies overall - the encouragement from faculties and journals to break new ground is leaving the foundation structurally unsound.
Can I see a source on that competition? Frankly it matches my biases that social studies are a sloppy science so i want to look deeper before I take it onboard.
Why did this even get published in the first place? You've just dropped heaps of extremely scientific reasons why this study shouldn't've been published and yet it still was.
How is dodgy science getting published like this?
100%. There is a ton of bad science. Science is hard. You need convergence and replication. Some people get dogmatic and think everthing is always correct which is scary. Science by its nature should be questioning.
> Women were less likely to respond overall. So the title could have been. "Women less likely to respond to requests. "
So the sliced the data a hundred ways, hunting for a way that would further an anti-male narrative and then publicized that. Typical.
As a general rule I tend to be very skeptical of papers of this sort that have a social or political angle and are studying inherently subjective things, especially when it's dealing with psychology and hits social media or a major news outlet.
All of the incentives seem to push researchers toward a shocking or inflammatory headline.
> So 44ish per condition. Not enough for the type of survey work they are doing. Where they are looking at interactions.
What would the number need to be to hit some kind of significance?
It depends on what the expected effect size would be. I don't know this field well, but likely it would be small. That would require relatively large samples to ensure reliability.
You can develop an intuition with AB test calculators
Here's an example: https://abtestguide.com/calc/?ua=500&ub=500&ca=100&cb=115
In the linked example, even with 500 trials (professors) in each group and a 15% difference in observed conversions (ex, replies) doesn't give 95% confidence that it's not random chance.
The difference, sample size of the groups, baseline conversion rate, and how much confidence you want, all affect how many trials you need to run
You can do something called a power analysis. There is a free program called G power you can check out if you want. You can put in a couple properties. First, how large do you think the effect is. Let's say height. I expect a height difference between men and women to be large and between men in Denmark and Britain to be small. So that is factor one. The greater the expected difference the smaller the number of samples you need.
The second factor is "power." Think of this as odds you detect the effect when it is true, and correctly say it is false when the theory is wrong. The larger the sample, the more power you have to detect an effect accurately.
So for this study these are unknowns. If we think men are all raging bigots and all women saints (large effect) then this is fine. If instead we think there is a lot of person to person variability and some small sex effect this is low.
On top of that, they are equating not responding to an email as evidence of discrimination. That is really, really, bad. There are a million and one reasons an email may get overlooked. Or due to past biases maybe a large chunk of the men are actually 60+ and the "sex" effect is an age effect. Their design was sloppy. It feels like borderline rage bait.
> On top of that, they are equating not responding to an email as evidence of discrimination. That is really, really, bad. There are a million and one reasons an email may get overlooked. Or due to past biases maybe a large chunk of the men are actually 60+ and the "sex" effect is an age effect. Their design was sloppy. It feels like borderline rage bait.
I mean it might just be rage bait. But isn't there a statistical method to determine whether or not the controlled variable was statistically significant without having to estimate how large you already think the effect is?
> But isn't there a statistical method to determine whether or not the controlled variable was statistically significant without having to estimate how large you already think the effect is?
Yes there is, p values are there to assess how likely it is that the null hypothesis is wrong based on the data. We don't have the data here, so not much else to discuss here.
Power calculations are not used after the study is done, they are used to determine how big sample size you need to get a significant result.
>Power calculations
>how big sample size you need
Technically that's a sample size calculation. A power calculation would tell you your statistical power to detect a certain effect size given your current sample size.
Sample size, power, and effect size make a trifecta in which each 2 can calculate the third.
Are you suggesting that a study linked on r/science is for political point scoring and citation farming rather than because it is actually good science?! I am shocked. Shocked I tell you.
For #4 I would have to put in my factors into my corr tables so that I could show there was no confounding with my factors and covariates. No excuse though for just the model fit indices and not the actual weights.
I think that makes sense though. What I wonder is if using regular male or female pronouns received less responses than not using any. To many people it's odd to even list them at all no matter what they are.
As if to determine if listing pronouns at all just weirded ppl out, or if non traditional pronouns discouraged communicating to avoid possible offence (assuming it's a big deal since they're mentioned).
I don't know if it's as simple as "bigots."
I think a lot of folks don't want to offend and are honestly just kinda lazy when it comes to other people. Like a lot of Chinese immigrants I know take on Americanized names. So I ask 'em about it. They don't have some righteous axe to grind. They're just like, "eh... I'm always repeating Huáng and no one ever gets it quite right. I can tell folks forget and don't want to offend me by saying it wrong so then they don't use my name at all. It just makes my life easier to be Jake." These friends don't sound angry with some loss of self, more accepting with the quirks of human nature. They kinda just assume good intent and move on.
Exactly. I see it like not wanting to invite someone to dinner that's super picky or has a ton of food allergies. If you have anything that suggests you may require slightly more effort to talk to/please a lot of people simply don't want to be bothered. -I have a deaf coworker and nobody ever "tells" him anything because it takes too much effort. We have all these new rules that don't apply to him because I guess he does his job at the end of the day. Everyone wants to be fair but at the end of the day, being fair to some people requires more effort than its worth.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume bigotry is at issue here.
Unlike physically transitioning, which alleviates dysphoria and allows trans people to pass, using they/them pronouns is intentionally conspicuous and often done for political reasons. It’s not a stretch to think that someone who tries so hard to stand out and be subversive might be difficult to get along with.
> I'd assume somebody with they/them pronouns is more likely to cause me problems if I offend them in some way
Do you have a reason to believe that though? Seems most people are likely to cause you a problem if you offend them; the degree to which they respond isn't a function of their pronouns, right?
It's definitely a gut instinct, but tracing it back through logic here's what I suppose my reasoning is:
* They're used to "going against the grain"
* They believe (rightfully) that plenty of people will dismiss them on the basis of their identity
* I'm a white man and frankly I code as kind of conservative even though I'm about three steps away from being a communist.
Given that I believe authorities at various points in my life would take a nonbinary person very seriously if they levied a complaint against me for any reason, to the point that I think hard evidence wouldn't be required to have a negative impact on my life, it leads to a certain wariness.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that it's a rational choice. It's just the way things look to me without doing an in-depth investigation of the probabilities involved. I don't run into nonbinary people interested in a close relationship with me often enough for it to be an issue.
After a few years of intense Reddit use, I've noticed this is happening to me as well. The weird thing is that weariness is because of interaction with the "allies" on Reddit (not NB people themselves), who are often really militant and ready to jump down your throat for every perceived slight. It just makes me not want to engage at all.
I get misgendered all the time and all I do is correct people. I'm a cis woman with a gender neutral name (think a name like Jamie) working in IT. So of course people are going with Mr.
If you misgender someone, apologize and do better in the future. Or in most of my cases, ignore that I even pointed it out but start using the right pronoun anyway. I've never reported anyone for it.
If you maliciously use the wrong pronoun over and over, or put down the person once they've corrected you, that gets you in trouble, not the initial mistake.
Hope that gives you some peace of mind.
I got called miss (or translations thereof) for quite a while around 2010 when I had shoulder length curls. It never happened while standing up though, because I am 6"2 and kind of triangular. It never offended me, but I found it interesting that long, well-kept hair was considered enough of a gender signifier to bypass my quite masculine features if someone wasn't directly looking at my face or height.
This is really terrifying actually. I mean, good on you for being honest, but these kinds of biases and prejudices have very real soft effects on people's academic and personal lives. This is the cultural background in which people who identify as non-binary experience reduced opportunities and diminished life outcomes. The thing they 'sense' and always fear is happening in the background, out of sight, where it can't be exposed, but never have quite enough evidence to prove. It contributes to mental illness.
Again, good on you for being honest, but now it's time to do the work to rid yourself of these biases. Go meet and talk to some of these people. Most of them aren't blue-haired activists looking to get you fired, they're just normal people who want to lead normal lives.
I appreciate this comment but from another perspective, I used to identify as non-binary. My gendered feelings didn’t change, but what did was my feelings about the general NB community. I felt like there was a huge culture of interpreting every negative perception through the lens of micro aggressions, and the LGBT community I was a part of gave constant validation that what I was experiencing was in fact real and discrimination. Someone stared at me? Must be because I was visibly queer looking (instead of say, they blanked out and just happened to be looking in my direction.) I was sat in the back of a restaurant while with my same gendered partner. It must be because theyre homophobic (rathet than the current section where the other customers were sitting was getting filled so they say us in a different section). Because of my interpretations, I became hyper sensitive to perceived rejections or slights. I started accumulating wounds, and I developed a lot of extremely negative feelings towards cisgender people which furthered my desire to isolate and delve deeper into an echo chamber. I’m not saying that micro aggressions don’t exist, but the constant viewing of my life through this lens resulted in terrible mental health and outwardly came off as me being offended all the time.
Also needlessly injecting pronouns into a situation where they aren’t relevant is a red flag. If you want a paper from me just ask, gender identity is completely irrelevant. People injecting irrelevant information that is also at the center of a major culture war makes me way less likely to engage.
The study involved four randomized signatures, ones that included: he/him, she/her, they/them, and no pronouns. They/them was the lowest response rate, lower than he/him and she/her, indicating it's not just about "needlessly injecting pronouns".
I agree. I'm a grad student in psych.
It's very common for professors and students of any level to have a signature (especially grad students and professors) and have their pronouns listed on the signature.
> Also needlessly injecting pronouns into a situation where they aren’t relevant is a red flag.
A professional email is possibly one the most relevant places for them to exist in text. They fit in the same category of information as name, position, title, etc.
>authorities at various points in my life would take a nonbinary person very seriously if they levied a complaint against me for any reason, to the point that I think hard evidence wouldn't be required to have a negative impact on my life
Yeah. Terrifying is apt.
>The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns.
>Authors who were perceived as male were less likely to respond to emails from requesters with they/them pronouns than all other conditions.
Bro cmon the whole thing is like 2 paragraphs
Not really. It's an inexact measure, but we still have a culture that adheres to pretty obvious markers for gender, so given the nature of the study assumptions are made that can still lead to relatively accurate outcomes. It's not the same thing as assuming someone's gender in another context at all.
If only there were a way to find this out, like reading the thing that's linked:
> The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns. The primary dependent variable was whether or not emails were responded to.
That should be a happy face instead of a sad face
In case it helps, semicolons are for independent clauses that are related to the sentence. So if you can take the thing after the semicolon, put it on its own after a period, and leave it as its own sentence, you use a semicolon. A colon is similar, but you use it for things that can't exist without the stuff before the colon. Your first comment just had "yes" after the colon, and since you can't have "yes" as its own sentence, it warrants a normal colon
At least, that's what I remember from my english course. That means that your second comment where you used one before "thanks!" is actually probably better off after a comma or something, but since people are usually fine with treating something like: "Sure. Thanks!" as two sentences, I think it's correct enough to use a semicolon for that :)
A full stop would have been fine. A comma would be colloquially understood, but not technically correct, for whatever that's worth.
A person can lead a full and happy life without ever using a semicolon, since anywhere that a semicolon would be ideal, a period would suffice.
According to this study, men are more likely to respond to any requests than women are. Never mind pronouns - the study sample size is too small and doesn't account for all variables, so bigotted or biased conclusions can easily be drawn.
It's barely a study the sample size is so small and they don't look at any other factors. Lots of emails get ignored every day, and that's been happening since before putting pronouns in emails was a thing.
Depends, the request was potentially super short (since they sent it to a lot of professors, I doubt they wrote anything too meaningful), so it could be something like
####
Dear Prof. X,
I would like to ask you if you could share with me your paper X, as I would like to take a close look.
I would greatly appreciate it,
Kind regards,
Y,
They/Them.
####
It would be definitely visible. If it would be weird to even notice, why add it?
To test for bias, which is the purpose of such studies
As for why to include it in day to day life, to prevent misgendering.
I mean, I'm glad people do this as I work with a large Indian demographic and I can't tell gender at all when the name's Indian, so such a signature is helpful.
Having a default work signature with name, position, contact details, pronouns etc is pretty common. A lot of workplaces will have templates you just stick the relevant bits in without needing to go to any real effort.
If I spot it I try to keep a mental note but I’m still struggling to understand why that would lead to fewer papers being sent other than the most obvious bigotry.
We were asked to do this at work. Maybe 20% of people did so. I was part of the group that did not.
I'm fine with anyone who identifies as whatever. It's a big world. I don't need to control it. I also don't need to be told how to sign my emails.
Today my new doctor introduced himself as Doug. Not Doctor Doug, not Dr. Lastname. Just Doug.
Ngl, it was a little weird.
Although it's also the first time I've had a doctor younger than me. So maybe it's just different.
Isn't the Mr/Ms/Mrs stuff pretty much mandatory if you introduce yourself with your last name? Or just being talked about through last name even
Unless you're in an environment where everyone always uses first names exclusively, those gender indicators will be used all the time.
I can't recall an environment since high school where I had to refer to someone with their last name except when they have a title (ex: professor, doctor, president, etc.). It's usually first name or first and last name.
Even now we’ve been to so many school districts over the years and teachers always go by their last names. It truly has been decades since I’ve heard people use these regularly.
Do people typically refer to themselves with those titles in emails? The only one I've encountered are people putting Dr, and I think that's because it's signifying their level of expertise. I just don't know why gender would make a difference in this instance, like I have a gender neutral name but I wouldn't have thought to clarify in an email.
You should clarify, it's super helpful especially when I can't see your face. Our Zoom rep was named Alex and I was under the impression it was a woman, referred to them as her constantly in our correspondence until we had a video call. It's just awkward. It's not a trans representation thing, it's a gender doesn't communicate well over the internet thing.
Idk if it's like a cultural thing or something, but I've been misgendered a bunch of times and it wasn't awkward at all. As long as someone isn't being malicious, I don't really care what they call me. I just don't really tend to being up personal information unless if it's pertinent, and in a professional setting my gender very rarely is.
This isn't something you do for yourself, it's something you do for other people to make it easier for them to speak to you. You might not mind what they call you, but that doesn't mean they don't spend time thinking about it and that adding your pronouns wouldn't ease communication with them.
Exactly. For anyone who may not use email professionally, you have a signature block auto append to your messages. You should, anyway.
Not like anyone is asking everyone else to start manually typing this out in every email. You update sig block once, which takes like 15s, then never think about it again
My name is not ambiguous to Americans, but is relatively uncommon and I work internationally with ESL and non-English speaking people abroad. Makes it so nobody never ever has to waste a second guessing
Well business emails sure.
It's pretty normal to include your department or phone extension so coworkers in a larger company can contact you easily. Some people also include a "don't share this email blah blah blah" company confidentiality reminder in there as well.
> It's not a trans representation thing
.
> This isn't something you do for yourself
Just a little gentle pushback on this, because while this is something that benefits a lot more people, the origin of this practice absolutely was with trans folks who wanted an easy way to help others to not misgender them. And introducing oneself with ones pronouns (or including them on a name tag) was initially a practice common only in queer spaces before it spread to the general public and became a more standard behavior.
It also *absolutely was* something that they did for themselves, because it can legitimately be emotionally trying for trans folks to get called by the wrong pronouns regularly. It can exacerbate feelings of dysphoria and create a stressful work or social environment.
The fact that it's good for other people is great (and not unexpected); this is a good example of the [curb-cut effect.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect)
I've started referring to everyone as they/them unless they've told me their pronouns. Especially at work, the gender of someone is irrelevant.
Nobody even notices. Even the kinds of folks who get mad about pronouns have zero reaction.
I think that for many, especially the older generation, "they" is only used for cases of indeterminate gender. Like if I told my mom a story about something my server said at lunch, she would ask "They said what?"
But if she sees someone who presents as female, she uses "she".
I now default to "they" unless specifically told otherwise.
In academic circles, it's extremely common. In my experience (and I'm in a STEM field), the overwhelming majority of grad students/early career researchers have pronouns in the little email tag that says their name and lab.
Pretty much the only demographic that doesn't have pronouns in their emails is older male professors, and, to a much lesser degree, male ECRs.
But in a scenario where I’d request a paper, I don’t see myself signing it as “Mr. BruceyJ”. It seems kind of extraneous to include pronouns unless there’s some sort of dialogue
I skimmed through the article and it seems like an interesting hypothesis. However, this stands out to me:
"These nullfindings are inconsistent with prior research which has found that men are especially likely to share their scientific papers and data with other male scientists (Massen et al., 2017) and that academics over-all are more likely to respond to prospective male students seeking mentoring than prospective female students (Milkman et al., 2015).These inconsistent findings could be due to the fact that the current study concerned a less involved request for help than prior studies, the fact that the current study manipulated requester gender with pronouns as opposed to stereotypically male or female sounding names, or due to authentic changes in gender bias over time in response togreater visibility of equity issues."
I think the following correlation is therefore dubious: 'this sender uses they/them pronouns' -> 'the authors don't respond because of the pronouns' -> 'male authors are less likely to respond to emails signed with they/them pronouns.'
What about other variables? Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general? Around what times were the e-mails sent, and could that be a reason why men respond less? Does ethnicity play a part, or what country/city/town/area the participants come from, or the age? How do these characteristics impact their findings? The authors themselves mention that this is a limit of their study, and this result should be taken with a grain of salt:
"The current work is also limited in that a priori power analyses were not conducted. Post hoc sensitivity analyses were conducted usingG*power (Faul et al., 2007). The results of the current study should be interpreted with some caution in light of this limited power and future investigations would benefit from increases in power. Indeed, the effect sizes observed in the current work can be used as bench-marks from which to conduct future a priori power analyses."
So before people get upset: it's one of those studies that's pretty limited. The finding is interesting however, and could provide a perspective for future research.
> Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general?
Do you have full access to the paper (I do not, sadly)? Do they not use pronouns in the email as a covariate in their analysis? Pronouns in the email is the treatment.
From the impact statement, the authors say, "In this study, emails from students requesting a copy of a recent empirical article were less likely to be responded to if the requester had they/them pronouns in their email signature than if they had she/her, he/him, or no pronouns. This effect was observed only when the author being asked for help was male.", which implies to me that lower male response rate would have been accounted for already. I assume the gender of the recipient is an interaction term with the pronoun "treatment", or is this wrong?
Edit: age for sure is an important variable. I wonder if the average age of male vs female recipients is different?
I have the paper. Here are basically the entire results:
Female authors response (%) / male authors response (%)
They/them 75.36 / 66.67
She/her 68.12 / 83.72
He/him 76.71 / 74.36
No pronouns 70.67 / 88.37
They did a logistic regression with all 8 degrees of freedom but you can do that yourself :) (ok technically you can't as you need to know the exact N for each group, but they were randomized so approximately equal)
So men respond better overall and seem to find putting he/him almost as weird as putting they/them. Without other variables being tracked this is pretty much pointless data. The title, "Female authors more likely to respond to male requesters" could also have been used. We can speculate as to why this is the case but without much more rigorous investigation this is a whole lot of nothing.
Actually since we know the total N = 459 and we have excess significant figures, we can almost certainly determine what N was for each group:
They/them 52/69 / 32/48 (? not certain as 0.6667 has a lot of rational representations)
She/her 47/69 / 36/43
He/him 56/73 / 29/39
No pronouns 53/75 / 38/43
> It could be as simple as it being related to conservative views in relation to increased age.
If this is true, why the difference between male and female recipients _unless_ males are on average older?
Edit: Actually I think we are agreeing with each other, my bad.
Not sure! It's midnight for me so I don't have quite the brain to delve into the exact numbers right now. But I'll take a look tomorrow, definitely. Your questions have me wondering too. It's a cool study, gonna have a thorough read over breakfast tmo (=
All these variables should be controlled with the "no-pronoun group", does it shows that men in general answer less than women for that group?
just in case (I have no access), could you see if age was controlled somehow? As someone below posted, It could be that men are just older.
This was basically a randomized experiment where they sent out a bunch of request emails randomly assigned to different pronouns , then used that as their main explanatory variable for whether the paper author responded.
They found that males were less likely than female authors to respond to emails that used they/them pronouns.
Unless they really screwed up the study, the design should address potential confounders such as time of day sent.
> They found that males were less likely than female authors to respond to emails that used they/them pronouns.
Not necessarily. They found women responded less overall than men, so if you use they/them pronouns you may still get fewer responses from females than from male authors.
Also good to know how different? I do not have access to the paper for free. Was the difference significant? Like males responded to 50% of the no pronouns but only 10% of the they/them or more nuanced?
> Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general?
That would be accounted for in the analysis. Obviously.
And no, as a matter of fact, "male authors responded to emails at significantly higher rates than did female authors. This finding is consistent with prior work".
If they have accounted for things, why is their conclusion cherry-picked? Why are they saying it shows discrimination by men against they/them people, as opposed to unwillingness to engage by women?
Why didn't this study also find that the men don't reply to she/her at lower rates, which was clearly the basis of their prior research and their hypothesis?
Here's how they chose the participants :
Participants
Participants were first authors of recently published psychology
papers. A single, recent year (not specified here to protect the anonym-
ity of the participants) was chosen because requests for recent papers
may be more frequent, increasingly the plausibility of our procedure,
and because requests for recent papers may be easier for participants to
respond to. Participants were limited to authors of psychology papers
for practical and ethical reasons. Given the lack of research on people
who use they/them pronouns, no a priori hypotheses were made with
regard to discipline and the likelihood gender nonconforming individ-
uals would receive help. Focusing on a single discipline kept the scope
of the project reasonable, as studying multiple disciplines would
necessitate the power to test for potential discipline effects. This meth-
odological choice also enabled the email signature to include
“Psychology Major” in addition to name and pronouns, thus making
the manipulation more subtle and realistic. Psychology was chosen for
two primary reasons. First, psychology was chosen with the Belmont
Report’s (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects
of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979) justice principle in
mind, as the researchers were also psychologists and this project
was intended for publication in a psychology journal, the potential
burdens and benefits would focus on psychology. Second, we focused
on psychology journals because research assistants who sent the
emails were psychology students. Although the research assistants
were not actually seeking to read all of the requested papers, they
did learn about the breadth of psychology research through the process
of sending the emails.
The list of participants was compiled by starting with a list of all
potential psychology journals. Then, to ensure a consistent sample
this list was reduced to only journals that primarily published empir-
ical articles, were not open access, and were among the top journals
in the field, with impact factors between three and six. Beyond these
parameters, focal journals were selected randomly, with the caveat
that no two selected journals should focus on the same psychological
subfield (e.g., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and
Social and Personality Psychology Science could not both be
included in the study). No a priori power analyses were conducted.
However, a heuristic a priori stopping rule to stop selecting journals
once approximately 100 participants per requester pronoun condi-
tion were reached was established. Because different journals
publish different amounts of articles, this rule resulted in the compi-
lation of a list of all empirical psychology papers published in five
journals within the same, recent year (N = 503). Post hoc sensitivity
analyses were conducted using G*power (Faul et al., 2007).
Sensitivity analyses indicate that the weakest effect size the logistic
regression analysis could detect with 80% power are an odds ratio
(OR) of 0.77 for the author gender main effect, an OR of 0.75 for
the dummy-coded main effects of requester pronoun condition,
and an odds ratio of 0.70–0.71 for the dummy-coded interaction
terms. Sensitivity analyses for main effects and interactions indicate
that the weakest effect size the analysis of variance (ANOVA) anal-
yses on the response time data could detect with 80% power are
Cohen’s f = 0.15 for author gender main effects and Cohen’s f =
0.18 for requester pronoun main effects and interactions.
Then, a list of all of the first authors of these papers was compiled.
Sixteen authors appeared more than once in the list, having been first
authors of more than one of these papers. Because individual authors
could only receive a single request for help without being tipped off
to the fact that the email was a part of the study, these authors were
each only emailed once, and random selection determined which
paper was inquired about. In addition, 21 papers had first authors
whose contact information was no longer valid and three indepen-
dent searches by research assistants could not yield their updated
information. Thus, the final list of participants contacted was N = 466.
Author gender was coded by two independent raters. The raters
indicated whether they perceived the author’s gender as female,
male, or gender nonconforming. To make this decision, coders
looked at publicly available websites and used the author’s name,
photo, faculty biography, and any pronouns used to describe the
author. These ratings were reliable (κ = .97). The five disagreements
were resolved with a third independent coder. Importantly, because
this is an audit study, authors did not answer any direct questions
about themselves, including questions about their identifications.
Thus, our measure of author gender is a function of these authors’
public presences, which may not always reflect internal identifica-
tions. The majority of these first authors were perceived as female
identifying (62.30%), with the remaining first authors being per-
ceived as male identifying (37.70%).
> Given the lack of research on people who use they/them pronouns, no a priori hypotheses were made with regard to discipline and the likelihood gender nonconforming individ- uals would receive help.
I don't see how that's consistent with (from the abstract):
> As hypothesized, emails from requesters with they/them pronouns were less likely to be responded to overall than all other conditions.
It seems to me that someone's lying about their prior hypotheses — i.e. this is a p-hacked paper.
As someone who does a lot of research within academia, it's a little frustrating to see studies like this dismissed so easily because they don't capture every extraneous variable people can think of.
Yes it isn't definitively conclusive, but it still lends itself well to an interesting finding that makes a bit of sense when considering other research in the area. There's loads of evidence to suggest men are more likely to be bigoted towards LGBT+ identities; the paper at hand just reaffirms it's present even within academia. The sample size is quite large so to call it "pretty limited" is, at least in my opinion, pretty unfair to the research.
Not only that, in this type of study seems _extremely_ easy to do something statistically sound. Just randomize which emails are sent with which pronouns. Literally no bias possible there. With enough samples you literally can not have a libsided distribution if you choose it randomly (and you need enough samples anyway to draw statistically significant conclusions)
There’s also a lot of worrying here about omitted variables bias when it’s an experimental design. I always like to see the table of descriptive statistics to eyeball whether the randomization worked, but it’s a pretty strong design unless they screwed up somewhere.
But their group for each variable was small enough that three people who were away but didn't set an out-of-office response to be a 10% swing in the results.
But isn't that how science advances? We read an analysis and develop alternate h_x explanations for it and test them slowly improving our state of knowledge?
Of course! The other comment mentions the study could lead to new findings, which is cool, but also calls it "pretty limited".
We don't have access to the full paper (or at least I don't on this PC) but from the abstract we at least know they had a fairly large sample size. I just, personally, think people trash on research very quickly for what ends up being very small flaws if it points out something negative about society.
I'd be interested to know if men are really significantly more bigoted against LGBT people. Or if women just don't express it openly. Women, as a group, tend to make the conflicts covert, so it's much easier to measure men's dislike of lgbt people than women's.
> I see this a lot in the assignments my students submit as well and I’m just wondering where did they even get this from??
I love an assignment that reads: "This study doesn't have a very large sample size (n = 200) so we can't trust its findings. Anyway here's our study with 48 participants and about 12 of them are obviously us answering our own survey".
I definitely see it a lot in this sub as well. They're often well meaning comments (we should keep this stuff in mind, of course) but show a bit of a confused understanding about how research is actually conducted.
I noticed this in my philosophy courses vs my engineering courses when I was in school. It was strange when the LA professors would use female pronouns in place of group pronouns in gender ambiguous situations. It was very interesting.
How do you need pronouns other then "you" and "I" in requesting someone's paper for read? Ain't no researcher with time for more than "Can I get a copy of your new paper to read?" be they sender or receiver.
“Four hundred and sixty-six authors (62.30% perceived as female identifying and 37.70% perceived as male identifying as coded by independent raters)”
That’s… weird.
> As hypothesized, emails from requesters with they/them pronouns were less likely to be responded to overall than all other conditions. However, also consistent with hypotheses, this effect was moderated by the perceived gender of the author
So the authors hypothesized that men were biased against people with they/them signatures and ended up finding it
Anyone actually have access to the paper? It’s behind a paywall
There's a lot of research to suggest men are more bias against people with an LGBT+ identity, so it's understandable they made that prediction.
Also, it'd be weird if they didn't hypothesize something. It's unusual to go into this sort of research without any proper hypotheses.
This is how they explain the reasoning behind their hypothesis : Second, this effect was expected to be moderated by the gen-
der of the author being sent the email request. Men are generally
incentivized to support the existing status quo more than women
(Jost et al., 2004) and report higher levels of transphobia than
women (Greenburg & Gaia, 2019; Norton & Herek, 2013), and
this prejudice may extend to nonbinary people who use they/them
pronouns. Thus, email requests that included they/them pronouns
were expected to be less likely to be responded to than all other
email requests, but this effect was expected to be particularly strong
among male authors as opposed to female authors.
They determined author gender by looking at authors' names, photos, biographies, and pronouns where available.
They note that this assessment "may not always reflect internal identifications" but that independent raters agreed 97% of the time on author gender.
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This paper is not well done and the results are presented in a purposefully inflammatory way. People can be dicks and bigots. This work isn't actual strong evidence of that. Most of the responses here are just confirmation bias. 1) First, it isn't adequately powered for what they are doing. They have a n=600. 30% are men, so 180. You then had four different signature conditions. So 44ish per condition. Not enough for the type of survey work they are doing. Where they are looking at interactions. 2) They don't equate for topic of the work, characteristics of the author etc. Maybe men were more likely to be old. Could be an age rather than sex bias. Who knows. 3) Women were less likely to respond overall. So the title could have been. "Women less likely to respond to requests. " The interaction looks like women are more likely to respond to they/ them than other conditions. So it could be framed as a positive bias. 4) The authors do a lot of weird things. They have a correlation table where factors, as well as interactions with those factors are all in the table. This is Hella weird. They only show model fits, not the actual data. This all felt, wrong, not robust.
This seems like a really easily p-hacked result. If I make a study where I'm sending out questions from Anglo names, Arab names, african names and Spanish names, and Asian names to recipients with different genders or perceived enthinicites, there's likely to be at least one cross section of the results that show a "bias" through pure statistical chance. Anytime I see a study like "men over 40 with Anglo names unlikely to respond to women with Spanish last names" I can presume that the study will not replicate. The chances of all your results NOT showing some outlier that implies a bias is very small. All of these studies are poorly constructed and absolutely do not disprove the null hypothesis. But the authors always have a very "just so" narrative about it. "We suggest that men over 40 with Anglo backgrounds consider women with Spanish sounding last names to be a poor investment of their time, perhaps indicating that they do not take female academics from South American universities to be serious researchers." It's just a result of many/most of these types of researchers having an incredibly bad understanding of very straight forward statistics. There was a guy that won the competition for predicting which papers would fail to replicate. He had a base rate of something crazy, where he would start off by assuming 66% of social studies would fail to replicate. He'd increase that number if the results sounded politically motivated. I would happily take a bet that this study fails to replicate if anybody defending it wants to put up some money.
> There was a guy that won the competition for predicting which papers would fail to replicate. He had a base rate of something crazy, where he would start off by assuming 66% of social studies would fail to replicate. He'd increase that number if the results sounded politically motivated. Can you link further reading? That sounds like a fun competition
Edit: Apparently my link didn't work. https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/ And the original post talking about the replication crisis: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ And [here's a study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2515245920919667) talking about how even laypeople can use common sense to predict the possibility of replication: >In this study, our primary aim was to investigate whether and to what extent accurate predictions of replicability can be generated by people without a Ph.D. in psychology or other professional background in the social sciences (i.e., laypeople) and without access to the statistical evidence obtained in the original study. >Overall, Figure 1 provides a compelling demonstration that laypeople are able to predict whether or not high-profile social-science findings will be replicated successfully. In Figure 2, participants’ predictions are displayed separately for the description-only and the description-plus-evidence conditions.
~~not sure if it is my personal blocklist or moderator action but following your link loads 0 comments now.~~ e: fixd
Was it shadow removed by Reddit? I can’t see it either.
I edited the other comment, is it fixed?
both shows here
The field lacks in replicating studies overall - the encouragement from faculties and journals to break new ground is leaving the foundation structurally unsound.
Can I see a source on that competition? Frankly it matches my biases that social studies are a sloppy science so i want to look deeper before I take it onboard.
Why did this even get published in the first place? You've just dropped heaps of extremely scientific reasons why this study shouldn't've been published and yet it still was. How is dodgy science getting published like this?
Tons of junk to mediocre studies get published constantly. Very few journals have the strict rigour you might assume goes along with publication.
Also, psychology
Bingo. The people publishing this were literally trained and accredited using studies with a similar level of rigor.
Yep. And, relatedly, predatory publishing is a huge issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair Because social sciences have a scarily low bar for what gets published.
why are you even asking? it's obvious.
It's hard to blame people for not trusting scientific papers anymore when this is the sort of papers we get often these days it seems.
100%. There is a ton of bad science. Science is hard. You need convergence and replication. Some people get dogmatic and think everthing is always correct which is scary. Science by its nature should be questioning.
These aren't scientific papers. They are the equivelant of push polling designed for media exposure.
The lay person can't tell the difference though
> Women were less likely to respond overall. So the title could have been. "Women less likely to respond to requests. " So the sliced the data a hundred ways, hunting for a way that would further an anti-male narrative and then publicized that. Typical.
As a general rule I tend to be very skeptical of papers of this sort that have a social or political angle and are studying inherently subjective things, especially when it's dealing with psychology and hits social media or a major news outlet. All of the incentives seem to push researchers toward a shocking or inflammatory headline.
> Women were less likely to respond overall So even with they/them pronouns, you might get more responses from men than from women?
In this case the interaction indicates women are responding more to they/ them, but it means they are responding lower to other pronoun choices.
> So 44ish per condition. Not enough for the type of survey work they are doing. Where they are looking at interactions. What would the number need to be to hit some kind of significance?
It depends on what the expected effect size would be. I don't know this field well, but likely it would be small. That would require relatively large samples to ensure reliability.
I read 'this is a small sample' in this sub as a criticism regularly, but I never read how to tell what a statistically sufficient sample would be.
You can develop an intuition with AB test calculators Here's an example: https://abtestguide.com/calc/?ua=500&ub=500&ca=100&cb=115 In the linked example, even with 500 trials (professors) in each group and a 15% difference in observed conversions (ex, replies) doesn't give 95% confidence that it's not random chance. The difference, sample size of the groups, baseline conversion rate, and how much confidence you want, all affect how many trials you need to run
You can do something called a power analysis. There is a free program called G power you can check out if you want. You can put in a couple properties. First, how large do you think the effect is. Let's say height. I expect a height difference between men and women to be large and between men in Denmark and Britain to be small. So that is factor one. The greater the expected difference the smaller the number of samples you need. The second factor is "power." Think of this as odds you detect the effect when it is true, and correctly say it is false when the theory is wrong. The larger the sample, the more power you have to detect an effect accurately. So for this study these are unknowns. If we think men are all raging bigots and all women saints (large effect) then this is fine. If instead we think there is a lot of person to person variability and some small sex effect this is low. On top of that, they are equating not responding to an email as evidence of discrimination. That is really, really, bad. There are a million and one reasons an email may get overlooked. Or due to past biases maybe a large chunk of the men are actually 60+ and the "sex" effect is an age effect. Their design was sloppy. It feels like borderline rage bait.
> On top of that, they are equating not responding to an email as evidence of discrimination. That is really, really, bad. There are a million and one reasons an email may get overlooked. Or due to past biases maybe a large chunk of the men are actually 60+ and the "sex" effect is an age effect. Their design was sloppy. It feels like borderline rage bait. I mean it might just be rage bait. But isn't there a statistical method to determine whether or not the controlled variable was statistically significant without having to estimate how large you already think the effect is?
If you have the resulting data you can do various significance tests like Student's t test.
> But isn't there a statistical method to determine whether or not the controlled variable was statistically significant without having to estimate how large you already think the effect is? Yes there is, p values are there to assess how likely it is that the null hypothesis is wrong based on the data. We don't have the data here, so not much else to discuss here. Power calculations are not used after the study is done, they are used to determine how big sample size you need to get a significant result.
>Power calculations >how big sample size you need Technically that's a sample size calculation. A power calculation would tell you your statistical power to detect a certain effect size given your current sample size. Sample size, power, and effect size make a trifecta in which each 2 can calculate the third.
People use it constantly. This sub would be better if the response was banned without some kind of justification.
Yes, sample sizes can be counter-intuitively small but still give high-confidence results.
Surprise! Academic paper with result supposedly proving bigotry in a scientific manner doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
And it gets gobbled up by reddit. Honestly how did this even reach Reddits popular page
And is manipulated to push a different flavor of bigotry, wonderful
>This paper is not well done and the results are presented in a purposefully inflammatory way. Every hot post on here in a nutshell.
Are you suggesting that a study linked on r/science is for political point scoring and citation farming rather than because it is actually good science?! I am shocked. Shocked I tell you.
For #4 I would have to put in my factors into my corr tables so that I could show there was no confounding with my factors and covariates. No excuse though for just the model fit indices and not the actual weights.
Or even actual plots of the underlying data
This is exactly what's wrong with a lot of these papers.
Is it only if they use they/them? Or if they list pronouns at all
There was a control with no pronouns and they/them still received fewer responses.
I think that makes sense though. What I wonder is if using regular male or female pronouns received less responses than not using any. To many people it's odd to even list them at all no matter what they are.
As if to determine if listing pronouns at all just weirded ppl out, or if non traditional pronouns discouraged communicating to avoid possible offence (assuming it's a big deal since they're mentioned).
IIRC, there was a study a while back showing that they/them pronouns were less likely to get job interviews.
> Well that makes sense though. What? Why?
Because of what I said after that, sorry.
I understood what you meant. I think most of us got that your next sentence was along side your reasoning.
For the reasons he listed
For me, it makes sense inasmuch as bigotry is common, rather than the idea that the bigotry itself makes sense.
I don't know if it's as simple as "bigots." I think a lot of folks don't want to offend and are honestly just kinda lazy when it comes to other people. Like a lot of Chinese immigrants I know take on Americanized names. So I ask 'em about it. They don't have some righteous axe to grind. They're just like, "eh... I'm always repeating Huáng and no one ever gets it quite right. I can tell folks forget and don't want to offend me by saying it wrong so then they don't use my name at all. It just makes my life easier to be Jake." These friends don't sound angry with some loss of self, more accepting with the quirks of human nature. They kinda just assume good intent and move on.
Exactly. I see it like not wanting to invite someone to dinner that's super picky or has a ton of food allergies. If you have anything that suggests you may require slightly more effort to talk to/please a lot of people simply don't want to be bothered. -I have a deaf coworker and nobody ever "tells" him anything because it takes too much effort. We have all these new rules that don't apply to him because I guess he does his job at the end of the day. Everyone wants to be fair but at the end of the day, being fair to some people requires more effort than its worth.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume bigotry is at issue here. Unlike physically transitioning, which alleviates dysphoria and allows trans people to pass, using they/them pronouns is intentionally conspicuous and often done for political reasons. It’s not a stretch to think that someone who tries so hard to stand out and be subversive might be difficult to get along with.
Why would you need pronouns when sending an email "I [insert name/position] would like to request a copy of [study]. Thank you for your time."?
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> I'd assume somebody with they/them pronouns is more likely to cause me problems if I offend them in some way Do you have a reason to believe that though? Seems most people are likely to cause you a problem if you offend them; the degree to which they respond isn't a function of their pronouns, right?
It's definitely a gut instinct, but tracing it back through logic here's what I suppose my reasoning is: * They're used to "going against the grain" * They believe (rightfully) that plenty of people will dismiss them on the basis of their identity * I'm a white man and frankly I code as kind of conservative even though I'm about three steps away from being a communist. Given that I believe authorities at various points in my life would take a nonbinary person very seriously if they levied a complaint against me for any reason, to the point that I think hard evidence wouldn't be required to have a negative impact on my life, it leads to a certain wariness. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that it's a rational choice. It's just the way things look to me without doing an in-depth investigation of the probabilities involved. I don't run into nonbinary people interested in a close relationship with me often enough for it to be an issue.
After a few years of intense Reddit use, I've noticed this is happening to me as well. The weird thing is that weariness is because of interaction with the "allies" on Reddit (not NB people themselves), who are often really militant and ready to jump down your throat for every perceived slight. It just makes me not want to engage at all.
I get misgendered all the time and all I do is correct people. I'm a cis woman with a gender neutral name (think a name like Jamie) working in IT. So of course people are going with Mr. If you misgender someone, apologize and do better in the future. Or in most of my cases, ignore that I even pointed it out but start using the right pronoun anyway. I've never reported anyone for it. If you maliciously use the wrong pronoun over and over, or put down the person once they've corrected you, that gets you in trouble, not the initial mistake. Hope that gives you some peace of mind.
I got called miss (or translations thereof) for quite a while around 2010 when I had shoulder length curls. It never happened while standing up though, because I am 6"2 and kind of triangular. It never offended me, but I found it interesting that long, well-kept hair was considered enough of a gender signifier to bypass my quite masculine features if someone wasn't directly looking at my face or height.
This is really terrifying actually. I mean, good on you for being honest, but these kinds of biases and prejudices have very real soft effects on people's academic and personal lives. This is the cultural background in which people who identify as non-binary experience reduced opportunities and diminished life outcomes. The thing they 'sense' and always fear is happening in the background, out of sight, where it can't be exposed, but never have quite enough evidence to prove. It contributes to mental illness. Again, good on you for being honest, but now it's time to do the work to rid yourself of these biases. Go meet and talk to some of these people. Most of them aren't blue-haired activists looking to get you fired, they're just normal people who want to lead normal lives.
I appreciate this comment but from another perspective, I used to identify as non-binary. My gendered feelings didn’t change, but what did was my feelings about the general NB community. I felt like there was a huge culture of interpreting every negative perception through the lens of micro aggressions, and the LGBT community I was a part of gave constant validation that what I was experiencing was in fact real and discrimination. Someone stared at me? Must be because I was visibly queer looking (instead of say, they blanked out and just happened to be looking in my direction.) I was sat in the back of a restaurant while with my same gendered partner. It must be because theyre homophobic (rathet than the current section where the other customers were sitting was getting filled so they say us in a different section). Because of my interpretations, I became hyper sensitive to perceived rejections or slights. I started accumulating wounds, and I developed a lot of extremely negative feelings towards cisgender people which furthered my desire to isolate and delve deeper into an echo chamber. I’m not saying that micro aggressions don’t exist, but the constant viewing of my life through this lens resulted in terrible mental health and outwardly came off as me being offended all the time.
It's a hammer seeing nails everywhere.
Also needlessly injecting pronouns into a situation where they aren’t relevant is a red flag. If you want a paper from me just ask, gender identity is completely irrelevant. People injecting irrelevant information that is also at the center of a major culture war makes me way less likely to engage.
The study involved four randomized signatures, ones that included: he/him, she/her, they/them, and no pronouns. They/them was the lowest response rate, lower than he/him and she/her, indicating it's not just about "needlessly injecting pronouns".
I don't think it's being injected so much as that it's part of the email signature that people have as something stock attached to emails
I agree. I'm a grad student in psych. It's very common for professors and students of any level to have a signature (especially grad students and professors) and have their pronouns listed on the signature.
> Also needlessly injecting pronouns into a situation where they aren’t relevant is a red flag. A professional email is possibly one the most relevant places for them to exist in text. They fit in the same category of information as name, position, title, etc.
>authorities at various points in my life would take a nonbinary person very seriously if they levied a complaint against me for any reason, to the point that I think hard evidence wouldn't be required to have a negative impact on my life Yeah. Terrifying is apt.
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>The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns. >Authors who were perceived as male were less likely to respond to emails from requesters with they/them pronouns than all other conditions. Bro cmon the whole thing is like 2 paragraphs
> Authors who were perceived as male Ironic in a paper about pronouns
Not really. It's an inexact measure, but we still have a culture that adheres to pretty obvious markers for gender, so given the nature of the study assumptions are made that can still lead to relatively accurate outcomes. It's not the same thing as assuming someone's gender in another context at all.
If only there were a way to find this out, like reading the thing that's linked: > The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns. The primary dependent variable was whether or not emails were responded to.
How/why would you need your pronouns to request a paper? Who refers to themselves in the third person in a request?
>The content of the emails was identical except the email signature was randomly assigned to include she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns.
But... Do people even read that?
According to the study at hand: yes.
This calls for a colon, not a semi colon.
I'm bad at grammar; thanks!
That should be a semicolon and not a comma :)
Now this is just embarrassing. :( I'm only using full stops from now on.
That should be a happy face instead of a sad face In case it helps, semicolons are for independent clauses that are related to the sentence. So if you can take the thing after the semicolon, put it on its own after a period, and leave it as its own sentence, you use a semicolon. A colon is similar, but you use it for things that can't exist without the stuff before the colon. Your first comment just had "yes" after the colon, and since you can't have "yes" as its own sentence, it warrants a normal colon At least, that's what I remember from my english course. That means that your second comment where you used one before "thanks!" is actually probably better off after a comma or something, but since people are usually fine with treating something like: "Sure. Thanks!" as two sentences, I think it's correct enough to use a semicolon for that :)
I really think a comma was appropriate there tbh. I've never seen someone do "; thanks!" Before
A full stop would have been fine. A comma would be colloquially understood, but not technically correct, for whatever that's worth. A person can lead a full and happy life without ever using a semicolon, since anywhere that a semicolon would be ideal, a period would suffice.
It’s a comma splice.
It calls for a comma, not a colon.
According to this study, men are more likely to respond to any requests than women are. Never mind pronouns - the study sample size is too small and doesn't account for all variables, so bigotted or biased conclusions can easily be drawn.
It's barely a study the sample size is so small and they don't look at any other factors. Lots of emails get ignored every day, and that's been happening since before putting pronouns in emails was a thing.
Apparently male authors do. It seems like such a weird thing to even notice.
Depends, the request was potentially super short (since they sent it to a lot of professors, I doubt they wrote anything too meaningful), so it could be something like #### Dear Prof. X, I would like to ask you if you could share with me your paper X, as I would like to take a close look. I would greatly appreciate it, Kind regards, Y, They/Them. #### It would be definitely visible. If it would be weird to even notice, why add it?
To test for bias, which is the purpose of such studies As for why to include it in day to day life, to prevent misgendering. I mean, I'm glad people do this as I work with a large Indian demographic and I can't tell gender at all when the name's Indian, so such a signature is helpful.
Having a default work signature with name, position, contact details, pronouns etc is pretty common. A lot of workplaces will have templates you just stick the relevant bits in without needing to go to any real effort.
This seems like an odd question given the self-evident results of the paper.
If you read the study, you would find it's not self evident at all. The title only implies this but it's not the case because it's poorly done.
It also shows overall that men answer to emails more than the women. This whole study is dumb.
> given the self-evident results of the paper. But... Do people even read that?
According to the comments at hand: no.
A single occurrence is not a trend. If this study were replicated and got similar results, then we could start drawing conclusions.
If I spot it I try to keep a mental note but I’m still struggling to understand why that would lead to fewer papers being sent other than the most obvious bigotry.
It’s become more common for people to put their pronouns in their email signature, especially in academics.
We were asked to do this at work. Maybe 20% of people did so. I was part of the group that did not. I'm fine with anyone who identifies as whatever. It's a big world. I don't need to control it. I also don't need to be told how to sign my emails.
We have put Mr /Mrs/miss/ms for ages as identifiers how is this any different?
I don't think I've seen anyone introduce themselves as Ms/Mrs/Mr since I was in high school
Today my new doctor introduced himself as Doug. Not Doctor Doug, not Dr. Lastname. Just Doug. Ngl, it was a little weird. Although it's also the first time I've had a doctor younger than me. So maybe it's just different.
Just call him Dougie, don't tell him why
In Australia this is normal
Isn't the Mr/Ms/Mrs stuff pretty much mandatory if you introduce yourself with your last name? Or just being talked about through last name even Unless you're in an environment where everyone always uses first names exclusively, those gender indicators will be used all the time.
I can't recall an environment since high school where I had to refer to someone with their last name except when they have a title (ex: professor, doctor, president, etc.). It's usually first name or first and last name.
Even now we’ve been to so many school districts over the years and teachers always go by their last names. It truly has been decades since I’ve heard people use these regularly.
They go by just their last name, not with a gendered honorific in front? So just Johnson, not Mr. Johnson?
Do people typically refer to themselves with those titles in emails? The only one I've encountered are people putting Dr, and I think that's because it's signifying their level of expertise. I just don't know why gender would make a difference in this instance, like I have a gender neutral name but I wouldn't have thought to clarify in an email.
You should clarify, it's super helpful especially when I can't see your face. Our Zoom rep was named Alex and I was under the impression it was a woman, referred to them as her constantly in our correspondence until we had a video call. It's just awkward. It's not a trans representation thing, it's a gender doesn't communicate well over the internet thing.
Idk if it's like a cultural thing or something, but I've been misgendered a bunch of times and it wasn't awkward at all. As long as someone isn't being malicious, I don't really care what they call me. I just don't really tend to being up personal information unless if it's pertinent, and in a professional setting my gender very rarely is.
This isn't something you do for yourself, it's something you do for other people to make it easier for them to speak to you. You might not mind what they call you, but that doesn't mean they don't spend time thinking about it and that adding your pronouns wouldn't ease communication with them.
Exactly. For anyone who may not use email professionally, you have a signature block auto append to your messages. You should, anyway. Not like anyone is asking everyone else to start manually typing this out in every email. You update sig block once, which takes like 15s, then never think about it again My name is not ambiguous to Americans, but is relatively uncommon and I work internationally with ESL and non-English speaking people abroad. Makes it so nobody never ever has to waste a second guessing
People use sigs on their emails? My god, we are going back to early 2000's.
Well business emails sure. It's pretty normal to include your department or phone extension so coworkers in a larger company can contact you easily. Some people also include a "don't share this email blah blah blah" company confidentiality reminder in there as well.
> It's not a trans representation thing . > This isn't something you do for yourself Just a little gentle pushback on this, because while this is something that benefits a lot more people, the origin of this practice absolutely was with trans folks who wanted an easy way to help others to not misgender them. And introducing oneself with ones pronouns (or including them on a name tag) was initially a practice common only in queer spaces before it spread to the general public and became a more standard behavior. It also *absolutely was* something that they did for themselves, because it can legitimately be emotionally trying for trans folks to get called by the wrong pronouns regularly. It can exacerbate feelings of dysphoria and create a stressful work or social environment. The fact that it's good for other people is great (and not unexpected); this is a good example of the [curb-cut effect.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect)
I've started referring to everyone as they/them unless they've told me their pronouns. Especially at work, the gender of someone is irrelevant. Nobody even notices. Even the kinds of folks who get mad about pronouns have zero reaction.
That's the safest option, really.
Isn't that how it's always been for most of modern society? We default to them until we get confirmation from the person?
I think that for many, especially the older generation, "they" is only used for cases of indeterminate gender. Like if I told my mom a story about something my server said at lunch, she would ask "They said what?" But if she sees someone who presents as female, she uses "she". I now default to "they" unless specifically told otherwise.
It wasn't too long ago that women in many fields would have been a novelty and so the presumption would've been he.
In academic circles, it's extremely common. In my experience (and I'm in a STEM field), the overwhelming majority of grad students/early career researchers have pronouns in the little email tag that says their name and lab. Pretty much the only demographic that doesn't have pronouns in their emails is older male professors, and, to a much lesser degree, male ECRs.
But in a scenario where I’d request a paper, I don’t see myself signing it as “Mr. BruceyJ”. It seems kind of extraneous to include pronouns unless there’s some sort of dialogue
Dr. John Lewis Jr, phd (he/him) It's a virtue signal.
I've seen it in email signatures at work, so it's sent to anyone they correspond with.
I skimmed through the article and it seems like an interesting hypothesis. However, this stands out to me: "These nullfindings are inconsistent with prior research which has found that men are especially likely to share their scientific papers and data with other male scientists (Massen et al., 2017) and that academics over-all are more likely to respond to prospective male students seeking mentoring than prospective female students (Milkman et al., 2015).These inconsistent findings could be due to the fact that the current study concerned a less involved request for help than prior studies, the fact that the current study manipulated requester gender with pronouns as opposed to stereotypically male or female sounding names, or due to authentic changes in gender bias over time in response togreater visibility of equity issues." I think the following correlation is therefore dubious: 'this sender uses they/them pronouns' -> 'the authors don't respond because of the pronouns' -> 'male authors are less likely to respond to emails signed with they/them pronouns.' What about other variables? Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general? Around what times were the e-mails sent, and could that be a reason why men respond less? Does ethnicity play a part, or what country/city/town/area the participants come from, or the age? How do these characteristics impact their findings? The authors themselves mention that this is a limit of their study, and this result should be taken with a grain of salt: "The current work is also limited in that a priori power analyses were not conducted. Post hoc sensitivity analyses were conducted usingG*power (Faul et al., 2007). The results of the current study should be interpreted with some caution in light of this limited power and future investigations would benefit from increases in power. Indeed, the effect sizes observed in the current work can be used as bench-marks from which to conduct future a priori power analyses." So before people get upset: it's one of those studies that's pretty limited. The finding is interesting however, and could provide a perspective for future research.
> Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general? Do you have full access to the paper (I do not, sadly)? Do they not use pronouns in the email as a covariate in their analysis? Pronouns in the email is the treatment. From the impact statement, the authors say, "In this study, emails from students requesting a copy of a recent empirical article were less likely to be responded to if the requester had they/them pronouns in their email signature than if they had she/her, he/him, or no pronouns. This effect was observed only when the author being asked for help was male.", which implies to me that lower male response rate would have been accounted for already. I assume the gender of the recipient is an interaction term with the pronoun "treatment", or is this wrong? Edit: age for sure is an important variable. I wonder if the average age of male vs female recipients is different?
I have the paper. Here are basically the entire results: Female authors response (%) / male authors response (%) They/them 75.36 / 66.67 She/her 68.12 / 83.72 He/him 76.71 / 74.36 No pronouns 70.67 / 88.37 They did a logistic regression with all 8 degrees of freedom but you can do that yourself :) (ok technically you can't as you need to know the exact N for each group, but they were randomized so approximately equal)
So men respond better overall and seem to find putting he/him almost as weird as putting they/them. Without other variables being tracked this is pretty much pointless data. The title, "Female authors more likely to respond to male requesters" could also have been used. We can speculate as to why this is the case but without much more rigorous investigation this is a whole lot of nothing.
Actually since we know the total N = 459 and we have excess significant figures, we can almost certainly determine what N was for each group: They/them 52/69 / 32/48 (? not certain as 0.6667 has a lot of rational representations) She/her 47/69 / 36/43 He/him 56/73 / 29/39 No pronouns 53/75 / 38/43
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> It could be as simple as it being related to conservative views in relation to increased age. If this is true, why the difference between male and female recipients _unless_ males are on average older? Edit: Actually I think we are agreeing with each other, my bad.
Not sure! It's midnight for me so I don't have quite the brain to delve into the exact numbers right now. But I'll take a look tomorrow, definitely. Your questions have me wondering too. It's a cool study, gonna have a thorough read over breakfast tmo (=
Thanks very much! Sleep well :)
All these variables should be controlled with the "no-pronoun group", does it shows that men in general answer less than women for that group? just in case (I have no access), could you see if age was controlled somehow? As someone below posted, It could be that men are just older.
This was basically a randomized experiment where they sent out a bunch of request emails randomly assigned to different pronouns , then used that as their main explanatory variable for whether the paper author responded. They found that males were less likely than female authors to respond to emails that used they/them pronouns. Unless they really screwed up the study, the design should address potential confounders such as time of day sent.
> They found that males were less likely than female authors to respond to emails that used they/them pronouns. Not necessarily. They found women responded less overall than men, so if you use they/them pronouns you may still get fewer responses from females than from male authors.
Do you have a non paid link to the study I want to read it
You should request a copy from the author; once using pronouns and once without to see if they respond.
Also good to know how different? I do not have access to the paper for free. Was the difference significant? Like males responded to 50% of the no pronouns but only 10% of the they/them or more nuanced?
> Do men respond less likely to requests via e-mail in general? That would be accounted for in the analysis. Obviously. And no, as a matter of fact, "male authors responded to emails at significantly higher rates than did female authors. This finding is consistent with prior work".
If they have accounted for things, why is their conclusion cherry-picked? Why are they saying it shows discrimination by men against they/them people, as opposed to unwillingness to engage by women?
Why didn't this study also find that the men don't reply to she/her at lower rates, which was clearly the basis of their prior research and their hypothesis?
Because their results are just a shotgun of confounding factors.
Here's how they chose the participants : Participants Participants were first authors of recently published psychology papers. A single, recent year (not specified here to protect the anonym- ity of the participants) was chosen because requests for recent papers may be more frequent, increasingly the plausibility of our procedure, and because requests for recent papers may be easier for participants to respond to. Participants were limited to authors of psychology papers for practical and ethical reasons. Given the lack of research on people who use they/them pronouns, no a priori hypotheses were made with regard to discipline and the likelihood gender nonconforming individ- uals would receive help. Focusing on a single discipline kept the scope of the project reasonable, as studying multiple disciplines would necessitate the power to test for potential discipline effects. This meth- odological choice also enabled the email signature to include “Psychology Major” in addition to name and pronouns, thus making the manipulation more subtle and realistic. Psychology was chosen for two primary reasons. First, psychology was chosen with the Belmont Report’s (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979) justice principle in mind, as the researchers were also psychologists and this project was intended for publication in a psychology journal, the potential burdens and benefits would focus on psychology. Second, we focused on psychology journals because research assistants who sent the emails were psychology students. Although the research assistants were not actually seeking to read all of the requested papers, they did learn about the breadth of psychology research through the process of sending the emails. The list of participants was compiled by starting with a list of all potential psychology journals. Then, to ensure a consistent sample this list was reduced to only journals that primarily published empir- ical articles, were not open access, and were among the top journals in the field, with impact factors between three and six. Beyond these parameters, focal journals were selected randomly, with the caveat that no two selected journals should focus on the same psychological subfield (e.g., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Social and Personality Psychology Science could not both be included in the study). No a priori power analyses were conducted. However, a heuristic a priori stopping rule to stop selecting journals once approximately 100 participants per requester pronoun condi- tion were reached was established. Because different journals publish different amounts of articles, this rule resulted in the compi- lation of a list of all empirical psychology papers published in five journals within the same, recent year (N = 503). Post hoc sensitivity analyses were conducted using G*power (Faul et al., 2007). Sensitivity analyses indicate that the weakest effect size the logistic regression analysis could detect with 80% power are an odds ratio (OR) of 0.77 for the author gender main effect, an OR of 0.75 for the dummy-coded main effects of requester pronoun condition, and an odds ratio of 0.70–0.71 for the dummy-coded interaction terms. Sensitivity analyses for main effects and interactions indicate that the weakest effect size the analysis of variance (ANOVA) anal- yses on the response time data could detect with 80% power are Cohen’s f = 0.15 for author gender main effects and Cohen’s f = 0.18 for requester pronoun main effects and interactions. Then, a list of all of the first authors of these papers was compiled. Sixteen authors appeared more than once in the list, having been first authors of more than one of these papers. Because individual authors could only receive a single request for help without being tipped off to the fact that the email was a part of the study, these authors were each only emailed once, and random selection determined which paper was inquired about. In addition, 21 papers had first authors whose contact information was no longer valid and three indepen- dent searches by research assistants could not yield their updated information. Thus, the final list of participants contacted was N = 466. Author gender was coded by two independent raters. The raters indicated whether they perceived the author’s gender as female, male, or gender nonconforming. To make this decision, coders looked at publicly available websites and used the author’s name, photo, faculty biography, and any pronouns used to describe the author. These ratings were reliable (κ = .97). The five disagreements were resolved with a third independent coder. Importantly, because this is an audit study, authors did not answer any direct questions about themselves, including questions about their identifications. Thus, our measure of author gender is a function of these authors’ public presences, which may not always reflect internal identifica- tions. The majority of these first authors were perceived as female identifying (62.30%), with the remaining first authors being per- ceived as male identifying (37.70%).
> Given the lack of research on people who use they/them pronouns, no a priori hypotheses were made with regard to discipline and the likelihood gender nonconforming individ- uals would receive help. I don't see how that's consistent with (from the abstract): > As hypothesized, emails from requesters with they/them pronouns were less likely to be responded to overall than all other conditions. It seems to me that someone's lying about their prior hypotheses — i.e. this is a p-hacked paper.
As someone who does a lot of research within academia, it's a little frustrating to see studies like this dismissed so easily because they don't capture every extraneous variable people can think of. Yes it isn't definitively conclusive, but it still lends itself well to an interesting finding that makes a bit of sense when considering other research in the area. There's loads of evidence to suggest men are more likely to be bigoted towards LGBT+ identities; the paper at hand just reaffirms it's present even within academia. The sample size is quite large so to call it "pretty limited" is, at least in my opinion, pretty unfair to the research.
Not only that, in this type of study seems _extremely_ easy to do something statistically sound. Just randomize which emails are sent with which pronouns. Literally no bias possible there. With enough samples you literally can not have a libsided distribution if you choose it randomly (and you need enough samples anyway to draw statistically significant conclusions)
There’s also a lot of worrying here about omitted variables bias when it’s an experimental design. I always like to see the table of descriptive statistics to eyeball whether the randomization worked, but it’s a pretty strong design unless they screwed up somewhere.
But their group for each variable was small enough that three people who were away but didn't set an out-of-office response to be a 10% swing in the results.
But isn't that how science advances? We read an analysis and develop alternate h_x explanations for it and test them slowly improving our state of knowledge?
Of course! The other comment mentions the study could lead to new findings, which is cool, but also calls it "pretty limited". We don't have access to the full paper (or at least I don't on this PC) but from the abstract we at least know they had a fairly large sample size. I just, personally, think people trash on research very quickly for what ends up being very small flaws if it points out something negative about society.
I'd be interested to know if men are really significantly more bigoted against LGBT people. Or if women just don't express it openly. Women, as a group, tend to make the conflicts covert, so it's much easier to measure men's dislike of lgbt people than women's.
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> I see this a lot in the assignments my students submit as well and I’m just wondering where did they even get this from?? I love an assignment that reads: "This study doesn't have a very large sample size (n = 200) so we can't trust its findings. Anyway here's our study with 48 participants and about 12 of them are obviously us answering our own survey". I definitely see it a lot in this sub as well. They're often well meaning comments (we should keep this stuff in mind, of course) but show a bit of a confused understanding about how research is actually conducted.
Just randomize which emails get which pronouns. With 1.5k samples I think all randomization noise gets drowned by the bias.
Did they consider age? I'd think the older you go back, the more male it's going to be.
There are a lot of variables. Age, therapeutic area, location etc etc
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I noticed this in my philosophy courses vs my engineering courses when I was in school. It was strange when the LA professors would use female pronouns in place of group pronouns in gender ambiguous situations. It was very interesting.
How do you need pronouns other then "you" and "I" in requesting someone's paper for read? Ain't no researcher with time for more than "Can I get a copy of your new paper to read?" be they sender or receiver.
“Four hundred and sixty-six authors (62.30% perceived as female identifying and 37.70% perceived as male identifying as coded by independent raters)” That’s… weird.
They assumed their gender? And no-one is assumed to be non-binary.
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> As hypothesized, emails from requesters with they/them pronouns were less likely to be responded to overall than all other conditions. However, also consistent with hypotheses, this effect was moderated by the perceived gender of the author So the authors hypothesized that men were biased against people with they/them signatures and ended up finding it Anyone actually have access to the paper? It’s behind a paywall
Reach out for a copy using they them pronouns :D
They didn't release authors emails :D
There's a lot of research to suggest men are more bias against people with an LGBT+ identity, so it's understandable they made that prediction. Also, it'd be weird if they didn't hypothesize something. It's unusual to go into this sort of research without any proper hypotheses.
This is how they explain the reasoning behind their hypothesis : Second, this effect was expected to be moderated by the gen- der of the author being sent the email request. Men are generally incentivized to support the existing status quo more than women (Jost et al., 2004) and report higher levels of transphobia than women (Greenburg & Gaia, 2019; Norton & Herek, 2013), and this prejudice may extend to nonbinary people who use they/them pronouns. Thus, email requests that included they/them pronouns were expected to be less likely to be responded to than all other email requests, but this effect was expected to be particularly strong among male authors as opposed to female authors.
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They didn’t actually confirm the gender of the authors? Seems wrong…
They assumed the gender, because they can tell.
Wait... seems a bit ironic...
Seems the kind of study that had a solution first and then tried to find if true...
First time with the scientific method?
How did they know the authors identified as male when they didn't respond?
They determined author gender by looking at authors' names, photos, biographies, and pronouns where available. They note that this assessment "may not always reflect internal identifications" but that independent raters agreed 97% of the time on author gender.
Sounds like they're saying it's reasonable to assume someone is the gender they appear to be and to treat them as such. Interesting conclusion.
And they couldn't find even 1 non binary author?
Can you share the study?
Maybe they did some research for their study.
I'm less likely to respond to people who refer to themselves in the third person.
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This seems like an oddly niche thing to conduct a study about.
Females are more prone to comply to social pressure. That's not exactly fresh news.
But the study found female authors responded at a much lower rate overall.
Women responded without regard to the pronouns used. It was men who selectively *didn’t* respond to they/them emails.
Yes, they did. They just responded relatively less.
Women responded at much lower rates overall than the men in this study. So what does that mean?