"For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, [Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
"As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
"Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are *literally* losers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-haras...
Interesting and important study! But the press glosses are mis-representative. The study [1] doesn't even mention harassment; also, because of the small sample size and only 13% of that (11 individuals) uttered hostile sexist statements "We found that the presence of sexist statements was not determined by differences in maximum skill achieved." The paper is really about the extent to which lower-status male players are bigger jerks to women players. They did find this with respect to negative and positive statements, but didn't have the statistical power to conclude a correlation about hostile sexist statements.
What I found interesting methodologically is that for the analysis they had two exclude two jerks as outliers. "For the examination of negative statements, there were two focal players in the female-voiced manipulation that made 10 more negative statements than the next highest individuals (greater than 5 standard deviations from the mean). As a result, we removed them from our analysis to ensure they did not skew our results towards significance." Given the "rotten apple" thesis (a minority of jerks can spoil the barrel), what they had to do for the purposes of their thesis and statistical analysis doesn't correspond to the experience women players may have. That is, I believe, if we excluded 5% of the most awful people online as outliers, the Net would be lovely!
[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613
On 07/22/2015 10:02 PM, Neotarf wrote:
"For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, [Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
"As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
"Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are /literally/ losers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-haras...
Re: "The study [1] doesn't even mention harassment"
If someone is being singled out for frequent negative comments based on their gender, that's pretty much the definition of sexual harassment.
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 6:11 AM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2011@reagle.org wrote:
Interesting and important study! But the press glosses are mis-representative. The study [1] doesn't even mention harassment; also, because of the small sample size and only 13% of that (11 individuals) uttered hostile sexist statements "We found that the presence of sexist statements was not determined by differences in maximum skill achieved." The paper is really about the extent to which lower-status male players are bigger jerks to women players. They did find this with respect to negative and positive statements, but didn't have the statistical power to conclude a correlation about hostile sexist statements.
What I found interesting methodologically is that for the analysis they had two exclude two jerks as outliers. "For the examination of negative statements, there were two focal players in the female-voiced manipulation that made 10 more negative statements than the next highest individuals (greater than 5 standard deviations from the mean). As a result, we removed them from our analysis to ensure they did not skew our results towards significance." Given the "rotten apple" thesis (a minority of jerks can spoil the barrel), what they had to do for the purposes of their thesis and statistical analysis doesn't correspond to the experience women players may have. That is, I believe, if we excluded 5% of the most awful people online as outliers, the Net would be lovely!
On 07/22/2015 10:02 PM, Neotarf wrote:
"For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week,
[Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
"As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that
players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
"Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the
game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are /literally/ losers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-haras...
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On 07/24/2015 01:44 PM, Neotarf wrote:
If someone is being singled out for frequent negative comments based on their gender, that's pretty much the definition of sexual harassment.
I agree, and this is one of the things in the study that led to press confusion. As I wrote more fully in the blog post:
They did find this with respect to negative and positive statements -- and we could (rightfully) call this sexist itself -- but they didn't have the statistical power to conclude anything about hostile *sexist* statements.
http://reagle.org/joseph/pelican/social/the-skew-of-rotten-apple-jerks.html
I saw the "loser" spin on some TV report as well. I've definitely found the guys who gave me the most grief were psychologically disturbed. (Of course I consider patriarchal dominance behavior the main psychological disturbance of the human race.)
This often is combined with some grievance where they feet oppressed, be it disability-wise, sexuality-wise (or from sexual frustration at rejection from women), ethnic/religious-wise or whatever. In economics areas it's often related to their psychologically driven economic views, i.e., they need capitalism or state capitalism (so they can get rich and afford good women) or need to control/destroy capitalism (so that they can make sure rich guys don't get all the good women).
Their beliefs they are oppressed or assailed by the world make them feel they have a right to "fight back" and be abusive. Of course, they take it out on women who they see as of lower status and generally safer to abuse.
And, of course, they see women and others who really ARE getting clear and obvious grief/harassment *and* complaining about it as being the disrupters!
If I ever get around to doing an analysis of sexism on Wikipedia, I may analyze evidence of the above attitudes and behaviors by specific editors (and their sockpuppets) who have given me particular grief over 7 odd years. It's important to me to identify and publicize the problems and shame the abusers so that these patterns can be more easily identified and dealt with. Far more important than getting back into the fray, especially before the issues adequately dealt with. I know I'd be constantly targeted by these types of losers. Of course I MIGHT not be targeted if I only edited in non-male dominated areas and immediately acquiesced to the demands of any male editors. But sc**w that...
Anyway, I'm glad to see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen%27s_User_Group happening and hope someone can work a description of the study and a generalized essay or whatever out of it. Hey, I guess I could do that if no one beats me to it! :-)
CM http://carolmoore.net/wikipedia
On 7/22/2015 10:02 PM, Neotarf wrote:
"For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, [Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
"As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
"Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are /literally/ losers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-haras...
On 07/23/2015 10:52 AM, Carol Moore dc wrote:
Anyway, I'm glad to see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen%27s_User_Group happening and hope someone can work a description of the study and a generalized essay or whatever out of it.
I expanded me email into a blog post: http://reagle.org/joseph/pelican/social/the-skew-of-rotten-apple-jerks.html