People with strong commitments to gender equality are more likely to trust rigorous studies showing bias against women. However, the same moral conviction can lead to biased reasoning, causing people to infer discrimination even when the evidence says otherwise.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.3071

From the linked article:

How do our moral beliefs shape the way we interpret evidence of societal issues like gender discrimination? A recent study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that individuals with strong commitments to gender equality are more likely to trust rigorous studies showing bias against women. However, the study also points to a darker side: the same moral conviction can lead to biased reasoning, causing people to infer discrimination even when the evidence says otherwise.

The researchers found a clear relationship between participants’ moral commitment to gender equality and their evaluations of scientific evidence. Participants who expressed stronger moral convictions about gender equality were more likely to positively evaluate studies that provided rigorous evidence of gender discrimination against women in STEM hiring processes. These individuals rated the studies as more accurate, reliable, and of higher quality compared to participants with weaker moral commitments.

The results showed that participants with higher moral commitment to gender equality were indeed more likely to accept the study’s faulty conclusion. Despite the data contradicting the idea of discrimination against women, these participants were more inclined to endorse the study’s findings, showing that their moral beliefs could lead them to overlook evidence that did not support their views.

Additionally, participants in these experiments were more likely to accept the flawed gender discrimination conclusion than the fallacious conclusions in the control conditions. This indicates that moral commitment to a highly charged issue like gender equality can lead people to reason in biased ways, accepting conclusions that align with their beliefs, even when those conclusions are unsupported by the data.

A few issues here.
A bias in *academia* favoring women- in *certain cases*- does not mean the gender equality issue has “reversed.” College is becoming more and more seen as culturally feminine, with female undergrads outnumbering men significantly. That fundamentally shifts the framing of the argument of “reversal.”

Secondly- and they even cite this right at the beginning of the study- there *is* a misogynist bias. Talk to almost any woman in Engineering and she’ll tell you horror stories. You can’t just ask for suspension of disbelief and present “compelling data” indicating something factually untrue and expect people to be meaningfully swayed when they know they’re participating in a study. A study representing data that gases are more dense than liquids would be read, and then promptly ignored, if the conclusions were correct.

Third, it’s wild to go to a publication about science and shrug your shoulders and say “ermmm I guess women just don’t *like* those fields!” Please! At least do a literature review.

Their conclusions are stronger on confirmation bias- people don’t look deeply at sources they agree with- than on anything meaningful about gender equality.

Anyway, cue responses from people who neither read the article nor the study.