“How likely is an all-male speakers list, statistically speaking? A mathematician weighs in.”
“If you’ve ever followed a debate about why an event has so few women speakers, you’re likely familiar with the argument that gender was not a factor (AKA “we chose the best speakers, regardless of gender”), and that speakers were chosen in an unbiased fashion, on merit alone. Well, if I understand the math correctly, the odds of that assertion being true are next to nothing.
It delights me to no end that Greg has found a way to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. So naturally, I asked if he’d be willing to share a little more about how he arrived at his calculations.”
The rest of the post is a detailed stats lesson and instructions for how to make the calculations in your field.
It’s a very simplistic model, there are a ton of social-hierarchy weighting systems I can imagine that would pull in info about, like, bias toward more prestigious universities or better-funded sub-fields or “sexier” topics more likely to get media attention, and then you could look at gender disparities there too.
