(no subject)

[jinian]

I found it interesting that tolerance.org didn't use any women's names in the hidden bias test that I took this morning. Maybe most people don't know when a woman's name sounds like it's from Arabic as much as they do for a man's? I suppose they might not have wanted to complicate the test results with strange attitudes someone might have about different sexes.

On a somewhat related note, these pictures got me as close to crying as I've been over anything in September or after. Bad stuff just makes me shut the huge iron gates, usually, but good stuff can get to me.

Comments

Burqas

[confesstome.livejournal.com]

I actually have a burqa that I bought in Peshawar in the 80s. I've worn it a few times (years ago, tastelessly, to a Halloween party, I admit), and it's amazing the mind fuck it does to you. You feel invisible, hidden, very disconnected from other people. You also can't see very well, and trip a lot. Very dehumanizing. Those pictures moved me too. Thanks for sharing!

pictures of little girls at school

[rubricity.livejournal.com]

it's a beautiful thing

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I took that hidden bias test too, largely because I saw your link to it. I was a little miffed that it gave me a 20% pro-Arab bias when I think all I did was recognize the difference between Arab and non-Arab names. (Yeah, as a physicist I work with a whole lot of middle eastern men.) I was also curious about the complete lack of women's names in the quiz too, but shrugged it all off as a poorly constructed test.

Thanks for the link to the pictures. I think I liked the balloon seller most of all, just for the whimsey of that. But they're all moving.

[seanmcguire.livejournal.com]

I think it's probably just because gender is another factor on which people are biased. Psychologists like to eliminate all those factors... I remember when I was running an experiment in college and one of my anthropologist friends asked if I had any non-native-English-speaker subjects, and I said "no." She seemed to think this was a flaw of the experiment. Actually, it was an advantage - if I'd added non-native speakers, I'd have had to add another dimension to the analysis of variance. Which would have been fine if I could have gotten a few dozen such subjects, but I couldn't... and it would have made it a different experiment.