describes an experiment:

With more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial, statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).

The title of Ayres' op-ed was: "When Whites Get a Free Pass: Research Shows White Privilege Is Real."

The op-ed linked to this study, by Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters, which summarized some of the study's results in the figure below:

Mujcic Frijters

The experiment involved members of four races, but the op-ed ignored results for Asians and Indians. I can't think of a good reason to ignore results for Asians and Indians, but it does make it easier for Ayres to claim that:

A field experiment about who gets free bus rides in Brisbane, a city on the eastern coast of Australia, shows that even today, whites get special privileges, particularly when other people aren't around to notice.

It would be nice if the blue, red, green, and orange bars in the figure were all the same height. But it would also be nice if the New York Times would at least acknowledge that there were four bars.

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H/T Claire Lehmann

Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about teacher grading bias

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You might have seen a Tweet or Facebook post on a recent study about sex bias in teacher grading:

Here is the relevant section from Claire Cain Miller's Upshot article in the New York Times describing the study's research design:

Beginning in 2002, the researchers studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. The students were given two exams, one graded by outsiders who did not know their identities and another by teachers who knew their names.

In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys' abilities and underestimated the girls', and that this had long-term effects on students' attitudes toward the subjects.

The Upshot article does not mention that the study's first author had previously published another study using the same methodology, but with the other study finding a teacher grading bias against boys:

The evidence presented in this study confirms that the previous belief that schoolteachers have a grading bias against female students may indeed be incorrect. On the contrary: on the basis of a natural experiment that compared two evaluations of student performance–a blind score and a non-blind score–the difference estimated strongly suggests a bias against boys. The direction of the bias was replicated in all nine subjects of study, in humanities and science subjects alike, at various level of curriculum of study, among underperforming and best-performing students, in schools where girls outperform boys on average, and in schools where boys outperform girls on average (p. 2103).

This earlier study was not mentioned in the Upshot article and does not appear to have been mentioned in the New York Times ever. The Upshot article appeared in the print version of the New York Times, so it appears that Dr. Lavy has also conducted a natural experiment in media bias: report two studies with the same methodology but opposite conclusions, to test whether the New York Times will report on only the study that agrees with liberal sensibilities. That hypothesis has been confirmed.

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Social science correlations over 0.90 are relatively rare, at least for correlations of items that aren't trying to measure the same thing, so I thought I'd post about the 0.92 correlation that I came across in the data from the Leslie et al. 2015 Science article. Leslie et al. co-author Andrei Cimpian emailed me the data in Excel form, which made the analysis a lot easier.

Leslie et al. asked faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students in a given discipline to respond to this item: "Even though it's not politically correct to say it, men are often more suited than women to do high‐level work in [discipline]." Responses were made on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Responses to that suitability stereotype item correlated at -0.19 (p=0.44, n=19) with the mean GRE verbal reasoning score for a discipline and at 0.92 (p<0.0001, n=19) with the mean GRE quantitative reasoning score for a discipline [source].

suitabilitystereotype

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