A paper that is generating a lot of debate at the moment in the US is linked below. It looks at racial biases in NBA refereeing decisions. The Freakonomics blog has some interesting discussion about it and Levitt and O'Donohue have written a similar paper about racial biases in arrests.
http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/NBARace.pdf
It would be interesting to think of rigorous ways of looking at such biases in the Irish context. As well as race, gender is of course an interesting area. There is a lot of work done in Ireland on gender discrimination. Perhaps someone can correct me if Im wrong but i have never seen a gender paper in Ireland that has anything approaching causal inference and I strongly suspect that we have made a lot of policy on the basis of correlations and ideological preferences dressed up as science. Based on what i have been reading (admittedly just for the last ten minutes to get me psyched to go back to my real work!), a couple of issues come to mind:
(a) does the gender composition of decision makers (e.g. police giving tickets, lecturers marking scripts, committees hiring staff etc.,) have an effect on the gender distribution of outcomes? In what domains of activity is this particularly relevant in Ireland.
In the abscence of further information, it is clearly non-sense to say that the reason there are more female nurses is that women discriminate against men or that the reason there are more men in finance is that men discriminate against women. We need something more causal.
(b) continuing from a previous post, how will the occupational segregation by gender affect welfare outcomes. Will a predominately female teaching profession produce worse outcomes for boys. We have already argued that simply observing a correlation between feminisation of teaching and declining relative position of boys in education is completetly unrigorous. We would need more to go on before we could even begin to claim that. Looking from the other side, does the fact that the Dail is mostly male have negative implications for women? can we find clear differences in the decisions made by political representatives as a function of gender. The gender quota system introduced by some of the parties might be a (albeit fairly noisy) way to look at some of this.
(c) Can we find clear causal effects of the imposition of public sector gender reforms in Ireland on gender composition of hiring and promotion? Can we find any evidence that this either improved or detracted from the performance of the agencies involved. My unfounded hunch would be that they (almost by definition) do have an effect on gender composition of hiring but i dont believe either the story that women are somehow better at certain jobs and thus productivity improves or that women have multiple objectives outside work and thus productivity worsens. My (again unfounded) hunch is that public sector employment by and large attracts more skilled applicants than is needed because of the extra benefits in terms of job security and conditions. You would have to go very far down the distribution to have a marked negative effect on productivity. The reforms probably represent a redistribution of "cushy jobs" from men to women. Given that us men probably dont do our fair share outside the job market, maybe this is fair enough. The big losers are the altruistic men at the margins of good public sector employment who just fail to get in. My other suspicion here is that focusing men's minds on gender quotas can lead to an exagerration of their effect.
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