Re:Do women face a reputational bias when they co-author?
by jordigh on Friday November 13, 2015 @10:18AM
(#10560246)
There are more statistics than a simple frequentist-style hypothesis testing. You can totally make a probability statement about equality if you allow Bayesian-style statistics. Frequentist-style hypothesis testing was designed for a time when computations were done by hand and data was scarce, but we can do better now.
You can also just outright swap around your null and alternative hypotheses for a frequentist-style test. For example, your null hypothesis could be "proportion of women to men is 0.1" and your alternative hypothesis is that it isn't, for a standard two-tailed test.
Statistics do not work like this. You either positively reject the null hypothesis (i.e.: "these things are different") or you fail to reject the null hypothesis (i.e.: "I cannot assert these are different").
Formally speaking, I am doing the latter.
Informally speaking, everybody else understood my point as a rebuttal to OP's. More explicitly: "claims of X seem grossly exaggerated" should be taken as "I haven't seen compelling evidence for X" -- it may be awkwardly phrased, but I suspect you know exactly what I meant.