Ever since psychology grad school, I've kept an informal interest in systematic biases in people's perceptions and interpretations. Occasionally, I'll do a small study to quantify biases of some sort. This section includes two different types of papers on the subject.

Gender Discrimination in the Workplace: A Short Literature Review is a small literature review I did initially as part of an effort at Sun to investigate the claim that there weren't as many senior technical women as men because there weren't as many available in the job candidate pool. Kathy Hemenway wrote a very thoughtful article about the psychology of the glass ceiling, and I did a short literature review to back up some of the data from statistics about graduation rates of women in technical fields as well as pay and promotion discrepancies in the industry overall. These articles were later published by Communications of the ACM in its special issue on women in computing.

On a separate topic, I did some quantitative analysis of the acceptance rate of papers submitted to the Computer-Human Interaction conference from North American vs. Non-North American authors. There was some concern in the CHI community that the conference seemed to accept papers from North American authors at a rate disproportionate to their submissions. We got the data from the CHI 95 conference, and compared submission vs. acceptance rates for European, Asian, and North American papers. I also did a content analysis of the reasons reviewers gave for recommending acceptance and rejection, hoping to learn if there were any systematic patterns. We found that there was indeed a bias against Non-North American papers, and that there were differences in the types of problems cited by reviewers. Why Don't More International Papers Get Accepted to CHI? describes the study and our findings. This paper directly led to the creation of a CHI mentoring program for people who wanted more direct guidance and feedback on their work before submitting it to CHI.