Harvard Humanities Academic Francesca Gino has filed a defamation lawsuit against her employer, Harvard University, and three bloggers on the site Data Colada.
Humanities academics and social scientists love to wrap themselves in the flag of culture and claim it is sexism if, for example, no evidence shows that standing with arms extended for two minutes will cause a woman to “embody power and instantly become more powerful.” The people who debunked the methodology were overwhelmingly men while social psychology itself is overwhelmingly women.
In the case of Gino and Dan Ariely, whose 2012 paper claiming car insurance customers lie about how many miles they drive, was flagged by data checking and then retracted. That's right, a humanities academic who talks about everyone else lying was found to be lying in her paper about people lying, I couldn't have made that up.
Gino's lawsuit notes:
If a man says it, is it always sexist? Actually, for a jury trial in the northeast, especially anywhere near Harvard, taking the chance that the jury might have other humanities academics is a pretty smart roll of the dice. Since one of her papers claims those who accurately predicted the outcome of a coin toss were subsequently more creative it's also on-brand.
Yet the company that provided the data, The Hartford, stated the raw numbers had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study. The paper was retracted.
Gino says penalizing her was unfair even though the examination showed the data has been faked. Ariely said the insurance company must have faked it, the insurance company provided the raw data they provided to him and showed they had not. Gino says she is an innocent dupe targeted due to sexism - ironically, duped by a man?
The attorney she chose to allege sexism is Andrew Miltenberg, who Mother Jones in 2018 noted "spent the last five years making a name as one of the foremost defenders of male college students accused of sexual violence" which has nothing at all to do with the case, but is a great bit of irony when it comes to alleging sexism.
