The Petrie multiplier is a

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or mathematical model invented by British

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Karen Petrie, and first described by Ian Gent in 2013. The multiplier "shows that if the percentage of men and women in the room who make questionable remarks to the other sex is equal, then the average number of sexist remarks experienced by members of one party scales by the square of the proportion of the offending party to the other.

Mathematical formulation

Gent defined the multiplier in the following terms: The Petrie multiplier corresponds to Lanchester's square law in

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and predator–prey dynamics.

Expanded model

The model assumes that men and women are equally sexist. Further, each sexist remark made by a man is assumed to randomly target one of the women and vice versa. A more complex analysis published in the

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modeled heterogeneous levels of sexism by assuming each person to make sexist remarks according to an independent

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, maintaining the assumption that each sexist remark is directed to an individual of the opposite sex. Under these conditions the Petrie multiplier takes the form . The Petrie multiplier has not been the subject of any

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study. However, one commentator used a Monte Carlo simulation to eliminate the assumption that people have a fixed number of sexist remarks to make, and found that women suffer from overwhelmingly more sexism in an environment where both genders are equally sexist. Another

probabilistic Probability is a branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an e ...

analysis found that the multiplier seemed to hold and suggested that the disparity could be even worse than quadratic.

References

{{Reflist Sexism Women in computing Thought experiments in ethics