Male-Female Differences: A Computer Simulation

"The Science and Politics of Comparing Women and Men" (Eagly, March 1995) raised an important question: What constitutes a practically significant sex effect? The practice of relying on proportion of variance measures (e.g., r 2, tt~ 2) to address this question has been judged inappropriate, for such measures are not intuitively accessible and can mislead researchers into ignoring the practical significance of small effects. In response, more easily understood metrics such as the binomial effects size display (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1982) and the common language effect (McGraw & Wong, 1992) have been introduced. However, Eagly concluded that even these approaches are not entirely sufficient: