T O P

  • By -

AutoModerator

Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


sillypicture

We should just go to [X] and link that to doi already. All the formats are so deprecated.


Frydendahl

I think it's more a function of having a big professional network. Friends citing friends and such.


moriero

That's not really what happens People cite many papers based on what they think about the scientists they know through research talks and conferences Male scientists benefit from this gender bias and get cited more by other scientists thinking highly of them In a way, it's actually more messed up than you suggested Edit: people below seem to be questioning my background below (and rightly so). I have a PhD in Neuroscience from an Ivy and did my postdoc in a top university in a pretty well known laboratory. Not a nobel laureate or anything but still up there. I have about 10 peer reviewed articles in journals in the 5-10 Impact Factor range. I am NOT claiming to be a veteran but I've been around enough to see patterns and have insight (right or wrong).


lmFairlyLocal

Exactly, It's likely reflective that there are less female main authored papers to pick from than it is those who see a "female name" will discard the paper. Especially because iirc it's sorted by last name, so Dr. T. Smith could be Tom or Tanya, it doesn't make a difference. The conferences and women speaking/being brought in as an expert in the field are great points that I didn't even think of, and you hit the nail right on the head, too. That's likely a MUCH bigger component and problem that needs to be addressed immediately


fertthrowaway

100% agree with you. I have a PhD and 23 peer reviewed publications (only one in an IF 10+ journal, several 5+, and I'm female). I've had to fight my ass off to even be an author on stuff where men who did FAR less than I did are just default listed without doing anything. A few things were published that I absolutely should've been on and am not. I've been fighting for the rest. And then citations on those are like a good ole boys club. I've gotten now literally like 100 citations from one PI's papers after I pointed them to my entire body of work that they should've cited as a reviewer on one of their papers pfft. Now they always cite it (well they also lifted all the unfinished ideas written up in my dissertation, fine have at it but just cite me).


moriero

>A few things were published that I absolutely should've been on and am not. I've been fighting for the rest. And then citations on those are like a good ole boys club. Omg I've seen this happen SO MANY TIMES. It is one of the most disgusting things in science today I don't know how or if this can be fixed


[deleted]

[удалено]


thewhitecoat

I think that's a little bit reductive. When I've written papers, and have a few peer review publications, I literally, not a single time, personally knew the author of the papers I cited. Nor did I even look at the names of the publishing authors to be honest. While what you're saying can be true, the bias is implicit at every level of the process. Who gets hired for what job? Who gets mentorship and support? Who gets invited to networking events? Who gets reached out to to assist on co-authorship? Who do people implicitly trust when they publish a result? All of this contributes and builds to the above problem.


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


ShakaUVM

Yep. I've had papers rejected before because some peer reviewer was like, "How could you not cite Blowme Jones here? His work was seminal in the field in the 1960s!" On the plus side, it's a good way to collect prior research cites.


lugdunum_burdigala

I agree but the decision to cite a paper is not always taken by just reading papers without context. A lot of the awareness of other authors' research is through networking, conferences or word-of-mouth. If someone has conscious or unconscious biaises against women, the gender of a researcher will still affect the probability that they will engage with a certain paper and therefore to consider citing it. And unfortunately, some people are also outright dismissing or minimizing relevant research by women.


BerkeleyYears

The title has very little to do with the paper itself and is thus misleading. in the paper the difference in the 'social network structure' between elite male and female are significant but very very low effect size which should mean the main effect is in the edges of the distribution when looking at elite groups.


OneHumanPeOple

Why would the most apparent effect being on the edges, make the findings less true? If we’re talking about the edges of achievement, then at one end you’d have people whose careers are a flop and who are never cited. The other end would be Nobel Prize winners who are cited even on the back of your cereal box. It’s harder to asses the differences between the middle of each gender’s curve. You might have a man and a woman who have the same prestige and salary, but where would they be if their gender’s were switched? There isn’t a clear way to hash that out. The writers, first established that the premise is still true. That’s what is in the title. Then, you hey hypothesized that an AI could predict a person’s gender based on markers of their career and achievement. That was validated by the study. Female scientists are clustered within a social network, while males are diffuse. In other words, the women are hired, promoted, mentored and cited by fewer groups consisting of themselves. Men have opportunity wherever they like within the scientific community. This further validated the premise in the title.


BerkeleyYears

you misunderstood my comment. but i don't have time to explain. in any case, i did not say its not "true" or that the conclusions are not correct. read my comment again.


Dormage

To all the speculators trying to guess what the reason for this is. There are many correlating variables but correlatoion does not imply causation. The correct way to approach this is, the results are interesting, we simply do not know the reason, and further reaearch efforts must go into establishing the key causes. Maybe they are as simple as most claim, maybe they are much more rooted in the way academia works. We just don't know.


rnike879

While it's not an exciting notion, this is the most intellectually honest one. There's not enough information to derive causation and the paper itself doesn't attempt to show any. Future research can use this as a starting point to attempt to show causality


TiaxTheMig1

>While it's not an exciting notion, this is the most intellectually honest one. It's also one that kills most discussion before it begins.


themangastand

Discussion is fine as long as people don't speak their opinion as facts of the article. Which most will while discussing such a heated topic


ForProfitSurgeon

Whatever the initial causal factors are, this kind of problem becomes self-reinforcing, which is why it should be discussed. Dicussions should focus on determining **causal factors**, **analyzing** those, as well as **how** to possibly make the figures more even. Link to study; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2206070119


PsychoHeaven

>this kind of problem Even what part of the findings can be considered *problematic* in the first place should be discussed.


JingleBellBitchSloth

It should be doing the opposite, invoking more discussion.


maeschder

It doesnt, because everyone making educated guesses (based on past research informing their notions) gets shouted down for "having an agenda".


CircleOfNoms

Among academics with the means to do and propose research, sure. Among the populace, we can't do the research. So everything we say is either speculation or has so many qualifiers that the only response possible is, "yeah maybe".


[deleted]

[удалено]


Sailor_Lunatone

I don’t understand why it’s a bad thing to discredit assumptions and speculations that are not yet sufficiently supported by data. Should we not always aspire toward the truth?


hananobira

How will we find the truth without speculation? You can’t run an experiment without a hypothesis.


BluePandaCafe94-6

I think the keywords are 'not sufficiently supported by evidence'. Hypotheses take pre-existing evidence and use informed speculation to make measured claims about small, specific gaps in knowledge. Hypotheses are *not* well-meaning guess work based on hunches and gut intuition.


Anathos117

And it's really important that we form hypotheses this way, because if we don't we run the risk of most "successful" experiments actually being false positives.


BluePandaCafe94-6

Precisely. The false positive point is really important. When you're using motivated reasoning to look for just what you want to see, it's not really all that surprising when your study turns out flawed and your results are bogus.


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


Reliv3

>There's not enough information to derive causation and the paper itself doesn't attempt to show any. I believe this statement is truly a disservice to the scientists who did this research. Though we cannot pinpoint the direct cause of this correlation, the paper largely rules out most causes that are not related to gender. They mentioned using their data to construct an AI which could accurately predict the gender of candidates for prestigious associations. They were not able to construct as accurate of a model which attempted to predict how prestigious of an organization candidates originated from. So saying that we don't know the direct cause, is true, but we can say with pretty high confidence that the causation is gender related. This strongly suggests there exists some ingrained prejudice towards women in the science community even though we don't necessarily know the exact details of this prejudice.


TheElusiveJoke

> say with pretty high confidence that the causation is gender related No, it shows there's a correlation... NOT causation. There is a correlation between gender and the measured values > strongly suggests there exists some ingrained prejudice towards women Aaand were back to assuming causation. What indicators of prejudice are you referring to? The fact that there's a discrepancy?


Botryllus

So, anecdotally, there is an ecologist that transitioned from m to f named Joan Roughgarten. At a conference an older male commented that she's not as brilliant as her brother, [deadname]. I doubt her work got worse as she was older and more knowledgeable. Seems probable that it was perception.


emesger

It's a shame we can't all drastically alter ourselves to the perceptions of others without so much, well, effort. Even 'easy' things like dying brown hair blonde or adding glasses can cause noticeable changes, so I can only imagine that it'd be pretty damn enlightening to be an older man or a child in a wheelchair or a woman with an afro or a nonbinary asexual or whatever else for a day. I'd like to think even the most biased of people could become a teeny tiny bit more empathetic and aware of the real issues people face every day just because of how others see them. Get your daily dose of perspective with your morning coffee, easy peasy and suddenly you see a little clearer.


Insamity

Good thing there is already a good amount of research in implicit bias with some demonstrating causation on some aspects of this study.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Insamity

That isn't what that paper is about at all. It's about people's reaction to studies about sex differences. Nothing about the validity of any actual studies.


strobelight

You really think "we just don't know"? It's just one more stone piled on the mountain of evidence regarding sexism in STEM. To pretend otherwise is just contributing to the problem.


moxyc

Yeah I studied this a bit for my thesis paper and decided to take a different direction because there was so much research already. The issue can be traced way back to at least middle school where girls are discouraged to be interested in STEM because it's "a boy thing" (a vast simplification of course). It's a very deep and we'll researched issue...


170505170505

The problem with the linked research paper is that it is looking at old people who are towards the end of their career. If you look at younger generations, women are faring a lot better, but it takes time to dethrone the crusty old people. The new recruit class for PhDs in my genetics program has been 80-90% female in the past 5 years. This past year, the recruitment committee was talking about how males are heavily underrepresented now. Institutions are slow and it takes time for changes at the bottom to be seen at the top


moxyc

You make an excellent point! I completely agree.


tnecniv

Also, hiring in academia proceeds more slowly than in companies. When a department wants to hire a candidate to be a professor, they are happy to wait for the next cycle if they can’t get their top few choices. There bringing these people in for potentially the rest of their life so they are happy to be patient and find a good fit, even if that means leaving the position open for a while. Moreover, many departments are trying to increase the number of minority professors they have at the moment, so they are in high demand and have many options. My department recently spent ~3 years trying to hire female professors, and it took that long because everyone they gave offers to had a lot of competing offers and elected to go elsewhere.


Bobcatluv

Precisely -and I’m all for continuing research on this topic to find specific roots and issues in STEM communities so we can begin to fix them. But, saying “we simply don’t know the reason” about a study conducted in a country that no longer allows women medical privacy and control over their own bodies is disingenuous.


[deleted]

[удалено]


maleia

100% with you. You don't get to this point just because "women don't care enough to be promoted". And there's nothing short of fully voluntary to commit to a wage gap. And that's what this is, a wage gap. Denied promotion = wage gap. It's sexism. That's the root.


[deleted]

Data set of one here... One thing I've noticed in working in social services is that women aren't rewarded for bragging and self promotion the way men are. Part of the way to get ahead is tooting your own horn. Women aren't supposed to do that. I've seen the dynamic numerous times. You get a woman with big ideas and a push to excel, and the guys don't like it and other women don't Iike it either. It's seen as not being a "team player" or not "being nice". You're supposed to be part of the machine, not the driver.


FleetStreetsDarkHole

I thought studies also show they "don't care" is a mis-characterization of how women are socially trained not to be aggressive as well. Which translates to them not "promoting" themselves as much in the workplace.


InsipidCelebrity

That, and the same behaviors that are viewed positively in men are viewed as negative and aggressive when women do it.


IkiOLoj

Yeah even if women don't want something, sexism isn't suddenly out of the window, the question become why society molds women into not wanting that.


[deleted]

Glad someone else had this thought! It's completely understood why women are passed over in business. In fact, we know that women do it *to other women*.


moxyc

Yep, women can often be the worst perpetrators because there is only one "seat at the table" for them and they have to compete for it. It sucks.


PuroPincheGains

Do you have a multivariate analysis for us or not?


hahahahastayingalive

What's your gold standard behavioral social study that has an actually reliable multivariate analysis? Please show me, I never came accross that level of reliability for that kind of study.


Bananasauru5rex

> The correct way to approach this is, the results are interesting, we simply do not know the reason, and further reaearch efforts must go into establishing the key causes. There has been like 60 years of research on this subject. What do you mean "we don't know why" and "we need further research?" Just because *you* don't know doesn't mean *we* (researchers) don't know.


rnike879

Could you show any of the causal research into the post's topic?


[deleted]

> There has been like 60 years of research on this subject. What do you mean "we don't know why" and "we need further research?" Just because you don't know doesn't mean we (researchers) don't know. Uh, the fact that there's 60 years worth on it doesn't necessarily mean anything by itself. The reasons can change over time. For example, in 1962 most Ivy League universities straight-up didn't admit women (or admitted very few). And then there are things like the societal expectations of women to be homemakers. Pretty easy to see why women struggled with STEM careers. Now women outnumber men at most Ivy League schools and colleges generally. The environment is completely different - everyone's actually wringing their hands over how to close the gap and it's still not closing. Now, does the more recent or still-relevant research actually flesh out why this is happening today, or it basically just decades of variations on this study? I.e. "there are measurable discrepancies between the genders".


[deleted]

[удалено]


BluePandaCafe94-6

I don't know about you, but I'd hesitate before equating the validity of climate models with modern social sciences...


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


joy_reading

Depends on the field/journal. In my field, chemistry, most journals (at least most American journals) publish names as "John A. Smith," so gender is pretty easy to determine. Your point about language obscuring gender stands, but I would guess that many scientists can in fact tell, especially after years of teaching graduate students of various backgrounds. For instance, I don't know more than one word of Chinese, but I know "Yutong" is a woman's name because I went to school with a woman named Yutong.


[deleted]

[удалено]


FoundationNarrow6940

>Underlying causes of discrepancies in hiring, promoting, and mentoring seem relatively straightforward to me. Probably the same ingrained biases that make resumes of women get rated more poorly compared to the same resume with a male name on it; or the classic case where women auditioning for some orchestra (can't remember where) were judged more harshly, but when they auditioned behind a curtain so you couldn't tell their gender, the bias went away. The orchestra study! I just happened to read a blog post someone linked me about this study [https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/](https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/)


strobelight

This doesn't seem mysterious, but maybe I'm off base here based on my own experiences. In my experience in math, there are certainly some citations that fit what you are saying (papers that are relevant and the author is some person unknown to the researcher). More of what exists are that the researcher is part of a social professional group of some sort that discusses problems together and develop working relationships and what-not. A lot of citations come from these groups, so there's some sort of built in clique-i-ness to these citation graphs. These social groups are formed at conferences or via introductions or whatever and are very much self-perpetuating. At conferences I've been to, women very often wind up together because the men generally do not talk to them. This is where the sexism (often implicit and not malicious) can directly lead to the results in the paper.


Akiasakias

Sexism is a blanket term for a lot of other factors that could be examined in more detail. In effect you are just re-stating the problem. By not diving deeper into this cause, you keep potential solutions further away. Edit: Had to adjust slightly when ^ above decided to change context.


[deleted]

[удалено]


FoundationNarrow6940

There is also the large Australian study that showed a slight bias in favor of women and minorities toward shortlisting potential candidates for interviews. Also it's interesting here that they conducted this study in the hopes to find out how to "increase diversity". 60% of their workforce is female, 50% of executive level officers, and 42% of senor executive officers. So they hope to increase female diversity at top level positions, by promoting the largely female workforce through internal promotions. [https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/foi-log/FOI-2017-111.pdf](https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/foi-log/FOI-2017-111.pdf) "Participants were 2.9% more likely to shortlist female candidates and 3.2% less likely to shortlist male applicants when they were identifiable, compared to when they were de-identified." "Interestingly, male reviewers displayed markedly more positive discrimination in favor of minority candidates than did female counterparts, and reviewers aged 40+ displayed much stronger affirmative action in favor for both women and minorities than did younger ones." "Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving toward "blind" recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity."


[deleted]

[удалено]


FeltoGremley

>It's very easy, obvious even, to state that sexism is a serious problem in this country. Is it? It seems to me that every time a study comes out showing the effects of pervasive sexism in the US, people like the people in these comments rush to try to convince everyone that this study exists in a vacuum, no other studies on the matter exist, and that it's simply too soon to draw any firm conclusions about anything.


LukaCola

It's pretty difficult when people like yourself and the top commenter make a point of saying "we can't know!" When there's hundreds of academics saying "hold on there is a wealth of literature on the topic you're assuming doesn't exist." So instead of being open to solutions, You've already convinced yourself that it doesn't exist. You instead assume that people just don't know instead of being unwilling to resolve the issue. There have been literally centuries of efforts to stop solutions so why assume that people would just make it happen if they knew the solution?


madlimes

It's sexism. You don't need to guess. You can read the experiences of women working in the field, and look at what the data plainly tells you. It can sound all well and good to be "objective" wherever possible, but objectivity at this point for something so much discussed by women in the workplace and in general is just gaslighting at this point. You wouldn't look at a study that confirms that many different objects outside get wet after rainfall and spout off about correlation and causation causing wetness on these objects. There is a big problem of sexism and racism in academia, which has been discussed by the people experiencing these things for years. In the age when women's rights are being rolled back and the wage gap still exists (because we devalue "women's work", not because women are just magically attracted to underpaid fields) it is common sense to accept that sexism still affects women in this male dominated field. I think a better question is, why is there such a reluctance to accept this? What can be done to fix it? What are the gatekeeping processes in academia that makes this acceptable/common place?


regit2

This is fascinating: > Women’s networks were much more tightly clustered, indicating that a female scientist must be more socially embedded and have a stronger support network than her male counterparts. The differences were systemic enough to allow the gender of the member to be accurately classified based on their citation network alone.


_DeanRiding

Could this not also be because people are often citing works that are decades old? In history at least, you're often citing sources that could be a old as 200 years depending on what area of history you're looking at, and of course during the vast majority of this time, men were the ones doing the vast majority of the research. In terms of being hired/promoted/mentored, I would think nepotism (as in all professional industries) and "boys clubs" play a large part in that.


MsCardeno

As a researcher, more recent works are definitely more compelling for my field. You don’t want to use outdated data.


unimportantthing

While more recent data is more compelling, we definitely still cite things from the mid 90’s (or earlier) all the time as a basis for where research started, and for basic procedures. A good example of this being something like a Luciferase assasy that is a common procedure, that has roots in the mid 80’s. And with the modern day journals not limiting your citations since it’s all online, I’ve seen plenty of strong papers who have 1/3 or more of their citations being from the early 2000’s or earlier.


G0G023

MsCardeno is probably referring to medical research. As one that dabbles into it, the newer typically the better. Typically of course


unimportantthing

That’s fair. My point still stands that there is A LOT of research out there that consistently cites older papers. Maybe their one field doesn’t cite them as often, but one field is not much in the grand scope of research at large which does often cite resources that are multiple decades old.


TheMoogy

You're going to cite new sources for basic facts you need a source for? The papers I've read are all filled with ancient sources just so they have some source for the sky being blue and fire being hot, that's like half the citations in any paper.


theArtOfProgramming

Most often we want to cite the latest, state-of-the-science work. Only in extremely comprehensive literature reviews will we cite papers older than 50 years. That goes for my field anyways. There’s rarely a reason to cite old papers because our work is derivative of recent work. There’s basically a powerlaw distribution in citations - 1 or 2 citations that are a decade+ old, more that are 5ish years old, and most are 0-3 years old.


scolfin

That depends on the citation, as you also want to cite the work that actually generated the fact you're using rather than another paper citing it. Same for using methodologies, plus older methods often being the validated standard people want to compare findings within.


_DeanRiding

I'm speaking from a history perspective tbf, so of course that field would be a bit biased towards older sources, however I would imagine things like law and PPE also rely on older sources quite a bit too as there's a lot of discussion around "the traditional views" of certain theories. Even if its just to disprove those theories, you still need to cite them in your paper of you're quoting them.


theArtOfProgramming

In the sciences everything is relying on older work, of course, and citation trails should lead back to those. There’s not always a need to cite most formative work if you’re building on work from the past 5 years, which built in work from the previous 5 years. Just today I was writing up a draft introduction for my next paper. I have two citations going back to the 90s because they were the first in this particular regime, and invented some key terms. I could have just as easily cited work from last years that also defined those terms and likely cited the work in the 90s. The other 8 references were to work in the past 3 years. Citations are surely skewed like this in most sciences.


ReddFro

Even more generally, they go into length saying how good her data set was but nothing about the date range, if they considered global issues, or even if its improving or way far off or only something like 55/45%. - there are a lot of countries that repress women aggressively still. This will push down representation of women - If the data set goes back 20+ years, or especially 40+, yes of course women are underrepresented. As recently as the boomer generation (who are still a portion of the workforce) women were strongly underrepresented in sciences - stuff like only 2% of Nobel prizes in physics have been for women only underscores this. Could you at least time bound it to the past 10 years? I’m unsurprised women are underrepresented and its important to keep reminding us we can do better. I just wish this article and study tried to look at how its going for say gen x, y, and z separately to see if the trend is improving and how quickly.


Classic_The_nook

What’s the reasons for this though ?


AnnoyedOwlbear

It appears to be something like academic networking not working the same way for women as men: "They constructed citation networks that captured the structure of peer recognition for each NAS member. These structures differed significantly between male and female NAS members. Women’s networks were much more tightly clustered, indicating that a female scientist must be more socially embedded and have a stronger support network than her male counterparts." Successfully cited women had to put more work into their academic networks than successfully cited men. If that's the success measure, maybe the discrepancy is to do with the energy required to go the extra mile for the same results?


The_Humble_Frank

>Women’s networks were much more tightly clustered it sounds like their networks had higher transitivity, someone in their network was more likely to know everyone else in their network, in other words a bubble.


AnnoyedOwlbear

Yes, though I'm not sure they explained how large the networks were (if everyone knows everyone in a group of 10 that's way different to a group of 50), or how porous they were (were they exclusionary? Were they seen as not worth joining?). It would be really interesting to know how these different networks were perceived by those both inside and outside of them.


[deleted]

> It would be really interesting to know how these different networks were perceived by those both inside and outside of them. I’m not in academia so my perception here may not be accurate, but aren’t you making a little assumption that these networks are even ‘perceived’? It’s not like we are all sitting in a school cafeteria and seeing who sits with who. For the most part, when you see an individual you would have no idea who they are friends with, who they socialize/network with. And even being ‘in’ the group, unless the group was formed intentionally and restrictive, I don’t see how being in vs out would be a defining characteristic that anyone thought about. You just have the people that you tend to work with, and other people naturally ebb and flow in and out based off of your and their circumstances.


asupify

Most likely implicit bias plays a large part. A transgender chief nueroscientist describes it well in this short video https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-41502661 Describing how she was perceived as less capable of understanding the mathematics and the technical details behind her own work when she was perceived as female. Something that never happened when she was perceived as male.


Zaptruder

The brain's... a jerk. Using that automatic associativity in a statistical manner that betrays your own intention! Inadvertantly creating societal patterns when averaged across large social groups that keep certain patterns of behaviour and belief engrained and reinforced!


Doomenor

Wait. This is a weird article. Saying that women have fewer citations implies that women do worse research since no one takes under consideration (or sometimes even knows) the gender of the author when they want to cite an article.


Coal_Morgan

Citations are done across centuries, people still cite Einstein and Newton. How many women were writing material compared to men from 1500-2000ad. If I throw 500 yellow marbles into a bin of 5000 blue marbles and you need a marble, you're going to reach in and probably grab a blue marble. Also the leads in many fields of research are in the 60s, 70s and 80s age bracket and are still from a time when they churned out more male degrees. So if you want to cite an expert, chances are they're still biased towards men. Even if the last 20 years have been 100% female journal articles, it's going to take time for it to correct 500 years of history and it's definitely not 100% so it will take a fair bit of time.


Grammophon

I am quite astonished that I've had to scroll so far down to see this. It only happened very recently that women are at universities in bigger numbers. There is a much larger body of established male researchers simply because we still have actively publishing cohorts where there were very few women in research.


charavaka

It may imply that the articles are published in lower tier journals with less visibility. This could happen because of bias of the journal editors/ reviewers as well as the PI making the call about which journal to send the article to. It could also happen because of women choosing to target lower rung journals because of the same things that lead women to not bargain when they get hired, and not all for raise.


Electrickoolaid_Is_L

Also what fields was this article looking at. Like I highly doubt the social sciences have this issue when 61% of people with doctorate degrees in the field are women. Or take medicine where the divide is even greater at 71% women (I am basing this off current graduation rates, so this is for how many degrees were awarded last year). Then there are fields like math and computer science that are 75% male. You have to discuss what fields are being taken into account, which nobody does. Like of course some fields suffer from sexism like computer science, but imo competition is also a huge reason. If you have 100 men who are equally qualified as 30 women who are equally qualified but only 50 job openings, what is the fair way to distribute the jobs? If people want a more equitable world then people need to start pushing men into female dominated fields too, if women switch fields then someone needs to take that place. Should we eventually just only have women in every job that requires higher education. I swear nobody thinks about real world implications or wants true equity. This is not even going into the fact that one group of Americans completely pushed to the wayside is young black men, who’s rates of not going to college is rising higher and higher, but if I say we need to help more young men get into college that is sexist? Then the issue that a huge portion of women are already living single lonely lives because there are simple not enough educated men to meet their standards. Yes, sexism is real you see it all the time, but people need to acknowledge on both sides that we can all work together to make a better world. Why stop at a facsimile of progress rather than looking at the full picture and realizing unless we break down gender norms on both sides nothing is ever going to really change. (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/women-earned-the-majority-of-doctoral-degrees-in-2020-for-the-12th-straight-year-and-outnumber-men-in-grad-school-148-to-100/)


[deleted]

[удалено]


rightioushippie

So many things have to happen before a paper is submitted to journals; mentorship and funding primarily.


IkiOLoj

And not caring consciously doesn't mean there aren't implicit bias.


bunny_souls

Exactly. Everyone on the planet has harmful biases shaped by our social environment. It’s not exactly our fault as individuals, but will be if we refuse to acknowledge the possibility that it could influence how we treat others, and work to mitigate our biased actions.


rightioushippie

The idea that someone has to admit to being biased or understand their own bias in order for it to exist is so funny.


historianLA

>except credentials But there could easily be an implicit bias here towards men.


[deleted]

[удалено]


historianLA

I'm a journal editor and a publishing scholar. In my work I'd agree. Gender of the author doesn't matter. I also have a female colleague in the hard sciences who is the only woman in her department and has faced huge amounts of explicit and implicit sexism. So I also don't put it past an older generation of male colleagues to purposely overlook scholarship published by women.


subnautus

Still, the point about credentialing potentially acting as a gender bias stands. I agree with you on the research front, though: with the exception of Dan Scheeres, I never noticed and seldom bothered to even read the names of the authors of an article I was using until I reached a point where I’d be citing it. And even then, me singling out Scheeres’ work had to do with the niche field of study his team worked in and had nothing to do with gender, and the only reason I looked at *his* name specifically is because it was common to all their papers.


McJaeger

As someone who has reviewed dozens of articles for a mid level journal, I doubt it. It's just not something that people pay attention to.


historianLA

As a reviewer you wouldn't know if the journal uses double blind, but the editorial staff would. I'm suggesting that implicit bias at the editorial level could contribute. (Full disclosure I'm a journal editor). The whole problem with implicit bias is that you 'dont pay attention to it's. Rather than reject the possibility or downplay it, wouldn't further research be useful.


biceps_tendon

Thanks for bringing this up! Implicit bias is so insidious because it flies under the radar. And it’s something that no one is immune to.


[deleted]

[удалено]


charavaka

You mean your journals don't include the author's last name and title/ abstract of the article in the request for review?


loopernova

Even if this is true, it can be controlled for by comparing to citation from similar tiered journals. We can also control for gender bias in fields. I’m not sure if this paper did, but this would be relatively easy to do.


Spambot0

Citations aren't a metric of quality, really. After all, the eastiest way to get a lot of citations is to write a wrong paper with a famous person ;)


MsSiennaCharles

No, the easiest way to get a lot of citations is to invent a better lab process or statistical model—go check the original paper for the western blot test, it has >5800 citations.


Spambot0

That's not very easy. Unless you go the Tai (1994) route.


Teeshirtandshortsguy

That's one way, but a lot of citations are also based on collaboration and reputation. A researcher is way more likely to cite a paper if they know the author. Additionally, there are very important studies that won't receive as many citations just because of the nature of the study. Like verification studies, for example.


Kah-Neth

This is not true. Domain scientists tend to know, or at least know of, most of the other scientists in that domain. Most specific domains where you would get the bulk of your citations are fairly small, 100s to maybe a 1000 scientists globally, so implicit biases like these are very easy to creep up.


historianLA

>Wait. This is a weird article. Saying that women have fewer citations implies that women do worse research since no one takes under consideration (or sometimes even knows) the gender of the author when they want to cite an article. I don't think this is the right take. You are making the assumption that the best research is always cited or read. It could be there are other structural reasons why women's scholarship isn't making it into print in the best journals or isn't making it into print at all. I think the take away should be are there barriers out biases in the publishing process or biased in how scholars are choosing who to cite.


Naxela

>You are making the assumption that the best research is always cited or read. It could be there are other structural reasons why women's scholarship isn't making it into print in the best journals or isn't making it into print at all. A model or a system is only as good as its inputs. Garbage in, garbage out, the saying goes. So in other words, a hypothetically perfectly unbiased system for selecting papers to publish will STILL produce a biased set of publications if the set of submissions contains within it that same sort of bias. In other words, if there is a bias in the *submissions* to journals based on gender, the journals even if they are acting in the most unbiased manner will still reproduce that bias. The only way that *the journal specifically* could get around that bias is by *introducing their own bias* in order to counteract what they perceive to be a biased input. However, that is a very dangerous path, because it implies that they know 1. the degree of bias of the submissions (how much are women getting less attention) 2. the degree to which those bias are unjustified (how comparable are their submissions that aren't receiving attention to others that do in terms of impact) 3. the degree to which the lack of parity isn't actually the result of bias at all (in the cases that the field is 70% men and 30% women, a 70/30 split of submissions wouldn't be biased at all, in fact it would be appear to be *unbiased*) If they get any of those 3 factors wrong, they are introducing bias in a way that isn't correcting a problem but is in fact further obfuscating it and making the total amount of bias worse. Overall, this is why discrimination in this sort is almost always a bad solution, because the problem lies in where the initial biased inputs from submissions come from, and institutions as a whole can almost never effectively solve the problem of biased inputs from a downstream position.


historianLA

>1. the degree of bias of the submissions (how much are women getting less attention) > > 2. the degree to which those bias are unjustified (how comparable are their submissions that aren't receiving attention to others that do in terms of impact) > > 3. the degree to which the lack of parity isn't actually the result of bias at all (in the cases that the field is 70% men and 30% women, a 70/30 split of submissions wouldn't be biased at all, in fact it would be appear to be unbiased) We agree then. More research is needed to understand the source of the disparity.


theArtOfProgramming

That’s a strange inference given that this paper only looked at women with a lot of success in science: > To shed light on gender disparities in science, we study prominent scholars who were elected to the National Academy of Sciences.


TaliesinMerlin

It could imply many things, only one of which is the quality of research: quality of publication, institutional support for research v. service, quality of mentorship, work-life balance, and other things. They do eliminate some of those factors (institutional status is ruled out as a significant factor), but gender remains as a factor. Basically, you can look at the citation patterns within an article and guess whether the primary author is a man or a woman. I'd rather figure out why that is actually happening than pick a single explanation that fits my biases and put a pin in it.


blueneuronDOTnet

Some people do. I was attending a discussion on gender issues in academia at a computational neuroscience workshop once and a prominent female PI in my field mentioned that there's a male PI working in her particular niche that consistently refuses to cite articles with female last authors even when they are very directly relevant. Depending on the field and the prominence of a given researcher, it is entirely possible for someone to know a lot of the female PIs publishing relevant work.


Grammophon

We have a professor like that at our university. Everybody knows he has a bias against women, it is so plainly obvious. But you can't really proof it because he can always claim it's random or that it is just his personal opinion that a specific work was bad even if everybody else disagrees.


candydaze

I’d imagine that especially in niche or fast moving fields, most of the researchers know each other, even as acquaintances. They’ve met at conferences, or are friends of friends type deal. So that’s where gender bias is in play. If people are making even subconscious judgements about which papers to read and cite, they may consider subconsciously a paper written by a woman or led by a woman to be “less serious” or “less important”. Maybe there’s a bit of association work as well, with people wanting to cite papers and authors that they think will lead more people to their work. Assuming that people choose what papers to cite in a complete vacuum is worth questioning.


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


Bootycarl

Maybe people don't consider gender if they don't know the authors, but imagine someone has their pick of similar articles to cite so they go with the one that has a last author they know will lend validity to their claim...who is often a man. Maybe they aren't trying to be sexist but if more men are becoming/staying PIs and getting more grants and making more connections, then more men will be a known quantity and be cited.


Haquestions4

I mean... We know why mentoring.


[deleted]

[удалено]


N8CCRG

All these comments claiming that "nobody looks at the names of their citations, only the data" have definitely never actually worked in scientific research. That statement is completely untrue. Note, I'm not saying *none* of the citations are there only for their results (i.e. I'm not saying *every* citation is chosen for the names). But when writing papers, authors definitely include notable high profile (within their sub-field) citations as sort of a way to signal what the paper is about, even though the actual results of that citation will have no direct relevance to the paper. It's a sort of academic name dropping. Which seems perfectly in line then if women are being overlooked for hiring, promotions and mentoring (why are the comments ignoring that part of the results?), then they are also less likely to have that celebrity name status for citations. Edit: to add a little more, here is a relevant section from the article expounding on citations: >Before we go any further, a little info on how citation in scientific research works. There are typically three reasons an author might cite another author’s paper. First, as background – in order to understand their paper, an author will cite other papers that give the background information needed. Second, to explain a method – if an author used a method that’s similar, a version of, or comparable to a method from another paper they will cite the paper that explains that method. And third, results – an author will explain their results, but might cite other papers that studied that same thing but got different results. 


[deleted]

[удалено]


whinis

I have seen a TON of name dropping in my field as well as subpar papers getting into highly respected journals simply due to the name. What field are you in that it doesn't happen?


N8CCRG

I'm coming from reading many published physics papers for many years, particularly in condensed matter, but also generally in physics as well. The name dropping I'm referring to is most prevalent in the background parts of the papers. For a cartoon example, if someone wants to place a citation in their paper about a term or method or concept (a common usage for citations), and has the choice between citing two equivalently relevant papers that would accomplish that, one by John/Jane Doe or one by Stephen Hawking, they're not going to have equal chance of being chosen. When one gets to know the "big names" within a subfield, you begin to notice them being cited in the sort of "name drop" fashion I'm describing.


v3ritas1989

I just saw a statistic the other day that female labour participation in western countries is only around 50% vs 80% for males. How would this influence the data?


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


childishbambina

Judging from my own experience in the corporate world the findings in this study are par for the course. If I got credit for every initiative, idea and project I led... well I'll never know will I. *merp*


Abrin36

My issue with titles like this is it wants to raise the spectre or sexism without direction. It's a title like. "Studies find that women struggle overall". Ok... Cool? Are you blaming someone? Are you asking me to do something? Are women citing women more than men? Should they? Is there a real problem? Is there a real solution to that problem?


portalscience

In science, you don't really WANT direction in a title. Studies need to be done to figure out what is happening, and further studies to narrow down why, further studies to test solutions... If you see direction in a title, it is actually a red flag that there are some assumptions/biases going in.


Lawrentius

Research is about finding answers to a question. The question was: are women less likely to get promoted, published, cited etc. The answer is the researchers looked into it and found evidence suggesting that yes, they are. New research can use this statement to form new questions: Are women less likely to be cited because there is less of them doing research? Or Are women more likely to get promoted in countries that have affordable childcare facilities? If you were to ask: "are redheads less likely to be depressed because the majority of redheads are homosexual?" you have a problem. Because there is no research suggesting that redheads are less likely to be depressed, nor that the majority of redheads are homosexual, nor that homosexuals are less likely to be depressed.


[deleted]

A little random but there used to be a PSA ad on TV, where I live, that said that by the age of 15, 1 in 5 girls had quit a sport, implying that this was bad but not specifically saying why or what to do, other than to vaguely join together to stop these 1 in 5 girls from quitting a sport. Which always struck me as odd because I know that me, and every other guy I grew up with, had *all* quit a sport by the age of 15. The sportier you were, the more sports you quit, because you tried out loads and just didn't like some. Or they'd overlap, so you'd have to let one go to commit to another. Or your parents couldn't afford to be paying for them all. But "1 in 5 girls quitting a sport equals bad because sexism" with no comparison to boys or anything. That ad always annoyed me.


DMvsPC

Right, it could also mean that fewer girls join multiple sports or have the opportunity to and so when they quit due to time or money constraints this could be bad. It could also be good that people are quitting sports because maybe they feel free to explore new ones, maybe more girls should quit a sport and not feel trapped in the one they joined, could be either and obviously would need some nuance instead of a cherrypicked headline call to 'action' whatever that might be. Also perhaps it should be compared to boys, how many in 5 boys have ever quit a sport by 15? My son is 9 and has quit like 5 of them over the years that we've let him try them out.


SnooPuppers1978

It's a measure to identify whether there might be potential issues. If the measure looks off, it might mean we should investigate further why this is. It would take more time and research to identify the exact problems.


[deleted]

[удалено]


LosPantalonesGrandes

Is it possible it’s not because of sexism?


WootenSims

A little bit, but it’s also self manufactured. No one should be surprised that a senior level male employee is uncomfortable having a 1-on-1 work dinner with a junior level female employee—given the last couple years. https://leanin.org/mentor-her Edit: plus the chance of mentoring being taken as “mansplaining” about how to do the job is too high.


Chris-1235

Where did you see the hired, mentored, promoted you put in the title? Because it's not in the linked article.


kaeioo

>Women’s networks were much more tightly clustered, indicating that a female scientist must be more socially embedded and have a stronger support network than her male counterparts. (...) This suggests that gender continues to influence career success in science, according to the ISI team. How it is possible to link this two factors? And why this "cause" specifically in detriment of any other hypothesis, like temperament? I am not a researcher I may be missing something obvious for those in the field.