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Male Scientists More Prone To Misconduct
sciencehabit writes "Male scientists — especially at the upper echelons of the profession — are far more likely than women to commit misconduct. That's the bottom line of a new analysis by three microbiologists of wrongdoing in the life sciences in the United States. Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, Seattle; Joan Bennett of Rutgers University; and Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine combed through misconduct reports on 228 people released by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) over the last 19 years. They then compared the gender balance — or imbalance, in this case — against the mix of male and female senior scientists and trainees to gauge whether misconduct was more prevalent among men. A remarkable 88% of faculty members who committed misconduct were men, or 63 out of 72 individuals. The number of women in that group was one-third of what one would expect based on female representation in the life sciences."
At last there's a thing that we men can also fake!
Their conclusion: Men commit more misconduct.
My conclusion: Women are sneakier at committing misconduct.
Who gives a shit about the amount of females in life science, other than females ?
The moment there are more male secretaries, there will be more female scientists.
Any woman who wears a shirt which is to tight, to showing, to low. A skirt which is to short, to tight. If she wears make up or is hot, is just as guilty as any man. So well you can believe that lie it's not entirely true.
Female scientist are just better at getting away with it.
So, the misconduct incidence among male scientists mirrors exactly the misconduct incidence among male non-scientists (by-gender incarceration rates.) Erm...okay.
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How is this news? I mean, really: In every aspect of society, men are more aggressive and prone to antisocial behavior than women. The headline might as well be reading "Sky found to be blue, water wet." It might be interesting if it turned out that the ratios were significantly skewed only in scientific endeavors compared to the baseline, but I'm not seeing that here. I'm seeing someone study a sample from a specific subculture and realize that... it's just like a random sample from the general population. It isn't new or groundbreaking. It's simply confirmatory... extra empirical findings that support what's already established.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Science is generally a "boys club" profession that isn't friendly to women in general (yes, of course exceptions exist, no need to get indignant). Women have to work harder than men to get the same amount of respect, and can't get away with misconduct as easily because they face more scrutiny. So women who are inclined towards bad behavior get weeded out sooner than men with similar levels of inclination. Those who remain are the ones who either have strong ethical objections to misconduct, or simply don't want to risk their careers.
I'm willing to bet that this discrepancy is more a factor of groups vs. individuals than male vs. female. Aka "peer pressure" aka "everyone is doing it" etc.
Alternatively, women are allowed to get away with it.
The opposite result would be unpublishable, and in an academic setting unspeakable. Can it be credible science if only one result was permissible?
Posting as AC for the obvious reason.
I believe it. And I don't care. I would also not be surprised that a higher percentage of male athletes use steroids. Cheating is an unfortunate byproduct of being competitive (although maybe an evolutionarily advantageous one).
It does piss me off though to see garbage like
They then compared the gender balance — or imbalance, in this case
in the summary.
"Women Scientists More Prone to Misconduct"? - such a headline would immediately be met with cries of "PREJUDICE!!!! DISCRIMINATION!!!! SEXISM!!!!!"
Women are more likely to get out of speeding tickets. You have to wonder how many misconducts of women were never reported.
I interprit this as follows. Gender imbalance in a field increases the likelyhood that that the biased for gender contains low quality employees. These people would not have their job in a fair job market. Likewise the other gender will contain higher quality people who were able to overcome the gender bias with exceptional skills.
Misconduct is a very broad term.
I know I've been accused of being hard nosed and stirring plenty of times. Had the written warnings and the likes.
But I consider myself pretty honest, to the point of having loose lips.
FTA
The trend seems clear, but the authors did admit that "[w]e cannot exclude the possibility that females commit research misconduct as frequently as males but are less likely to be detected."
I remember reading once that as a child Mao Tse-tung often witnessed his parents fight. He concluded the more effective tactics were the indirect ones used by his mother. These recollections lodged in his memory -- it is no mistake that the Art of War, of which many of the tactics described therein are predicated on deceptiveness, became the revolutionary army's bible.
I'm willing to bet that this discrepancy is more a factor of groups vs. individuals than male vs. female. Aka "peer pressure" aka "everyone is doing it" etc.
And the combination of
1) certain research areas are predominantly male
2) certain research areas misconduct is more profitable
any non-trivial intersection is going to skew the results.
Needs more than 73 cases, please.
I think in the interests of equality that more women should be compelled to acts of misconduct to make sure there is even representation.
It would be just silly to suggest that efforts were made to reduce misconduct or that this was a frivolous story based on an extremely small sample.
That explains the gender pay gap and glass ceiling; it's easier to appear exceptional than to be exceptional, and one side is more willing to cheat :)
This seems like a horrible comparison considering there are only 16% females in the scientific industry compared to men. Not only that but this is collected from data of known misconduct. I could easily see a female as being more likely to get away with scientific misconduct and thus they would not even be represented in this comparison. Used http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=2264&page=5 as reference for the 16% women scientist figure.
http://interserver.net/
A remarkable 88% of faculty members who committed misconduct were men, or 63 out of 72 individuals.
Since the majority of the study consisted of men, they should normalize it based on the percentage of men in the study. Considering that only 72 individuals were examined, there isn't a scientific conclusion that can be drawn from this study.
Since they didn't have enough females to make a male vs female comparison, they could have done it as "a percentage of scientists are prone to misconduct".
not stated clearly. They mentioned fraud, but as only one possible example.
If you read the study, you see that they started by looking at retracted studies.
In other words, this is specifically misconduct on published studies that caused those studies to be retracted.
This is a huge difference between that and say sexual misconduct, or financial misconduct.
Clarify your topics people.
The summary and its linked article are both unclear as to what "misconduct" is being discussed. Fortunately, clarity is available through the original paper:
. . . we found that misconduct is responsible for most retracted articles and that fraud or suspected fraud is the most common form of misconduct. Moreover, the incidence of retractions due to fraud is increasing, a trend that should be concerning to scientists and non-scientists alike.
The study is looking into why scientific papers are being retracted and what trends there are in the retractions.
It's too bad that the summary was so generic it could have meant anything from nosepicking to marital infidelity to fabricating data. This is an interesting topic, and it's sad that the frequency of fraudulent publications is increasing.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
When males hit on women co-workers, the women always hates it. When women hits on men, the men almost always likes it. Hope they did not waist too much time telling us what we already know.
Did they correct for risk aversion? Not being adverse to cheating, but being adverse to entering a field where luck / risk plays a pretty big part in success which means more motivation for cheating?
For example, lots more women in lib arts, where pretty much any result is acceptable. In the hard sciences, negative results are pretty much unacceptable, although in many ways they're just as important as positive results.
Examples:
Say you wanna prove women don't make as much money as men in field XYZ. Doesn't really matter what the result is, you get to publish, and in a publish or perish world, you win.
Say you wanna methylate some weird hydrocarbon. And you just Freaking Cannot Do it. Perhaps because its impossible. Oh well I guess you fail and become homeless and live under a bridge. Or you could bend the rules just a tiny bit just this one time....
I would stand by my lifetime observation that women are dramatically less tolerant of risk.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
New Headline: Male Scientists More Prone To Be Reported Of Misconduct
Males are less likely to report misconduct of women either because we want to have sex with them or we don't want to appear weak and petty to our male co-workers and/or managers by resorting to snitching. That's not to say that we don't commit more misconduct, it just makes it harder to measure.
Seriously, why is this here? I imagine the same could be said for any another male dominated industry...if their study was on womans basketball you can sure as hell bet those figures would look better for us men, grrr..
gig in front of bl7eak future. In
There are more male scientists than female ones. So its not that males are more prone to misconduct, its to do with there are just more males to misbehave. If you have 500 males and 50 females and count misconduct there will be more males misbehaving just because there are more of them.
Not to mention I work in the medical field with the majority being women and I found women can misbehave all the like and never really get in trouble for it. Like sexual harassement. Ive had numerous women I work with do things that could be classified as sexual harrasement but no one says a thing, but if I did any one of those things then Id be infront of HR faster than you can say "fired before a lawsuit happens".
is the dumbest study I've read on Slashdot to date. Congrats. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50510582/ns/health-mens_health/#.UQBxUWdBqrg/ is random better news. Also, male doctors have a higher rate of sexual misconduct than female doctors, study pending.
It looked to me from the article that P=0.24.
That is really not a reasonable basis to draw all these conclusions from.
After having actually read TFA, I still don't know what they mean by "misconduct." Are we talking academic, i.e. falsifying data or plagiarizing, or sexual misconduct, or what? The article carefully avoids ever joining an adjective to it.
Because come on...in general, does anybody believe males if they report being accosted?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Oh sure! Everyone's ALL FOR preserving Hitler's Brain, but the moment you try to put it into the body of a great white shark, then all of a sudden you've gone TOO FAR!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In almost any study of gender behavior, males tend to fall on the extremes of both ends (the good and bad). We soar higher, but also crash more. Males score the very top in math, but also tend to fill up the very bottom. Male behavior just plain seems to be more varied than females, at least when objectively measured.
It could be because over the course of human evolution, male roles have been more varied than females such that nature gambles more with the male brain so that males can find or create different niches and/or to avoid direct competition with other males.
Table-ized A.I.
It's 3 pages long, the last page is half references, the first page is a title page, the second page is half abstract.
It's got one page of content.
It fails to account for gender ratio in each of the job categories. It's not even mentioned other than to say it is comparable with other areas of science.
Of course women behave better. That's their only hope to compete with male domination.
At first glance I thought the title said "Mad Scientists More Prone To Misconduct" and thought this could be an interesting article.
The real question is: What were the genders of the researchers who posted this study to begin with? Maybe the study itself is a paradox, or at least self-fulfilling.
if ($question !~ m/bb|[^b]{2}/i) { die(); }
If we're to argue that 9 females is enough to judge the entire population by, then we might want to tell every statistician that they're wrong about, well, everything.
Men dick about more than women, who knew!?
Quick, we need to allocate funds to more female scientists for misconduct to level the playing field.
I just wanted to say that I fervently hope that Ferric Fang goes by the nickname 'Iron'.
Mates were taken by the best of the hunters and gatherers for thousands of generations before the cathode ray tube was available. Taken, by the males who could survive and provide. Nature saw fit that the male's predisposition to more muscle mass trumps the females primary responsibility as child-bearer ..... different advantages that magnified in a two parent family. Pre-civilized society, the man's physical advantage was a tremendous opportunity to dominate the weaker matriarch. Physically inferior, the woman had to work twice as hard on the intangibles: cunning, strategy, and treachery. That said, a man's reputation as a risk taker is well documented. Consult any insurance industry actuarian.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
and the inverse of misconduct...whatever that is.
more conduct in general.
Am I the only one that read the title as "Mad Scientists More Prone To Misconduct" and said to myself "Duh?"
It's a very male dominated field of course women are going to be crossing every "t" and dotting every "i". Take any field where a particular gender is going to have a hard time as a peer and I can guaranDAMNtee you that gender will have a lower rate of misconduct.
A remarkable 88% of faculty members who committed misconduct were men, or 63 out of 72 individuals, or not large enough of a sample size to mean anything.
There used to be strong religious taboos and social morays that kept people faithful, but after the sexual revolution of the 60s and cheap and effective birth control, the gloves are now pretty much off.
...and the youngins used to respect their elders.
Giacomo Casanova was a real guy, you know?
And the fact that the ten commandments have to mention infidelity TWICE, while murder only once, indicates how much of that was going around (and kept going around) WAY before "the 60s".
Actually, there are some excellent articles on primate behavior that suggest there are many reasons for infidelity among both sexes. Its not to hard to figure out why women are sneakier... think people, men outweigh women by 50% or more and have twice the muscle mass. If your spouse can kill you with their bare hands,you tend to unconsciously avoid circumstances where that behavior might be expressed. Duh! Many women are taught from an early age to marry a good provider, but when Mr. Oh My Gawd shows up... stuff happens.
Why go down to the biological level or even psychological level? Women ARE better at social interaction. That's it.
Human relationships (including love triangles, rectangles etc.) are literally exactly that - any relationship between two or more individuals.
End of story.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Scientists will be scientists.
...and confirmation bias.
Also, the article is VERY light on data and heavy on rationalization for its theories.
But let's address the "scientific/engineering academia" issue first.
An overwhelming 88% of faculty members committing
misconduct were male, compared with 69% of postdocs, 58%
of students, and 42% of other research personnel (Fig. 1). The
male-female distribution of postdocs and students corresponds
with the gender distribution of postdocs and students in science
and engineering fields (4).
"88% of male faculty members" is clearly NOT a trend.
In all other cases male-female distribution of misconduct MATCHES the general male-female distribution.
If anything, this indicates that faculty members in general are held to higher standards of scrutiny.
Or that students and postdocs are held to lower standards than the faculty members - if you want to look at it that way.
So, no. Neither men nor women commit more misconduct than "their average fair share".
Now... the other thing.
This is a clear case of a study NOT finding results it went looking for, so instead it changes the goal.
I.e. Percentages match in the case of "all science and engineering fields" - let' narrow the field to only "life sciences".
Whoomp! There it is! There are more misconducts among males in general, than there are males in life sciences.
Ergo - Males Are Overrepresented among Life Science Researchers Committing Scientific Misconduct.
Hold on a second... I do not think it means what they think it means.
There are 58% of male students committing misconduct, but only about 45% of students in life sciences are male?
There are 69% of male postdocs committing misconduct, but only about 61% of postdocs in life sciences are male?
There are a whooping 88% of male faculty members committing misconduct, but only about 71% of faculty members in life sciences are male?
Where does any of that say how many male (or female) LIFE SCIENCE RESEARCHERS (of any academic level) have committed misconduct? NOWHERE.
They are taking the entire set A, extracting a subset B out of it, then comparing the sizes of incidences of characteristic C in the entire set TO THE SIZE OF THE SUBSET B.
Not to the incidence of C in the subset B.
I.e. "Males Are Overrepresented among Life Science Researchers Committing Scientific Misconduct."
Oh and...
Those 72 cases (9 of them women) of misconduct in academia, women being only one third of their "predicted number among life sciences faculty"?
Life sciences faculty has male-female distribution of about 70% to 30%, right?
70% of 72 people is 50 people.
88% is 63 people.
That's 13 more guys "then there should be", or 13 less gals, when using the faulty math comparing 88% overall numbers with unrelated numbers in life sciences.
Compared to "ALL science and engineering" distribution of 74-26%, or 53-19 people - those 63 guys are 10 more guys "than there should be".
You wanna know how many "science, engineering, and health doctorate holders employed full time in academic institutions" article's main source claims there were in 2006?
72.500 females, 161.200 males, 233.700 total.
Out of that, 39,3%, 30,9% and 33,5%, respectfully, were employed in life sciences.
Or 28492, 49810, and 78289.
10 more guys "than there should be". See? There they are, right there.
Forty-nine thousand eight hundred AND TEN.
Assholes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
a new analysis by three microbiologists
Men or women?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
A Woman without clothes is nude.
A Man without clothes is naked.
A woman with pert breasts is alluring.
A man with pert breasts is disturbing.
A woman witth big muscles is a turn-off.
A man with big muscles is a turn-on.
A woman with a beard is a freak.
A man with a beard is manly.
What is accepted on one sex is not accepted on another.
If you saw a woman with a dick, would you go "Lovely!" or "Eugh!"?
Where are the error bars.
If there were 100 people canvassed, that's +/-10 to 1 standard deviation. +/- 30 for 99% confidence, 20 for 95%.
Lets say 74 men, 26 women.
88% men were caught. That makes 65 men in the study. To extrapolate that to the entire set of men, 95% confidence that it would be 45-85 out of 74. 60-99%.
If women were 1/3 as likely to be caught, that makes it 30% of women. Which makes 8. Extrapolating to the entire set 1-28 95% confidence limit. Which would be 4%-99%.
We cannot conclude men are more likely to be cheating in science.
More data needed.
Suffice it to say that a female scientist was in charge of this study.
What exactly were they trying to accomplish here? Reinforcing gender stereotypes is all?
They had a paper that could have helped describe why scientists do misconduct and ways to avoid it and instead we have an article that simply causes more name-calling between the sexes. Men will remind themselves that women are for more likely to get their way through deception rather than overt action, while women will remind themselves that men need to be constantly monitored or they will lie, cheat, and steal their way to success.
Maybe next time they do a project on academic dishonesty they could do it on, I don'y know, a real subject? How about: What causes or pressures are the tipping point to misconduct? Perhaps preventative measures or similar mitigating methods that can be used to either catch them or prevent them to begin with?
Nah, let's just sling mud instead and stir up people. That'll get us more views! Really, this is like scientific trolling - pretty amazing in some ways.
I read that as "Mad Scientists More Prone To Misconduct", and immediately wondered if this is not the obvious expectation.
I need a break.
All day long, a tough gang of astrophysicists...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Mao Tse-tung, Art of war ?
Sun-Tzu will be very upset
How do you thunk they got there...they learned early that men who cheat get a head in life...
Male scientists more prone to misconduct. There's a "Shocker"! Waah waah waaaaaaah
I glanced at the headline, and misread it as "Mad scientists more prone to misconduct", and thought, what's surprising about that?
mark "mwuhahahahahahaha!"
The report title does not describe the actual analysis done;
Males Are Overrepresented among Life Science Researchers Committing Scientic Misconduct
The main issue is that the source of the statistics is the ORI of scientists found to have committed misconduct. These numbers do not reflect any of the following;
1. Misconduct not noticed
2. Misconduct caught by fellow scientists
3. Misconduct not reported
4. Misconduct not investigated
5. Misconduct not proven.
The more accurate title of the paper would be as follows;
Males Are Overrepresented among Life Science Researchers Found by the OSI to Have Committed Scientific Misconduct.
Since they only looked at researchers found by the ISO to have committed misconduct that is the only conclusion that can be drawn. To attempt to extend that to all scientists who have committed misconduct would only be valid if all scientists who committed misconduct were caught and convicted by the OSI. Since we all know that not everyone is caught and convicted that extension is patently false. I wonder if such blatant misrepresentation of facts would be considered misconduct.
It reminds me of a joke;
An economist, an engineer and a mathematician are on a train to Glasgow. The economist looks out the window at some black sheep in a field and says, "All sheep in Scotland are black." The engineer looks out the window and says "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black.". The mathematician looks out, sighs and says "In Scotland there exists at least one field in which the sheep are black on at least one side."
Considering all they observed was one field and one side of each sheep that is the only absolutely correct conclusion.
Logic has no place here, it's an excuse to bash the patriarchy! TAKE THAT SOCIETY!
More Twoson than Cupertino
He didn't claim that Mao Tse-Tung wrote the art of war. He claimed that Mao appreciated the deceptive tactics of his mother and he appreciated the Art of War (which uses many deceptive tactics). Frankly, I don't know if this is factually correct (though it's plausible).
Reading comprehension around here is really pathetic.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Male-dominated forum completely unable to accept empirical data with deprecating implications for males! Frothing rationalizations, irrelevant diatribes, and repeated demonstrations of a failure to even read the summary ensue...
Misconduct means INFIDELITY? This all sounds like Yet-Another-State-Of-Nature (YASOF) where the individual is dead-or-keep-surviving against a totipotent entity it cannot change nor affect... djb
I doubt this has anything to do with bashing of any kind.
A cock-up is always a much more likely reason.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been in situations at work where a female has told a dirty joke and everyone laughs, but when a guy tells a similar dirty joke it's straight to HR and either out the door or some sort of reprimand. (I've also seen where one guy can say almost anything, sexist or sexual etc, and everyone laughs and just says, 'Well, that's Marty for you!' where as another male saying something not quite as bad gets his nuts in a bind over it). I'm not discounting that men would be the main perpetrators, because that's usually the case from what I've seen myself, but that the results might be skewed because of the fact men wouldn't report some sorts of misconduct done by men. I might add, a girl I used to work with was constantly getting propositioned by her female boss. She was afraid to make a complaint in case she lost her job. So, ones persons misconduct is another persons free pass. (And I'm damned if I know how Marty gets away with saying the sorts of things he does ... but everyone just lets it slide!)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
I've read that single-gender places operate more like gangs:
immunity from accountability ( for whichever kind of abuse it is that the dominant gender is prone to )
becomes assumed...
and that having a gender-equal workplace squelches that, significantly...
Confirmation bias? More like cognitive dissonance -- on your part.
I.e. Percentages match in the case of "all science and engineering fields" - let' narrow the field to only "life sciences". Whoomp! There it is! There are more misconducts among males in general, than there are males in life sciences.
You either didn't read the article carefully or didn't understand it. From the article: "...nearly all instances of misconduct investigated by the ORI involved research in the life sciences, and the proportion of male trainees among those committing misconduct was greater than would be predicted from the gender distribution of life sciences trainees. Males also were substantially overrepresented among faculty committing misconduct in comparison to their proportion among science and engineering faculty overall, and the difference is even more pronounced for faculty in the life sciences (5)." (Emphasis mine). In other words, they weren't cherry picking a damn thing. They didn't need to limit it to life sciences to find the disproportionate misconduct. That's just where it was most egregious. Playing with the numbers to make them say something different isn't going to change the findings. I don't even understand your bizarrely cryptic note at the end about the fact that there are 49,810 -- ZOMG TEN -- men in life sciences. It doesn't seem that's even an actual literal number, but instead something you got to by plugging percentages into your calculator. This proves.... what, exactly?
Perhaps instead of feeling like your masculinity is somehow threatened by the fact that in the upper echelons of academia, EXTREMELY PRIVILEGED AND POWERFUL MEN tend to be worse actors than their extremely privileged and powerful female peers, you could instead put your energy into, I don't know, something actually useful. And if you're afraid that the numbers about a specific subset of powerful people might lead people to draw unfair conclusions about your gender as a whole, well, gee. What on earth would make you think people might respond so unfairly. Perhaps, I don't know, maybe the fact that this is what people do to women all the time?? How about that -- maybe the problem, then, isn't the facts, but the sexism. Almost like the feminists have a point or something.
Sorry for the delay. I'm not really the master of my own waking hours these days.
Also, sorry if the following seems smug, condescending or unnecessarily sarcastic.
Plain text + Poe's law + hostile media effect + confirmation bias does that.
Aaaand I guess that saying "See, this is why you are wrong - it's in your brain." doesn't help much either.
Just trying to set the stage and explain myself as a "trying to be helpful asshole" instead of a "condescending jerkoff".
Also, sorry for the length of this reply. Just trying to be extra clear this time around. No guarantees though... It's late and I've been yawning for quite some time now.
First, I must correct you on the cognitive dissonance part. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's either that or this is the case of a bit of projection happening here.
And from that second paragraph of yours... I'm afraid that is exactly the case.
Perhaps instead of feeling like your masculinity is somehow threatened by the fact that ... MEN tend to be worse actors ... you could instead put your energy into... something actually useful. And if you're afraid that the numbers about a specific subset of powerful people might lead people to draw unfair conclusions about your gender as a whole, well, gee. What on earth would make you think people might respond so unfairly. Perhaps, I don't know, maybe the fact that this is what people do to women all the time?? How about that -- maybe the problem, then, isn't the facts, but the sexism. Almost like the feminists have a point or something.
You clearly went full emotional there and I'm a bit inclined to give you a pass on those ad hominems.
If for no other reasons then for the fact that your assumptions of my "masculinity being somehow threatened" made me laugh.
My gripe with the article is related purely to it being yet another example of bad science - cause there's plenty of that out there already.
Then again I simply MUST point out a very dangerous error in your logic there. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth here, I'm just rephrasing that last part up there.
Basically, you are saying "So what if bad statistics lead to faulty conclusions about one gender? People make faulty conclusions about other gender based on its "otherness" all the time."
Three wrongs somehow making a right.
It's OK to present bad science as facts, cause it's representing only MEN in a bad light. Which is OK.
Cause it's OK to be sexist against men - cause "people" are sexist against women.
Then, you follow that up with "Sexism is bad."
Screw facts. Sexism is OK because sexism IS. Sexism bad.
So basically, once that entire thing runs it course and cancels itself out it boils down to just "Screw facts".
And that really isn't much of a motto to live by.
they weren't cherry picking a damn thing. They didn't need to limit it to life sciences to find the disproportionate misconduct. That's just where it was most egregious.
Ugh... I am really sorry... but you are taking that quote out of context and using faulty logic on it.
However, the gender predominance varied according to academic
rank. An overwhelming 88% of faculty members committing
misconduct were male, compared with 69% of postdocs, 58%
of students, and 42% of other research personnel (Fig. 1). The
male-female distribution of postdocs and students corresponds
with the gender distribution of postdocs and students in science
and engineering fields (4). However, nearly all instances of misconduct
investigated by the ORI involved research in the life sciences,
and the proportion of male trainees among those committing
misconduct was greater than would be predicted from the
gender distribution of life sciences trainees. Males also were substantially
overrepresented among faculty committing misconduct
in comparison to their proportion among
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm replying late since you did, so I presume you don't have a problem with late replies. As humorous as I found your self-righteous preamble, I'll spare you mine.
Basically, you are saying "So what if bad statistics lead to faulty conclusions about one gender? People make faulty conclusions about other gender based on its "otherness" all the time."
Sigh... no. Nope. Not what I said, and not what I meant. There was some heavy sarcasm sprinkled in my last paragraph, and while sarcasm is difficult to translate from the written word, it was pretty damn blatant (and presumably the source of your odd note about "full emotional," which I'll chalk up to a combination of fatigue inhibiting reading comprehension and a veiled reference to quasi-ironic ableist humor rather than sexism). I'll try to explicate and see if that helps you out: my point was NOT, as you assume, that since sexism causes bad things to happen to women, therefore it serves you guys right, too. My point, rather, was twofold: first, I suspected (and still suspect) that you were willing to apply a harsher critical lens to this study because it happened to implicate the male gender (this is very common in society -- there's a lot of work I'm not going to rehash here going into the different ways that information about men is evaluated versus how information about women is evaluated -- this is part of how sexism is insidious and ubiquitous). Second, to the extent that you were implicitly fretting over any problems with using the study to draw broader conclusions about men in the abstract (and there is a valid concern there; assuming the study is factually valid -- and you've still yet to identify actual problems with it -- those facts don't tell us anything about the group of Men as a whole), it seemed an opportune time (particularly given all the unironic "wimmins is sneaky" comments getting crazy upmods left and right) to point out that, hey, what do you know, how about that, lazy thinking can be bad for men too. It was less a substantive point regarding the wrongness of sexism (to be clear, it's wrong no matter which way it cuts) than it was an implicit chastisement against hypocrisy, I suppose, though perhaps not entirely fair, as I can't *conclusively* prove from your comments that you're particularly sexist. So, yes, I made some assumptions about you, just as you made assumptions about me. It happens. I would've thought the relevant xkcd would have clued you in to the flippant tone, but different strokes and whatnot.
I'm going out of order here, but you brought up a point without finishing: whence the implicit accusation of cognitive dissonance in my post? Unless you're referring to your belief that I'm misreading the study, which results, rather embarrassingly, from an unfortunate **second** misreading on your part.
And it IS, unfortunately, another misreading. Here's your "gotcha":
Ugh... I am really sorry... but you are taking that quote out of context and using faulty logic on it.
Okay, first off, speaking as a philosophy major, it's like nails on a chalkboard when people misuse the word "logic" the way you just did. Good god please stop. If you want to tell me I'm misreading or misunderstanding it, go nuts. But the only "logic" I'm applying to it is implicit (the proof would go something like "abc words written in English have xyz meaning; the words set forth here are abc words words written in English; therefore, the words set forth here have xyz meaning," etc., etc. Boringly banal stuff. Unless you meant to make an epistemological point about assuming coherency and constancy and the existence of an objective universe and such, but I didn't get that vibe from your post. Let me know, however, if I'm wrong there and you really were trying to start a debate about whether or not language is an objectively meaningful communicative form, and/or whether or not you and I actually exist.) "Logic" doesn't mean any kind of argument. It refers to a v