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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."
Their conclusion: Men commit more misconduct.
My conclusion: Women are sneakier at committing misconduct.
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
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 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.
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.
The summary (and perhaps the article... I don't know, couldn't care less) is a study in sexism. It states the absolute percentage of male misconduct, not the rate. Then it uses the well known technique of stating the proportional change ("one-third of what one would expect") to make the difference seem really big.
I certainly believe men are more prone to getting caught cheating in science. I think it's reasonable that they may even be more prone to doing it. But the summary reads like a cancer scare piece or a political message.
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".
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
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
Your right! If a woman gives a man a pat on the butt and the man complains in 99% of all cases nothing will happen. If that man even looks at a woman with subjective eyes then he can be fired or suspended from work. Women have been able to create a system where men can't even look at them subjectively but they can do almost anything and get away with it.
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
Wow... rather than look at logical behavioral and sociological differences in men and women that might result is this finding, the male response is women are just as bad at men but aren't held to account for their misdeeds. Hhmmmm. Interesting. So in how many societies on the planet are baby boys being slaughtered or dumped on orphanage porches to make way for female babies? How many men are being forced to stay in their houses under threat of death even when staying in that house may include starvation? How many men are surgically mutilated to ensure that they will never enjoy sex and remain faithful to their wives? How many men are being raped, mutilated, burned, disfigured or killed by women committing acts against society? How many men are being hired by women for their large bulges and rippling muscles? How many men have to deal in a daily battle of sexist, matriarchal social norms that cause them to be members of the poorest classes in society, be burdened by frequent abandonment by women, left holding the bag for raising single parent families? You know, they used to keep statistics about Single Fathers who were abandoned by their wives, but the number was so ridiculously small that it disappeared into the statistical noise so they stopped tracking it. How many men have to deal with a female controlled medical system that caters to women's every sexual whim but virtually ignores even the most basic reproductive needs of men? You know... you guys are a bunch of whining ass hats who haven't even gone to the slightest trouble to come up with a world view that reflect anything that has to do with this space time continuum, talk about narrow minded and delusional.
Try this on, just as a possibility. For a woman to succeed in science she has to work 3 time harder than a man, undergo 3 times as much critical scrutiny by a male dominated peer review and sweat 3 times harder about getting it right in the first place. Consider men tend to be more competitive and women more collaborative, so men working more alone might be more tempted to fudge results because 1. They want to beat the competition and 2. There are fewer folks looking over their shoulders. Might it even be possible, that women have stronger social orientation then men and therefore a stronger sense of consequence for their actions. This would be consistent with research that suggest most female misconduct happens after menopause when estrogen drops and testosterone rises.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of snooty little self serving bitches out there who use sex as a way to get ahead. You just want to notice "That Girl" inn't getting patted on the back or "high fived" by the other women in the office for her behavior, because most of us want to succeed on our merits, intelligence and personal dignity, and we see a little trollop screwing her way to the top as a cheater. Winning is less important to us, that contributing and leaving things better than we found them. Perhaps that is the important difference between women and men in general. Winning is great, winning at all costs, not so much.
Excuse me, but I've been in business settings now for nearly 40 years... I've never, ever seen a woman pat a man's ass, wait... there was a pediatrician and the man was about 14 months old... but that's it. Guys, face it. Take responsibility for it. Just own the simple fact that testosterone is an amazingly powerful chemical. Here's a trick, give estrogen to a biological male... sexual impulse goes BYE BYE. Give testosterone to a biological female, she becomes a freaking sex fiend. Its not your fault, testosterone is a way powerful chemical. But for the love of Jebus don't try to suggest that there is a double standard here. Women seldom stalk men, the other way can't be said. 99.99999% of all sexual harassment is committed by men, and the woman who commits the 0.00001% is hyper testosteronal, uber competitive and scares the men around her every bit as much as alpha males scare the women around him.
If you haven't bothered watching men talk into women's breasts like they must have microphones in the nipples, or the Pavlovian drooling that so many men have in the presence of women with large mammaries, then you can't honestly judge how it feels to be a woman who feels like men are stripping her naked with their eyes. Its disconcerting and terribly uncomfortable outside the bedroom. I do understand, and I'm not belittling men. I'm just saying, rather than spending all your energy defending your ideological turf, stop for a moment and put yourself in someone else's pumps, to see what it must be like to get all that unwanted attention. SHOW A TINY BIT OF EMPATHY.
Oh, so it's only ok for feminists to stereotype?
Oh yeah, because everyone knows that women scientists like to work in their lingerie. Women in the middle east wear black gunny sacks, and the men still piss all over themselves to get a glimpse of fingernail... dude, its your hormones, your erection, your behavior, blaming other people because you have poor self control is like blaming fast food because it tastes good. That's the way its made, welcome to biology. Now take responsibility for your behavior.
You've made a large number of presumptions here, most of which don't hold water. The first is that life sciences have been dominated by men for many decades and only now are beginning to get access from women. I personally had three girl friends who went to prestigious schools (Cal Tech, Stanford and Carnegie Melon) in the 70s and did very well in Biological Studies receiving Masters and PhDs degrees. Each woman was sat down and told that nobody would hire them. Nobody would fund them. That they exactly 0 future in life science and that their only avenue of expression in the field was to go into medicine. All three women became doctors.
Even today, women only account for less than 38% of the life science researchers. So the fraud finding among female scientists being 12% suggests a 3X lower fraud rate than their male counterparts. They do have to work harder in life science which is still male dominated. The people who will review your work are men. The people who set the directions for rewarding researchers are men. Pretty much all the rule in life science are made by men. The competition is fierce, funding is a winner take all proposition and they only fund publishers of successful research. Men get the lion's share of research dollars. So pretty much everything you said is simply refuted by the facts.
Things may change in the future, but this is the current state of affairs.
Please show me the woman who is working 180 hours a week.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Alternatively, women face a much greater burden to be taken seriously in their profession than men do, and less leeway leads to cleaner habits.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Okay, let me put the dots a wee bit closer so you can follow the line. Women aren't meat. Women aren't things. They are fully functional, distinct human beings complete with rights. If the law allows a woman to legally walk done the street buck naked, she has the right to do so without you attacking her because you refuse to put your libido on a short leash. A woman's choice of social presentation is not a pass on your ability to function in a social manner. Sorry. I know its not fair, but you're the one with the outtie and keeping in check is YOUR responsibility, not the lady's. Is that clearer, do you understand now.
Oh, please all you want. Men do have problems, but being treated worse than women is not one of them.
Am I the only one that read the title as "Mad Scientists More Prone To Misconduct" and said to myself "Duh?"
Two can play at this game. Genital mutilation is still regularly practiced on males in the US. Women are more physically violent in relationships (see any of the 200+ studies on this topic), but men are ridiculed if they ever complain about it, are arrested if they report it to the police, and any defensive action will result in a prison sentence.
Single fathers are rare because the legal system overwhelmingly favors taking children away from their father. Divorce is similar. The homeless are almost entirely men because there is far more government support for poor women. Women's reproductive health is a medical specialty paid for by insurance, while male contraceptives haven't fundamentally changed for a thousand years and "men's health" isn't really a thing (beyond some rare doctor's individual interest).
Something that is likely most relevant to Slashdot's user base is society's expectation that men drive the entire courtship process, and suffer countless painful rejections by women. Men are also pushed into the dangerous or unhealthy jobs, while society is perfectly accepting of women as homemakers.
Heck, 60% of men throughout history never had surviving children, so society has always treated men as expendable. Men are competitive because the prize for first place is one or more women of your choice and a position of authority, second place is being first place's servant, and third place is dead. Men have to go big or go home, so I'm not particularly surprised that this mentality would lead to academic misconduct. OTOH, men tend to be in more senior positions than women since feminism is somewhat recent, so that would skew the results. (It also skews the "three times harder" nonsense, as does maternity leave and the tendency of women to not negotiate salary or pursue jobs with long hours but high pay.)
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.
"Try this on, just as a possibility."
Calm down. Don't get your knickers in a twist.
According to OP, this analysis was done by three "microbiologists of wrongdoing". I would not place much faith in their accuracy. Unless I am mistaken, they belong to the same professional organization as the "physicists of pillage".
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
No, asking for sources or *gasp* investing a little of your own intellectual effort of your own and providing your own sources contradicting the original claim was standard. [Citation Needed] has pretty much always been one step shy of trolling at best, especially since it's most often used as a drive by or as part of the "accuse the other guy of what you're guilty of" trick...
Like yourself, for example. You start out with [citation needed] before claiming you had sources proving something else. Sources that you didn't provide then and still haven't provided now, even though you've expanded to borderline ad hominem claiming my "numbers are clearly made up" despite it being literally impossible to NOT find proof they aren't IF you'd done so much as a Feeling Lucky google search for "one in six male sexual assault".
As for your claims that women are 5x as likely to be victims of sexual assault... There's a little thing called a "sanity test". Basically you run a rough working of the numbers and see if the result is either definitively impossible or otherwise sufficiently implausible as to warrant further investigation. Now you claim your still undisclosed sources place a woman's odds of sexual assault over the age of 15 at 5x that of a man's, that means either women's odds are much higher than the odds I gave for men or men's odds are much lower than what I provided. The latter flat out fails the sanity test without even needing to think about it because the rate of confirmed crimes is already high enough to support a 1 in 6 rate of victimization for men, which leaves the former.
If a mans odds are 1 in 6 (ie ~16.66%), which you're about to be literally BURIED in the proof of regardless of the previous sanity test, that would make a woman's 5x greater odds ~83.3%. In other words it would be virtually a statistical certainty that every single woman in the united states would at some point in her life be sexually assaulted. As before the numbers completely fail the sanity test unless you also follow the claim that upwards of 90% of all sexual assaults are completely unreported and never discovered... but THAT in turn completely fails yet another sanity test: the nation's population simply cannot support the absolute number of offenses that would be required to satisfy those probabilities. With the confirmed facts about condom use and physical violence it's just not possible for that quantity of sexual assaults to be taking place in utter secrecy, it'd basically be the sexual assault equivalent of living in Buffy The Vampire Slayer or renting a room in Halliwell Manor and never noticing anything supernatural.
Now if you'd like to rejoin the real world, where we don't have entire suburbs dedicated to 24/7 mass raping women in utter secrecy, here are some ACTUAL facts:
Dube, S.R., Anda, R.F., Whitfield, C.L., et al. (2005). Long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse by gender of victim. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 28, 430–438.
Briere, J. & Elliot, D.M. (2003). Prevalence and psychological sequelae of self-reported childhood physical and sexual abuse in a general population sample of men and women. Child Abuse & Neglect, 27, 1205–1222.
Holmes, W.C., & Slap, G.B. (1998). Sexual abuse of boys: Definition, prevalence, correlates, sequelae, and management. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 280, 1855–1862.
Lisak, D., Hopper, J. & Song, P. (1996). Factors in the cycle of violence: Gender rigidity and emotional constriction. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9, 721–743.
Finkelhor, D., Hotaling, G., Lewis, I. A., & Smith, C. (1990). Sexual abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: Prevalence, characteristics, and risk factors. Child Abuse & Neglect, 14, 19–28.
Holmes, G.R., Offen, L., & Waller, G. (1997). See n
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."