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Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They're Both Women
ferrisoxide.com writes: A paper co-authored by researcher fellow Dr. Fiona Ingleby and evolutionary biologist Dr. Megan Head — on how gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work — was rejected by peer-reviewed PLoS Onebecause they didn't ask a man for help.
A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent "ideologically biased assumptions." The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average," "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster." PLoS One has apologized, saying, "We have formally removed the review from the record, and have sent the manuscript out to a new editor for re-review. We have also asked the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript to step down from the Editorial Board and we have removed the referee from our reviewer database."
A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent "ideologically biased assumptions." The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average," "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster." PLoS One has apologized, saying, "We have formally removed the review from the record, and have sent the manuscript out to a new editor for re-review. We have also asked the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript to step down from the Editorial Board and we have removed the referee from our reviewer database."
Plos One needs to accept all papers from women that describe unfair treatment without reading them. Anything else would be unfair because men are privileged.
When they resubmit the paper, they can use the initial rejection as a citable example.
Feminism is self-proving: Just complain about it, the shitty reactions you get back are proof that it's still a problem.
...but this, my friends, is straight sexism.
Glad it's been dealt with. /thread
captcha: period.
I'll bet the reviewers repeat ideas women in their committees say, as if they came up with the ideas themselves, too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Men work harder than women because they're healthier and have more stamina
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I'm sure if a paper with the opposite conclusion authored only by men was submitted for review, women (both reviewers and others) would be decrying that fact, implicitly because of the assumed tacit bias of the all-male authors (a plausible concern to be fair, but in both directions), and, if it was in fact the case that women had more articles published than men, suggesting that perhaps an alternative conclusion to systematic bias could be that women just are better in that respect would be a perfectly acceptable critique of the paper.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
There is a massive problem in the literature about bias in academia with ideologies of all sides pushing their agenda. This is connected to the amazing situation where nearly identical studies are getting nearly exactly the opposite results. See http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/15/trouble-walking-down-the-hallway/. The idea that everyone who is male is one side of this (complicated) ideological dispute and everyone on the other side is female is incredibly stupid.
or so I thought, then I realized it was May 1st.
This is the same dross men have to go through when speaking towards gender, so why should it be different for ladies?
Welcome to equality. You made your bed, now lie in it.
My first and main reaction to this story is hilarity. The PC world appears to be well on the way to self-cannibalism...
... I'm not sure how to describe it, though.
I'm a firm believer in equality. I do not engage in sexism. I do not engage in racism. Yet when I come here to read news about technology, science, math, and interesting stuff like that, I'm bombarded with all sorts of "social justice" bullshit.
Every day we have some shitty article like this that's totally irrelevant here. If it isn't something like this, then it's yet another article about how there aren't enough women working as computer programmers (while totally ignoring the fact that there are various other fields where there are almost no men to be found).
The "social justice" supporters needs to realize that what they're doing is in fact doing the opposite of what they perhaps want to have happen. Their overreaction to the stupidest shit is actually turning people into the various -ists that the "social justice" supporters are trying to stand against.
How the fuck are we, as a society, going to get past racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and every other "cause" if the "social justice" crowd keeps bringing them up constantly, especially when the cases involved are totally fucking irrelevant?
Slashdot should do its part by not promoting this sort of overreaction to inane "social justice" issues. Save it for the rare case when something important actually has happened.
is he wrong in saying that only having researching gender issues and only having researchers of only one gender may skew the research? what if this were two male researchers and a female rejected it for "ideologically biased assumptions"?
just sayin.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How many papers can we find that have been rejected because all the authors are male?
I wouldn't be surprised if it had happened, but I don't remember reading of any examples. Maybe it's my forgetful male memory? ;-)
In any case, can anyone cite other examples (in either direction)? If they exist, it might be interesting to look into the stories.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You are exactly right, and everybody would be screaming at the men ....
you have to see this to understand the issue of the IDEOLOGICAL GOULAG sorrounding this issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just as they have blind auditions for musicians.
It's possible this paper (which was on gender differences) is a piece of crap.
It's also possible the reviewer is sexist.
It may even be that the females who wrote the paper are sexist and the paper is a pile of crap AND the reviewer is sexist.
Hard to say without seeing the paper and the data it was drawn from.
In a gender blind society, we can't assume the females or the males are always right or wrong. It may even be from different points of view that different people will feel one or the other was right or wrong.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How could they NOT have seen the backlash coming?
Way back before the internet they might have gotten away with this kind of behaviour.
game, set and match
Wowsers! you can't get much more Victorian Era chauvinistic than this. But much of the sciences, like engineering are still good old boys' clubs
at least the journal did the right thing and canned these cretins
reminds me of when a dim friend of mine asked my gf who had just bought a truck why a woman would want a truck..... (same reason as a man -except for the 'validating my masculinity' part)
-I'm just sayin'
So we can figure out who was recently removed?
It's clear that the man who reviewed the paper is blatantly biased. His characterization that the quality of papers from men must, by definition, by higher quality clearly establishes the fact that he is a textbook example of the problem.
Nevertheless, it may also be true that the people submitting the paper were also biased. But we will probably never know. The trouble is, now that it's been exposed that they were rejected by someone who is clearly biased, there is no good way to honestly evaluate the paper and come to any conclusion other than acceptance. If you don't reverse the action of the biased person than you too will be accused of bias. But when the paper is accepted, far too many people will assume it was accepted because of the first review and it will never get a fair shake.
And before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, I'm not suggesting that the paper itself is biased or not. There's no way to know given the limited information. I'm simply commenting on the fact that it will not be able to get a fair and honest appraisal now that it's been engulfed in this controversy. And no matter what the outcome, it will forever have one kind of stigma or another attached to it.
The paper was not rejected because of one reviewer. It's standard to have THREE reviewers, this is one guy out of three. Additionally, it's the editor's call whether to accept or reject it. Typically that's based on the reviewers recommendation. However, the editor could and should have ignored that one reviewer and accepted it anyway. Actually, the AE should have deleted the review and said to the authors "Sorry, the third reviewer never turned in his review, sending it out for a different reviewer." The AE could have accepted it even if all three reviewers had insightful criticisms of the paper and said it was horrible.
In other words, the rejection for publication could have nothing to do with that one review, it was not rejected due to that review, it was rejected by the editor who showed poor judgement in accepting the sexist review.
...on the face of it, if the researchers are so good, what are a couple of biologists doing trying to publish (survey-based) social science?
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Triggered, Privileged, The Patriarchy... BULL
This is indeed true. But when the president of Harvard said something similar he was harassed and stalked by justice warriors until he left campus. It is also very irrelevant.
There are two competing factors here: First, the assumption that a female team can't produce work equal to a male team. One can't make that conclusion from a baseline of the average. Second, a bias that gender imbalance can be ignored when the team favours females.
Die cis-trans-cis sum!
cis-trans-cis-trans 4 lyfe!
You guys didn't believe me when I said that Friday night is "MRA Clickbait Night" on Slashdot.
And here it is, right on time. Every Friday night since I noticed the pattern back in December, like clockwork. Sometimes the article is fer it, and sometimes it's agin' it but it always brings out the most charming fellows and their insightful opinions that "Bitches, man. They're spoiling everything.".
Slashdot really knows its audience, I'll give it that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... when their paper starts with 'A man once told me..."
So here we have a paper about *sexism*, garnering a review that is egregiously, over-the-top sexist in nature.
So, this would suggest to me (not by any means an expert) that the reviewer was quite aware of what he was saying -- he was being sarcastic, and/or trying to be funny. In other words, the over-the-top sexist tone was deliberate.
Wise? Probably not. But people often try to make points in misguided ways, and of those, sarcasm probably leads the pack. I'm reminded of the Justine Sacco controversy. Sacco, if you recall, was the flack who tweeted: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm White!" So all the Right-Thinking People were all outraged. Except, Sacco is a Good Progressive. Her tweet was (obviously, to some of us) an attempt to sarcastically tweak White Privilege. (Picture her saying it while rolling her eyes.)
Same idea might apply here.
The paper was probably garbage. Upon having to review it, the man (a real scientist) felt annoyed at seeing yet another 'science' paper written by women and complaining about men. So he laughed, wrote up a troll response, then went to barbecue some meat with a beer in hand. Worst case scenario, he won't have to review any more stupid papers. Sounds like a win to me.
First mistake was submitting to the Playboy Lounge of Scientists.
I was going to wait and hold my thanks until after I actually had the operation done and my "transition" complete, but right now I feel like a complete idiot so here goes: thank you, science, for twisting my brain in a knot.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Is death.
Marry little girls (allowed: Deuteronomy 22 28-29,hebrew)
Kill feminists (see same book on how to deal with opposition).
It was good that the woman in pakistan was killed last weekend.
If you think about it, this is the absolute best response this paper could possibly have gotten. It almost seems... too perfect.
... is find some pussy-whipped beta as fuck guy to sign in on their paper and push it through anyways. Science and academia are fucked.
The problem is that names are included at all. Papers should be evaluated *without* knowing who wrote them. Otherwise you have bias creeping into what should be a scientific review and editorial process.
If the female scientists would have instead wrote paper on the most efficient method of layering a sandwich, then not only would they got published but a Nobel prize.
Stick to what's best!
Why is anyone surprised that science is not necessarily politically correct? I'm surprised we don't see stories like this more often. I am appalled that they are taking the reviewer's job away for writing something. Even if he's completely wrong, is that how we make scientific research better? By firing or making a social outcast of a person when they make a mistake?
The problem with this case of sexism is that this is overt irrational sexism that genuinely belongs to another era.
Which is bad (obviously) and the perpetrators should be fully disciplined, but this is not an illustration of the subtle, systemic bias which is real but difficult to prove. *This* sexism is very rare and very easy to deal with, but the more challenging variety remains.
Men are constantly portrayed in both advertising and entertainment as buffoons and simpletons when they are anywhere near the kitchen, the kids, or the laundry. Everyone laughs when a man is kicked in the balls by a woman in a TV show/commercial. Where's the fake outrage about that violent sexisim in the name of humour?
I strongly suspect the paper was a "joke", and the reviewer was sarcastically reflecting the paper's bias back at the authors.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
when it's resubmitted. Just to remind them it's TWO THOUSAND and freaking FIFTEEN not NINETEEN FORTY SEVEN.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... Stop and read first. The issue isn't that they're women but that they're almost always women and they're presuming to talk about gender issues. Not women issues. But often as not men. It used to be called women's studies and just like the Department of War, changing the name doesn't actually change the nature of the beast.
The gender studies programs are generally speaking dominated by women, most of them are academic feminists, and frankly it isn't science.
They're basically like creationists in that they have a set ideology and they go around looking for evidence to confirm their bias.
If we all agree it is bullshit when the creationists do that, then can we please show a little common sense and knock the women's studies programs for doing the same thing?
Frankly, I don't see why we have the programs in the first place. The whole thing is properly a subset of anthropology which is probably why the women's studies programs HATE anthropologists. Seriously. Bring up anthropology in front of them... they'll vomit straight in your face, their heads will spin around a few times, and they'll start climbing around on the ceiling.
Its frankly another bullshit science that gets subsidized by undergraduates that are forced to to take the course and then have zero use for in the rest of their lives. And while you could say the same thing for anthropology of philosophy, at least there is some intellectual integrity in those fields where as in women's studies its just propaganda, group think, and often as not hate speech filtered through so many hipsterish orwellian terms that you don't actually understand the depth of fuckery until you've unpacked all the inherent assumptions.
Doubtless someone wants to disagree? Bring it on. :D
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
How come Soulskill always posts Identity Politics on Slashdot. He/she/it is kinda like those fake journalists that Gamergate exposed as pushing their political agenda on the wrong crowd.
Soulskill, please push your articles at Huffpost, they'll be appreciated there. We want News for Nerds, not the Neo-Marxist Narrative for Nerds.
ps. as someone who has submitted scientific papers they can be rejected for many reasons. Two women writing pseudo-science being rejected by a reviewer is not sexism - it shows the submitted article needed more work. Only a true sexist thinks otherwise (and only a sexist cares that the editor was a man). Think about it this way: if two men submitted a paper about the increasing misandry but their paper was rejected by a woman editor would that be evidence of sexism? or perhaps just they needed to do more work on their paper? or the current issue was full? etc.
Pushing articles that match the Leftist Narrative is a form of confirmation bias, intended to indoctrinate Slashdotters. It is very subtle. if enough articles push the Narrative from enough sources then people start to believe that the meme has some merit, despite the objective facts stating otherwise (which very few people bother to research or push back on, unlike the heroes of Gamergate).
This is a brilliant book how how this modern, subtle form of indoctrination is done. It's very cheap through Kindle:
"Disinformation" by Lt Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa (he is the highest-ranking Marxist defector to the West that explained how it was done):
http://www.amazon.com/Disinfor...
pps: I'm gonna be burnt with bad karma from the zombies that have swallowed the disinformation and now wage their Cultural Marxist Political Correctness war on others. But all I can do is say the truth as I understand it, and warn my fellow Slashdotters. Slashdot has become a sad place where Free Speech is pounded away by mod trolls.
Judging gender by a name is about as dumb as you can get. John Wayne would have kicked their butts.
Have gnu, will travel.
Q: How many gender studies professors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: It's not funny, you sexist pig.
Acceptance and rejection decision are made by editors. Peer reviewers are intended to help the editor, nothing more. Editors frequently have to toss out bad reviews and get someone else to review a paper. Peer reviews are returned to authors to help them improve the paper.
The problem here is not primarily with the peer review, but with the editor, who didn't do his job. He should have tossed out the review because it obviously wasn't helpful for the author. He then should have gotten new peer reviewers if he needed them. On the other hand, it's unclear that he needed a peer reviewer in the first place, given that the paper dealt with a "survey of scientists", which is not appropriate material for a scientific publication.
Since when does ANYONE on /. give a flying fuck about pseudo academic bullshit like "gender studies"?
For one, this isn't really a science paper. It's more a docurama in print form for a science journal. It didn't set out to find what was going on, but to document what supported a story. Secondly, they won't know what a male faces in the situation because they have no male viewpoint. Third, the paper seriously under-represents male scientists in the papers' creation staff. Nearly half of all humans are male, 0% in the writers of the paper. Please lets fix a gender bias here.
If you loathe the last point, please consider what it feels like to men to be told that they're the wrong gender and more of the opposite one should be pushed forward. Not nice, is it. Ever wonder why some get irate at "PC" "gender issues"? For the same reason you just did: because it's making you, personally, at fault merely because of your gender, something you can't change, and with no other evidence that you partake of the negative attitude other than your shared gender with someone, unspecified, who might.
Quite unpleasant, isn't it.
Yes, bias is real and serious. Women can be biased too. Hence the paper probably SHOULD have had a perspective on board of a gender not female. Just because they're two women writing on women issues doesn't mean they're not biased. Very much the opposite. They can't HELP but be biased.
The scientific method should allow that to be discounted, but it is entirely likely no such skeptical approach was taken, therefore an alternative view was the only other option possible to produce a paper that skeptically looked at whether it was right or missing something.
You know, science.
.. so we should remove all funding from all STEM education immediately in favor of 26 years of education in postmodern Gender Studies (only) for all. This is the only important subject. Mathematics and physics simply enable the patriarchy, so we should all go back to weaving rugs in caves with the other women.
That's the last thing we need!
For instance, if a climate of affirmative action resulted in a lower entry bar for females.
Science is supposed to consider all possibilities, and even without men being better than women, there can still be reasons why men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average".
This is corruption of peer-review.
Some of my favorite people ever are 20th-centurists! Plus I was born in that century!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Given the paper's subject matter was gender bias, isn't it legitimate to expect they get opinions from both genders in the process? How do we know the paper itself isn't gender biased? That's like a paper saying that African American's experiences are invalid, written by only white authors-- wouldn't a valid critique of that be that they might want to include some opinions from African Americans?
This is just like the response I got from women when passing around a paper I recently ran across indicating that men were more cooperative in same-sex interactions than women. The women I talked to all quickly asked whether the study was written by a man/men or woman/women; the fact that it was written by a group of men was not the answer they were looking for.
No, not the reviewer. Ok, they, too... But come on.. How misogynistic is it to require that an article, which was written by women, has to be reviewed at all? Worth than doubting the words of Jesus. Naturally worse, Jesus was a only man.
...on the face of it, if the researchers are so good, what are a couple of biologists doing trying to publish (survey-based) social science?
Doing science? Does it matter in what pigeon hole this particular research fits in?
I mean seriously, how hard is it to not show who wrote the paper to the reviewer? Its none of his business anyhow when he should rate the contents of a paper, and on the contrary can induce a huge bias (not only for gender reasons)
No joy here. As usual I see no scientists around. First thing, what is bias and why it is evolved ? Bias evolved for a reason and that reason is statistical tendency experience is expressed in bias. So therefore if you ignore the bias you lose some useful information, like a score of possible credibility.
Things like fighting with bias are pretty much backwards stuff. I am also always biased against expressed media opinion, but that is expressed rather like a scepticism, which I suppose should be heightened in some cases therefore creating a perception of bias, but actually it is not. It is a credibility score
How many "gender differences affect the experiences" papers can we find that have been rejected because all the authors are male?
And would we even hear about those on account of such "research" being highly corrected for political correctness?
I mean...
I know a guy with a masters in "gender studies" whose ideas about women boil down to "they get ahead by giving head" (exact words were "by sleeping ahead").
At this very moment his Facebook page has the following joke: Domestic violence is when your wife won't give you any and won't let you have any from others.
He is also rather successful in art and culture work, popular with women, once had a suspended sentence for breaking the other guy's limb and has been known to publish on his Facebook page "funny" songs about his real life friends "playing with children".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well gender studies (back in my day it was called women's study) is in general I hate men, see how bad men are and how great woman are.
In general when I find people complaining how they are being treated unfairly, it is usually because they are not performing as well as the others.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And so it continues, the elevation of a secondary standard, a women's standard, to primacy. Oppose the accepted narrative of absolute equality in all things and you are sent to exile.
E Proelio Veritas.
- Machismo ("There's no problem, women are in their right place, and even they often have more rights and help than men, even in the past, so enough with the bullshit of accusing men of everything, when we're the ones paying the bills and already tolerating most of their antics"),
- machismo peer pressure ("You want to talk about women rights? are you gay? or you just want to appear as a white knight and knock them all out, excluding us from the feast? drop the SJW act"),
- and general self-censorship ("I don't want to appear as either, and maybe it's not my place to talk about this anyway").
In an overall discriminatory situation, you indeed seldom see the people generally considering themselves as 'superior' researching how wrong they are about it... There are exception of course, as there are here. But indeed it's rare.
And when the "other side" sometimes "gets a say", there can indeed regularly be some amount of rushing, awkwardness, overreaching, and arrogance (none of those are proof the subject in question is non-existent or without interest... even everyone being completely wrong about a subject does not change the truth one bit...). That is very logical in these situations, not only because of their past, but also because of their present, still trying to get through many irrational artificial obstructions (sometimes even by other women themselves, because of various complexes).
To the extreme (which is of course very real in many areas of the world still): "prevent someone to learn how to talk, and laugh at them babbling, saying how incompetent they are, and how stupid they are for even trying" (I'm sure you can easily image some "redneck" laughing at a Mexican immigrant -even when they speak their own language fluently in this case, so it's even worse, but that's not the subject here).
Of course, though, we are today, through much effort, in a situation where an increasingly large proportion of women are highly-educated and highly-competent. The prejudices, though, are by definition lasting, and overgeneralization is always common today anyway.
And finally, women, as men, are generally quite far from perfect, and thus, yes, they can be wrong, as men, in all things. It is a very basic machismo dualism to consider that because of some errors, women would always be wrong and much inferior to men, and they should stop even trying, instead going back to their house/kitchen/bed/children...
All that being said, what's your actual experience with gender studies? Which significant proportion did you read? The odd one on Slashdot and a few others some teacher or fellow student threw at you? 'Seems very anecdotal to me...
This is only half true. Weaving rugs, sure, but don't forget all the dirty or dangerous tasks, which only men can and should do.
The paper they submitted was not in their field of education. It was a social science study on gender and the culture of science. The authors haven't made the manuscript available, so this is all speculation - but, the bits of the review they chose to share might actually make sense in the context of the manuscript. And they may very well have overreached themselves in a fit of hubris, believing that a couple of biologists should be able to do social science without any formal training. Earning the harsh rejection.
46 & 2
This is one of those "we're not getting the full story" situations. Of course, it benefits their paper to have it blown out of proportion, too.
Maybe they can give us some more bullshit about "the gender pay gap", while they're at it.
Almost all of the people bitching and whining about lack of women in various careers and fields are women who didn't go into any of those careers and fields. It seems most women would rather get a major in communications or gender studies and complain about the lack of women's input in every career and form of entertainment on the planet and criticize the outcomes of those things than, you know, actually have careers in them.
The women who DO want to go into those careers, do. Rather than becoming gender studies majors.
Those with a genders studies major turn out to be little more than a modern version of an ambulance chaser. Another scummy Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition - hiding under the masquerade of a legitimate and valid concern and a cause that nobody could rightly tussle with or question lest they be slandered as being a vile (racist, misogynist, etc)... when in reality, they're trojans coming in under those pretenses, but just in it for the attention and bucks they can get out of it.
You removed someone who suggested more diversity?
Weird. Stupid. Ignorant.
I didn't say anyone should go back to the kitchen nor did the person in the article.
My point was that women's studies programs had become ideological cesspits that need to be audited by someone not of the ideology.
What is more, they should restrict their conclusions to women unless they involve some male input.
Their studies often read like 19th century anthropology papers about "black people".
The work is frequently bigoted and lacking scholarly rigor.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I've yet to see an article about gender issues on slashdot that doesn't devolve into an anti-feminist circlejerk. You'd think people so determined to convince others that feminism is unnecessary would have the bare minimal intellect to avoid undercutting their own point with blatant sexism, and yet...
So does that mean that everything that has ever been written on any aspect of gender at any point in time must be wholly discounted unless that work had at least one male and one female author? Because if so, you've just written off a hell of a lot more work by men than by women.
it's funny b/c it's true.