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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."

3 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:this is science, so you have to ask... by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

    And the crazy thing is, they did consult with male colleagues before publishing. The reviewer just assumed that because two women submitted a paper with a conclusion that he disagreed with, that it's specifically because they're women "making ideologically biased assumptions" who refuse to talk to men.

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  2. Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome by anchovy_chekov · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's been commentary from the paper's authors on this. Along the lines of "the peer reviewer did provide a detailed list of suggestions for how they could make it better". Hard to revise if the best advice is to able to run a mile as fast as a man.

    Agreed, we don't know the quality of the research. It could have been shit. It could have just been bad science. But now the whole thing has been skewed by the ad hominem attack on the researchers themselves.

  3. Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome by siphonophore · · Score: 5, Informative

    Demonstrably false. Please try again.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/14/study-finds-surprisingly-that-women-are-favored-for-jobs-in-stem/

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