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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
I'm undoing all my mod points here to respond. But stop using "social justice" like some sort of curse word, it's as stupid as saying "socialist agenda" or "tea party fascists". You're making the assumption that any sort of social justice is a-priori wrong, like equating all environmentalists to being the same as Greenpeace, or all animal rights activists to being just PETA supporters. Just saying that life sucks and deal with is to support the status quo, but the status quo is pretty screwed up right now.
This paper right now is showing very blatant examples of sexism that so many "social justice" haters claim does not exist. We can't enter your world of everyone getting past all the -isms if the -isms are alive and well. The paper is not an irrelevant case, it's evidence that there is a problem (ok, so maybe it's only a problem for middle-tier academic journals with overworked editors).
The anonymous reviewer (gender unknown) seems to be of this same bent: because the paper's results seem to favor one charged viewpoint that the authors must clearly be biased. The reviewer assumed (incorrectly) that the authors never shared their paper with male colleagues. Further, despite the normal standards of the peer review process, there was no constructive feedback on how to improve the paper or a specific list of flaws to be corrected. The reviewer perhaps seems like the sort of person who rages at the term "social justice".
I'm sorry you're stuck in the 18th Century.
Please reset your Apple Watch to the correct date. It's the 21st Century, the year is 2015.
Most PhD and Masters graduates are women nowadays. In many of the top research fields the majority of faculty are women.
Please be advised the culture shock may be severe. But you will get through it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Why limit it to research papers? You have a push for more women representatives in government, regardless of the number of women that actually run, because a man can't represent women's issues, near quota systems to reflect diversity in the workplace, "mansplaining" being default for any male criticism of feminism, ad nauseam.
So why should research papers be immune from bias in the sole representatives are women?
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.
the point is the bias is real and serious. if ridiculous drama like that reaction to the guy's t shirt exists, this is minor sideshow crap compared to the very real, very serious, very unfunny sexism
but in certain minds, the blowback over a t shirt is the "real" issue, and the actual sexism is unnoticed and invisible, or a reason to make jokes, on a topic which is not funny
revealing the bias and prejudice to be very real
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
women suffer from sexism far more than men in general society, and especially in STEM careers/ academia
I agree that women suffer more from sexism. I disagree very much about the "especially in STEM/academia". These are probably the areas where women suffer the least, and have many people leaning over backwards to help them. To say that a woman working as a programmer at Google, or trying to get tenure at Stanford, suffers more than a women working in a sweatshop to feed her family is absurd. If you want to see sexism and suffering, you need to look at the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, not the people at the top.
I'll admit that men have many advantages over women in America. We are not a minority -- we are, in fact, a majority, and thus can exert more political influence. Under 30, we are better educated, earn more, have more health benefits, options, and social programs. We live longer. We're excluded from compulsory military service. We are more likely to pass along our genes. We get courted by women who try to impress us, please us, and pamper us. If we're not impressed, we can obtain the genetic material of a more suitable mate for a nominal fee without having to deal with that whole "relationship" thing. We prevail in custody cases under a presumption that we're better parents. We are but 30% of the homeless population. We are sentenced more leniently for the same crimes, and more likely to receive warnings for speeding. When we make bad decisions, it's an accident -- everyone knows we have good intentions. We are almost never charged with sexual assault, let alone convicted, and we receive more support when we're the victims. We can use our sexuality to our advantage. Women are often our fiercest advocates, and protect us unfailingly against external threats. Women provide for us.
Imagine the outcry if any of that were true.
*Shamelessly stolen from another slashdot post
original anon, So wait... i am either a misogynist or disconnected from reality by asking why it is wrong to ask what researchers have done to account for gender bias on a study about gender bias...really? so, you don't answer the question and instead ad hominem and ignore the criticism...
you know, maybe people would think modern feminism (including the arguments on women in stem) is not so much a joke if they actually addressed criticism.
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.
but it's the misogyny that is far, far more worse and embedded in social norms and power structures in jobs and schools,
Boys are killing themselves at 6 times the rate than in the 70's. Women dominate college enrollment and diploma earners. Furthermore, watch this, then tell me about "social norms". The fact that TFA is even being discussed shows that people actually do care about women, in fact, society is predisposed to rush to the aid of crying women. Prohibition was called for by some whiny puritan women, and they got it. You're a historical revisionist. Husbands used to go to jail for their wifes' crimes. Female serial killers were notoriously hard to prosecute thanks to the chivalry of male jurors and officials (see #6), and today men still serve longer sentences for the same crimes.
Here's a documentary about workplace sex differences from the most egalitarian country in the world. Researchers have found cross-culturally (thus not social norms) that the more egalitarian a country is, the more gender differences exist. This is likely because men and women are different and thus prefer different things (otherwise, reproduction wouldn't work); So, when you give them more freedom to decide what jobs they want they express their differences more. Humans are sexually dimorphic species, and it would be foolish to think that the same selection bias that created their very different bodies had no effect on one of the biggest and most complicated organs: Their brains.
Care to cite any facts? After 40 years of disproving social justice whiners I have mountains of evidence to back my claims. Here, have 286 studies that show women are as aggressive or more aggressive than men when it comes to domestic violence, but you won't hear any SJW advocating for Battered Men's homes, even though they're 40% of the victims of abuse, and the target of ~90% of all violent crimes, and make up over 80% of the homeless.
There are over 200 US government programs that exclusively benefit women, and few if any that benefit exclusively men (I couldn't find one). If you want to end sexism, why not have programs that grant assistance to any in need, regardless of race, creed or sex. I'm a poor white kid who grew up in the ghetto, and was beaten up regularly just for being white. My best friend was a black girl. I was every bit as disadvantaged as she, and she had government programs for housing and college available to her, I was excluded from assistance based on my sex and race. My skin and penis didn't win me any sympathy or "privilege". When I cried beaten bloody in the street no one came to my aid, but a startled women cried out at the site of me, men rushed to her aid.
You SJWs say that those who have privilege are blind to it. How ironic that in this gynocentric society, you would continue to be blind to the privileges afforded women, claiming that they are the most oppressed by sexism, meanwhile ignoring that any attempt to garner support for men's issues is typically met with contempt and loathing. Women are pandered to in everything from voting since women are the majority of voters and swing voters and women decide where ~70% of the nation's income is spent.
You want to talk about social norms? How about this: Men are disposed to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of women and children, and for the "privilege" of fulfilling such duty we get less empathy, less rights, less assistance, and a constantly whining bunch of idiots telling us how bad women still have it because they don't like doing the largel
it's a false equivalence to ask for scientific rigor in science? if we were blind to the gender of the authors and reviewers, wouldn't you want the same standards and practices followed to further our scientific understanding of the issue?
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.
... 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.
Yes, but you are forming your opinion on the matter from Gawker Media. The chances of you having an informed opinion are exactly 0.
No.
There IS a chance of forming an informed opinion that anything posted under that banner is usually mostly crap.
Chances for unbiased, non-sensationalistic, click-bait, flame-war-inciting troll-posts from Gaw*retch*ker Media ARE very close to zero though.
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.
It's not a competition to see who has it worst overall. It's about fixing specific problems for both genders. Don't try to turn it into a gender war, that doesn't help anyone.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Too bad that women are only interested in emotional and weak men when they're having a fight with their macho boyfriend, and they need somebody to talk to.