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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."
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.