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."

Comments

acceptance is the only fair outcome

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[siphonophore]

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/

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[penandpaper]

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?

Re:acceptance is the only fair outcome

[itzly]

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.

Feminism is self-proving

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Flip it around and...

[Pfhorrest]

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.

Re:Flip it around and...

[interkin3tic]

That was a four line run-on sentence with two parenthetical sets and four commas.

Maybe you should have had a woman read it before you hit post.

Real problem, bad solution

[JoshuaZ]

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.

this is science, so you have to ask...

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:this is science, so you have to ask...

[Rei]

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.

This reveals a need for blind review

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:This reveals a need for blind review

[gweihir]

As a reviewer, I think it is very likely this paper was utterly biased and did not meet sane scientific standards. While it is unprofessional for a reviewer to snap and put in sarcastic remarks like these, they will almost never be the result of sexism, but the result of the pure stupidity of the "research" presented. Also notice that a paper is never rejected based on just one review except in utterly crappy venues.

Personally, I have written reviews that suggested the authors read an undergrad book on the subject or that an undergrad semester thesis may not be the right base for publishing at a good conference. Yes, many, many submitted papers are really that bad.

Getting lost in the shuffle.

[grimmjeeper]

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.

Error in headline

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Error in headline

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an academic journal editor.

I'm torn about whether I would have rejected the review. I would have ignored it probably, but would have I rejected it?

As many have pointed out, if the genders were reversed, this would be playing out in a very different way. Imagine, for example, that males submitted the paper, and the reviewer suggested they have a female co-author. Many would see it as rational, if extreme suggestion, that almost certainly would not have resulted in this outcome.

And, although their suggestion about male superiority is pretty unpleasant at multiple levels, it *is* a possible explanation for observational survey results. None of us might like that, but it's possible.

In that way, the review might represent a very tiny minority, and a minority whose viewpoint I don't share, but it's not irrational, abusive, or nonsensical.

I really have no idea how the AE handled the paper with the editorial decision letter. Maybe they were inappropriate there. But accepting the review per se doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate justification for removing them from the editorial board.

The real problem is that, according to the article, the paper was rejected with only one review. They probably ideally should have gotten more than that.

Even that is problematic to judge, though, because it's hard to say what happened. Maybe they tried forever to get other reviewers and no one would review it? That happens all the time, especially with papers that are not very impactful--no one wants to review them because they're perceived as uninteresting. The editor doesn't do an outright rejection because they think it's worthwhile to review, but then none of the solicited reviewers share that opinion, so they don't review it. (This is why, by the way, if you're asked to review a paper, you should review it whether or not you think it sounds interesting.)

My broader point is that this is all can be much more complicated than it seems initially. It's possible the AE thought the paper was interesting enough to solicit reviews for, tries unsuccessfully to get any reviews, then feels unsure about accepting the one odd review, so errs on the "safe" side by keeping it, and then it turns out to be a powder keg.

Of course, it's also possible the AE was totally inappropriate and mishandled this completely.

The real lesson to be learned? *This* is the real scientific process. Not too pretty. It's why you should be skeptical of all the scientific research you read.

Re:Error in headline

[durrr]

Or the paper is garbage and the gender inquisition should be dismantled.

Re:Error in headline

[Anonymous Coward]

> And, although their suggestion about male superiority is pretty unpleasant at multiple levels, it *is* a possible explanation for observational survey results. None of us might like that, but it's possible.

It's actually a quite plausible statistical consequence of programs aimed at increasing the number of women in STEM fields.

The highest performing researchers will be given positions and grants regardless of their gender. If there are then slots or scholarships or grants for women without respect to their performance, it will increase the amount of research done by women but lower its average quality.

Re:Error in headline

[borknado]

No you shouldn't reject it because it was written by two women, because even if it was one man and one woman, that no longer captures the spectrum of gender these days. There is no way to get a "representative" slice of gender because there are gender-neutral people, transgender, and polygender, and all the shades in-between. Also one could make the case that a gay or bisexual member of a gender would have a relevantly different viewpoint that needs to be included. So, accept the paper, and evaluate it for yourself on a case-by-case basis whether there is bias due to whatever gender group submitted it.

Re:Error in headline

[michelcolman]

I must agree that you can't really say anything useful about this incident without knowing what was in the paper. The title makes it seem like an outrageous situation: "Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They Are Both Women". I imagine that what actually happened is probably a lot more nuanced.

It could very well be that the quality of the paper was rather poor. The article says the two female researchers just looked at the number of papers submitted by men and women, the number of jobs they applied to, and how long it took them to get accepted for a position. They then apparently concluded that, since women tended to be less successful, this obviously proves the existence of gender bias because the quality of the work cannot possibly be different, you know, men and women being equal and all.

I know that the article only gives a brief and possibly distorted summary of the paper, but if this was indeed the content, the reviewer has a perfectly valid point saying the results could also be explained by a lower quality of women's work. That doesn't mean that this is indeed likely to be the case, just that it would be an alternative explanation that must be ruled out before you can conclude anything about gender bias.

There have been other studies on academic gender bias, for example the one where identical papers were sent in with either men or women listed as the authors, and noting the discrepancy in their acceptance. And yes, a bias did indeed show up there, so I certainly don't rule it out, but you have to use proper methods instead of jumping to conclusions.

The remark about including a male co-author is obiously not a very smart one, but I kind of understand the reason for that suggestion too: a paper on the Palestinian conflict written by Jewish and Palestinian co-authors is more likely to be neutral than a paper written by only Jews or only Palestinians. So for this particular issue, having a male co-author is probably not a bad idea. Especially if they jumped to a conclusion about gender bias without ruling out alternative explanations, which would actually suggest gender bias in their work.

Once again, I haven't seen the paper so this is all just speculation on my part. The reviewer certainly could have phrased his comments a little better, though. Maybe he was just poking fun at them for writing an obviously flawed paper, but it clearly didn't get interpreted that way.

Re:Error in headline

[SharpFang]

Problem in numbers available.

that's like saying that increasing the number of minority coders will decrease the overall quality of code produced.

Imagine you have a company that is to hire ten new employees. There are 100 white applicants and 10 applicants of minorities. Their skill lies on the same bell curve; no difference in distribution.

If you perform tests and pick 10 best candidates, statistics say one of the hired ten will be of the minority.

Now if your company policy says "50% must be of minority" you end up hiring the top 5% of white and top 50% of minority. Of course the new white employees will outperform the minority ones simply because you got crème-de-la-crème of the whites and merely "above average" of the minorities. And of course the disparity will cause frictions, rift in the team, disparity of handled workload and worse code quality on the average. Oh, and the company policies will protect the minority employees, punishing the whites who confront them for worse performance.

Trying to enforce a higher percentage of accepted minority products/employees/students than what percent of the applicants they are is in fact discrimination against the majority. In the above example a white guy who got 93% on the company test will be rejected in favor of a colored with 55%, simply because of skin color.

Friday Night Fights

[PopeRatzo]

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.

PLoS

[Snufu]

First mistake was submitting to the Playboy Lounge of Scientists.