Evolutionary geneticists Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head
collaborated on a study of gender bias in academia. They found that
women with a PhD in biology published fewer articles than their male
peers, which the authors argued showed gender bias, reports Times Higher Education.
When the women submitted the study to peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, a reviewer came back with some pretty shocking suggestions.
Ingleby quickly posted the reviewer’s remarks to Twitter:
The women’s reviewer also suggested the publishing gap could exist
because middle-aged female scientists preferred spending time with their
children to working in a lab.
“Perhaps it is not so surprising
that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than
female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students
can probably run a mile race a bit faster than female doctoral
students,” the reviewer added, according to Times Higher Education.
And show me where it’s written to suggest male authors do the same with female authors for the same reasons? Ya ain’t gonna find it.
Fun times in academic philosophy
I missed the visit days for prospective graduate students in my department a couple weeks ago because I was in California, so I was surprised and alarmed to receive this e-mail from the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) last Tuesday:
“As you may have heard, a prospective student made a number of inappropriate sexist comments in conversations with graduate students during the visit last week. I am writing to let you know that I have written to the student in question, to point out that I find the comments that have been reported to me to be highly inappropriate, and that such comments are serious violations of norms that we all are committed to upholding. I added that I would take issue with such comments being made in our department not only by prospective students, but also, and especially, by people who are members of our department, such as the department’s graduate students.”
Of course, I immediately asked some people who I thought might be in the know for all the gory details. In conversations with various grad students in the department last week, I found out that he did all of the following:
He remarked to a female grad student on how easy she must have it in the department because she’s a woman.
He told a female grad student that he was glad to see that most people in the department work on “real” philosophy rather than feminist philosophy.
He speculated that a famous professor in our department was probably only working with a specific grad student because she’s an attractive woman.
He saw two grad students listed on the website with the same Chinese last name and assumed that the woman must only have been admitted because she was married to the man. (The kicker: not only are they from different places – the woman grew up in China, the man in Canada – but the man is also flamingly gay.)
He was told a story about how two Asian-American women, as first-years, walked into the grad student bar and a male student loudly remarked, “Mmm, China.” (Incidentally, one of the women is Korean-American.) He was not horrified, and in fact seemed to think this was perfectly normal.
Part of the reason I was feeling so shitty last Thursday is that I got involved in an argument between a male grad student who works on philosophy of law and a bunch of other grad students about whether we were treating the prospective student unfairly by talking amongst ourselves about how terrible he is, which would probably lead the grad student community to be inhospitable or even hostile toward him if he were to come here, without adequate proof of his misdeeds and without giving him an opportunity to show himself to be better than we thought, or at least redeemable. This was obnoxious not least because law guy is a guy – and he acknowledged that he can’t know how women feel about the sexist remarks, but he is South Asian and said the prospective made a remark to him that might be construed as racist, but he was giving him the benefit of the doubt. He also kept going on about “procedural justice” (which he said he’s a big champion of in his research as well) – which sounds an awful lot like the “due process” that opponents of the Me Too movement like to scream about – and insisted that it applies with regard to “the court of public opinion” as well as more official channels like the decision whether or not to rescind his admission offer. An implication was, of course, that he wasn’t sure whether he could trust the testimony of people who reported the sexist and racist behavior, most of whom are women. Because what “due process” so often means is “you can’t believe women – they’re overly emotional and misinterpret things and/or they’re crazy and they lie.”
Anyway… the DGS e-mailed the prospective to tell him that kind of behavior was inappropriate and would not be tolerated in the department, the prospective responded by indignantly denying everything (you know those hysterical women!), the DGS told him he was looking into rescinding the offer, and the prospective wisely decided to go somewhere else – namely, Oxford, where he’s been doing a B.Phil (a glorified second bachelor’s degree that’s special because it’s from Oxford), and where they seem to be OK with this kind of shit.
omg I’m doing research for one of projects for college, and apparently, girls learn better when they’re in an all girls class, but boys learn even worse when they’re in an all boys class, because all the negative things become even stronger of there are no girls to act as “buffer”
get rid of the boys and let girl learn in peace, i couldn’t care less about them
It’s not our job to be a “buffer”
Separate boys from girls then, they don’t have to be acting like mothers at age 12, if boys ruin the education of others boys, um, idk, fix their behavior maybe?
I work at uni. My program is very competitive. Like you need a 92% or more to get in. We get 10x the applications than we can accept. So. This means our program is 95% female. Simply because girls do better in highschool than boys. Its literally that simple. However. This is a HUGE deal in the administration! Because OMG all those poor boys with less than a 92% can’t get into our program and woe is me, those poor poor boys. Every year we meet to talk about ways to “rectify” this “problem”. One year they’re going to stop inviting me to these meetings. Because I always ask questions like “how do we get boys into the program with lower GPAs without denying girls with higher GPAs? And how is giving boys preferential treatment not sexist?” Keep going good ladies, I’m saving your seat!
This type of thing always happens when women are dominating something, protocols are changed to accommodate and benefit men, and if this strategy isn’t successful the field is devalued.
Keep the good work!
The amount of times I heard my grandfather talk about the ‘feminization’ of schools because he wanted to blame the system for boys under performing (or, more accurately: girls out performing the boys) instead of, ya know, boys’ entitled attitudes and overall piss poor behavior when at school.
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
I think I’ve talked about it before on other posts, but I once had an anthropology class that, completely unintentionally, was all women and one man, and he dropped the course after two weeks. The other section of the same anthropology class, taught by the same professor, was mixed with men and women. So, since it was anthropology, she asked if it was cool if she took notes. She said right away that the all female class had a wildly different vibe, that we spoke and acted differently and had different social expectations of her and the rest of the class, and that we let students complete their thoughts before disagreeing, while the mixed class was highly traditional and almost entirely male dominated because every time a woman spoke, a man jumped in halfway through to “correct” her by saying the same thing. Its a very small sample size, but I think about this a lot
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
^ As a woman in a male-dominated field that’s wrestling with the shortage of women… it really is a struggle to convince people that the gender imbalance shows that there’s something wrong with the way the discipline is conducted, rather than that women are just inherently worse at philosophy. But as soon as women start to outnumber men in university education as a whole, everyone starts wringing their hands about how K-12 education is “failing boys.” Fuck you, the entire world has been failing girls and women for millennia.
Loki is the Philosopher King 