Sexism: it's still neat-o!

[tikistitch]

Via wintersweet....

How To Get Published in Nature: Try Not To Be Female

If you find yourself in the condition of being unavoidably female, and you aren't willing to undergo a sex change operation, then your best publication strategy may be to hide the XX affiliation.

The title of a recent publication on this issue is self-explanatory: "Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors" by Budden, Tregenza, Aarssen, Koricheva, Leimu, and Lortie. Sadly, as the authors note, double-blind review is "rarely practised". If your name screams out "woman", you may be better off with an initial.

Of course, this is nothing terribly new; just a very nice and thorough documentation of the effect in one journal, Behavioral Ecology. The authors observed a 7.9% increase in female first-authored papers after double-blind review was implemented at BE. That's an increase three times greater than the increase in female ecology graduates across the same time period of the study. No similar increase was observed in comparable journals that continued with standard review practices. The authors also note that the double-blind review process may eliminate bias against less well-established researchers, where women in the field are concentrated.

Double-blind, in case ya don't know, means the reviewers don't see the names of the authors of the paper, and vicey-versey. That's all, just no author names, but same old paper. And so, reviewers have to actually review the science therein, instead of knowing it's their old buddy, Sparky, who's doing the research.

Zuska then links to the eminent science journal Nature's blog, where the reaction boils down to, "Double blind? We don't need no steenking double blind!"

If you're a private company, and you have a new drug, and you want the US gummint to approve that drug, you're required to do double blind studies about its efficacy - give it to people who don't know whether they're getting the drug or a placebo, and where even the docs giving out the drug don't know. That's because everybody's suspicious that doctors have biases and patients have biases.

But, if you work for a science journal, evidently, unlike the other 99.99% of humanity, you don't have any biases!!! Well, that's just darned neat.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Must be nice, bein' so special and all! :p

I'm still appalled that their reaction wasn't "CRAP! Seriously?! Fuck, we've gotta do something!"

Gahhhhh.

I'd like to see the open-access movements like PLoS move to blind submissions. Leave the old-boy dinosaurs behind in the 19th century where they so wish they were anyway!

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I'm not surprised in the least. (Appalled, but not surprised.) Remember, the people who get to conduct funded research are the ones who beat back the other 90-some percent of grad students in their field in order to to grab a scarce academic position. They're not a group, as a whole, who believe in the warm & fuzzy or the caring & sharing.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know--it's the people Ms. Mentor warned me about. Pleh.

[jabberwockypie.livejournal.com]

Appalled, not surprised. One would think that double-blind review would be the standard. Shouldn't scientists be more aware of the possibility for bias? It's amazing how often logic and scientists DON'T go hand in hand.

And I'm saving this link for the next time the twerp in my computer ethics class goes into one of his rants about oppressed he is as a white male going into a predominantly male field.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Geez, IM me sometimes for horror stories. I got my PhD in a lab where a fellow grad student felt perfectly comfortable asking us if we were bitchy 'cause we were on our periods.

[jabberwockypie.livejournal.com]

How charming. <_< 'Tis the season to fill out FAFSAs and apply for grants. Every year since I started college, at least one guy has ranted about being a totally oppressed middle-class white male.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Golly, poor oppressed dears. I hope some day we can look forward to having our first white guy president, 'cause you know, that never happens.

[jabberwockypie.livejournal.com]

Pffft, it'll never happen. All the womens and minorities are keeping them down, doncha know.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

But, ya know, you just can't do affirmative action for White Guys, because it only makes them lazy and stupid.