Imagine undertaking some research into scientists. Your study finds that, on average, male scientists from Ph.D programs graduate with more co-authored papers than their female peers. Now imagine you turn that empirical research into an academic paper with another colleague.
You then submit your work to one of those well-established forums where your peers review your work to see if it will be published. (It’s a quirk of academia.) And then here it is, the big crescendo. You wonder what your colleagues will make of this work. Imagine, then, being told your research into gender bias would be better if IT HAD BEEN CO-AUTHORED BY A MAN.
Unfortunately this isn’t a hypothetical drill. It’s precisely what happened when Dr Fiona Ingleby and Dr Megan Head, two biologists from the University of Sussex and ANU respectively, submitted their work to PLoS One, a journal from the Public Library of Science.
A male co-author, they were advised by a helpful anonymous chap, might “serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions.”
Because women are inept at deciphering between the two? Even when the women are established scientists who hold doctorates? How curious.
Dr Fiona Ingleby from the University of Sussex was perplexed, to say the very least, by the feedback. She took the remarkable step of expressing this astonishment herself, seemingly without even engaging the guidance of a man more eminently suited to comment.
Upon sharing the fact the paper had been rejected on these grounds the world weighed in. #AddMaleAuthorGate began trending on social media and is showing little sign of abating.
The journal PLOS ONE has since stated that is has “removed” a reviewer whose remarks about a manuscript by two female researchers. “[W]e have removed the referee from our reviewer database,” PLOS ONE’s editorial director Damian Pattinson wrote. The journal has also “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.”
Apparently Dr Ingleby and Dr Head are not alone in having their work almost dismissed arbitrarily on the basis of their being women. Buzzfeed put a call out for stories of this kind and were inundated as a result.
An evolutionary biologist at Harvard shared a pretty remarkable story. (By ‘remarkable’ I mean jaw-droppingly bad.) Katie Hinde was involved in a considerable research project examining how sexism affects female scientists. That such a piece of research was even undertaken with a woman in a senior role defies “scientific” logic, but, nevertheless it was.
516 women scientists were surveyed. 26% had been sexually assaulted by colleagues, and 70% had been sexually harassed, most frequently by their superiors at the sites. Terrific.
After presenting this ground breaking research at a conference in 2013 Hinde took a phonecall from a senior colleague. What a travesty he said. What, that so many women were harassed? No. The fact this study didn’t have a male co-author.
“You should really have a male co-author so it will be taken seriously.’ Then he suggested it should be himself,” Hinde told BuzzFeed News.
At that point she pulled the phone away from her ear: “Are you freaking kidding me?”
Not only was the man in question senior but he had a rather well established record at touching juniors inappropriately. In which case, it’s hard to argue he wouldn’t be well placed to participate in the research project.
I suppose one might wonder how well he might be able to decipher between the empirical and the ideological aspects involved in the subject matter. Seeing as though he isn’t a woman, however, he would naturally be able to decipher between to two, yes?
Is sexism in science really as ghastly as this?