Study finds that "manuscripts written by women as solo authors or coauthored by women were treated even more favorably by referees and editors" yet gets reported with the heading "no gender bias". Gender bias against men doesn't seem to count as gender bias!

ManofGod1000 · 2021-01-08T02:18:37+00:00

Shouldn't these be womanuscripts? LOL ;) :D Ok, ok, I will show myself out......

tenchineuro · 2021-01-08T02:27:42+00:00

The results, published today (January 6) in Science Advances, suggest that at no point in the editorial process are women at a disadvantage. While female scientists publish fewer articles than their male counterparts across scientific disciplines, they also submit fewer manuscripts, and following submission, their articles were treated more favorably than men’s were. However, says Squazzoni, who spoke with The Scientist about the study, this doesn’t mean women don’t face discrimination in their careers.

Gee, the authors measure gender bias like the UN.

TS: Were you surprised by that result?
FS: We were surprised because . . . the expectation was to find a negative bias on women. . . . But this is just a piece, obviously, just a step in a more complex process. . . . Our findings do not say that there’s no discrimination [against women] in academia, or that women are treated positively by academia. No, we only wanted to say that peer review doesn’t add anything negative [to what is] probably preexisting to the fate of women in academia. And I continue to believe that probably one of the possible explanations of that fact that women submit fewer manuscripts is probably they are exposed to discriminatory practices and obstacles during their career.
TS: What are the next steps to figure out the sources of bias and correct them?
FS: The next step is to try to have an overview of the complex process, which starts from education, then to the selection of research topics or specialties by academics. It’s the problem of recognition in terms of access to resources, then with journals and funding agencies. So we need to put together all these different pieces. . . . We will need to put together more data on different kinds of processes to try to reconstruct more comprehensively and precisely the source of bias that might still influence the career promotion recognition of women in academia.

EDIT1: Thank you kind stranger.

EDIT2: Someone posted a link to the paper (which I did not lookup this time), the conclusion is interesting.

CONCLUSIONS
Although we could not perform a largescale, multijournal randomized experiment and worked only on existing journal data, our findings indicate that manuscripts submitted by women or coauthored by women are generally not penalized during the peer review process. We found that manuscripts by all women or crossgender teams of authors had even a higher probability of success in many cases. This is especially so in journals in biomedicine, health, and physical sciences, thereby confirming previous research (16, 18, 22).
However, given that we did not have an objective or predefined estimation of the quality of manuscripts (if any) and could use only referee recommendations as an indication, this positive inclination by referees and editors could simply reflect some intrinsic characteristics of the manuscripts. Previous research suggests that women could be inclined to invest more in their manuscripts to prevent expected editorial bias (10, 33), which could also explain why they submit fewer manuscripts (18, 23, 24, 28). In this respect, the fact that manuscripts by crossgender teams of authors received systematically more positive treatments in our sample could even reveal an exploitation opportunity by men, who benefit from collaborating with women colleagues.

So men are probably exploiting the hard work of women scientists. Yeah, right.

CttCJim · 2021-01-08T08:07:39+00:00

Tangent but fun fact: in the erotica writing works, we men have to use female or gender neutral monikers in order to be able to sell anything. Nobody wants to read porn by a man.

McFeely_Smackup · 2021-01-08T06:22:12+00:00

This is literally the premise of the episode of South Park when Towelie writes a book

OkLetterhead10 · 2021-01-08T09:03:06+00:00

I just sent a complaint, do the same. here is the email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

The_Limpet · 2021-01-08T03:29:31+00:00

From what I can gather from the actual study itself, here, papers submitted by women have a very slightly higher chance of being accepted by Journals. One of the suggested reasons for this is that women submitting the papers think they need to work harder on the papers before submitting them in the first place, because there's a percieved bias.

The actual differences in acceptance rates are minor, see this figure (larger blocks of colour show a greater proportion of submitted papers, lack of bias would be shown in this figure by the coloured blocks being the same size on both sides of each pair) and the study states they have no real way of checking the objective quality of papers submitted.

The study was looking to account for why fewer women scientists publish papers than men, and tried to find bias in the way submitted papers are treated. They didn't find any. Women in some fields were slightly more likely to be published, but there were multiple reasons why this might be the case and not just journals deliberately picking women over men.

Rockbottom503 · 2021-01-08T14:30:42+00:00

I'm not sure why this would come as a surprise to anyone. It's the same in almost every walk of life - all you have to do is look at the information bandied about on IWD - anywhere that women are dominating is seen as steps toward equality, anywhere they don't want to be dominating is ignored and anywhere they do want to but arent is seen as oppressive.

sno_cone_thehomeloan · 2021-01-08T03:21:47+00:00

!remindme 2 days

Blunt_Sage · 2021-01-08T15:03:53+00:00

What are the next steps to figure out the sources of bias and correct them?

We need to find the source of bias that might still influence the career promotion/recognition of women.

Wait...what?! Shouldn't they be trying to find the source of bias against men to correct that?! That's what the data shows, isn't it? Fucking bizarro world!

Liquor_China · 2021-01-08T17:25:27+00:00

Manuscript is probably the classiest place to hide the word “anus” in.

DirtAndGrass · 2021-01-08T16:52:07+00:00

there are far too few citations / citation density for this paper to be taken seriously, whole paragraphs in "results" with 1 citation?

author(s)' opinion doesn't belong in scientific research.

Also, "they teamed up with a publisher, to see if published works are biased"? huge conflict of interest

heyyy-kiddo · 2021-01-08T19:29:05+00:00

I think books are hard to critique. In the end everybody is biased somehow and i expect a book written by women to do a better job at representing the world from a women's eyes than a man's(providing no bad intentions mixed in like making all the male characters snobby...etc). What i don't get is why gender bias is a tag for books?

I read other kind of literature anyway(NovelUpdates kind) where the least I have to worry about Is gender bias. If I want to read shitty stuff intended for men i have a huge pile of crap,if I want to read crap that targets a female audience i read shojo novels.

All mentioned above are crap and nobody cares or even looks for gender bias. In the good works like Re:Zero or Overlord gender/political correctness is the last thing you worry about.Some works are so gory/dark/life like(since life is no walk in the park) very few mainstream people would look into even tho they are great. I feel Western literature is constrained by all this crap.

2021-01-08T12:40:44+00:00

They "expected to find bias against women". Imagine thinking that you're still living in 1820

kireol · 2021-01-08T15:24:41+00:00

/r/science would downvote this in to oblivion. It doesn't fit the agenda

2021-01-08T01:49:21+00:00

Never has!

wntk · 2021-01-08T21:47:04+00:00

Note that the researcher has highlighted the article on their Twitter account and hasn't complained about it.

They have also highlighted other articles on the research, and so far haven't really complained about any of them.

I note that he is a sociologist, a field which seems to be quite heavily influenced by feminism

GerryPhillbane · 2021-01-08T22:01:48+00:00

Well the interview is of a guy soo... maybe we just investigate how oppressive he is and replace him with a guy who can avoid gender bias..

If he wants to play dumb then let him reap what he is sowing!

He’s basically admitting that he is sexist in his own words... want me to view you as incompetent I’m happy to oblige your delusion, you know... for science

GerryPhillbane · 2021-01-08T22:06:13+00:00

Problem is losers like the guy interviewed are never forced to be accountable. If you want to sell me on this pursuit of inquiry let’s see some evidence to support why it’s even relevant in your field.

If someone told me to study how half my colleagues might be eating dog shit in the office I would hope I would decline to participate in that study unless I have seen this first hand..

So where are your examples? Let’s solve the problem instead just taking money to make shit up

Suck-Less · 2021-01-08T10:26:02+00:00

Well that’s the problem, not only were some women forced to collaborate with men, they were actually forced to write MANuscripts!

Can I get a “awoman”?

BonjourReturn2 · 2021-01-08T21:42:01+00:00

gamma gamma gamma bias

BonjourReturn2 · 2021-01-09T17:10:06+00:00

Strumia has been kicked out from the cnrs for saying the same stuff.

z-z-bop · 2021-01-09T21:41:14+00:00

sure cuz it is not "genus" - it is what is called "sex"

Heywood_Jablwme · 2021-01-08T14:58:01+00:00

And what women write is usually inferior to what men produce.

citation needed...