Science still seen as male profession, according to international study of gender bias

[Dubious]

This is not a trivial issue. In stories of individual lives and in conclusions of education research studies, role models have been shown to be of immense importance in girls' and women's decisions to learn science.

Evidence of women scientists comes from as long ago as 4000 BC., when a carving of an unnamed Sumerian priestess-physician was made. Written records exist about Egyptian female physicians such as Merit Ptah from 2700 BC. and Zipporah from 1500 BC. Ancient Egyptian women could attend medical school with males or attend an exclusively female school at Sais. Tapputi-Belatikallim worked with chemicals used for perfume production in Mesopotamia around 1200 BC.

 

[Jungibaaz]

When elementary school children were asked to draw a picture of a scientist in a recent study, 820 girls and 699 boys drew male scientists. Only 129 girls and just 6 boys drew female scientists (Fort & Varney, 1989).

On what basis were these kids drawing scientists? Were an equal number of males and females presented?
Because if a representative sample of big names in science were taken, then there is no reason for that to be odd, it makes total sense for them to do so.

That's especially the case, if they had total choice and no predisposing factors or suggestions to bias them in any way.

 

[Dubious]

You seem to be claiming that the overrepresented of males in these fields does not have anything to do with it. That is entirely false.

I never claimed that All I said was:

.it says that it had little to do with how many dominate which field....

Here, Miller's conclusion advocates my point on it's own, and Schmader I agree with, it's a logical conclusion. I am not saying that it's solely the case that women are under-represent and thence the implicit bias shapes itself accordingly, that is only one large factor, there are many more, a few of which I mentioned above.

A last factor to consider, and one that can not be got rid of.

Men have always dominated these fields. When even at a young age, free of any bias, you're taught about the great names and their discoveries now common to man.

Your scientists: Newton, Tesla, Einstein, Faraday and Darwin. Your philosophers and mathematicians: Gauss, Plato, Newton etc. Your role models of the 21st century, scientists, businessmen, big names in the industry: Oppenheimer, Bell, Turing, Bill Gates, Bill Nye, Stephen hawking, Richard Dawkins.

All men.

For every one of those, I can think of maybe a few females enough to count on one hand, some big names such as Marie Curie.

This issue will not fade quickly, once the female representations kicks off and time passes on, perhaps more female names will populate such lists.

That is why I highlighted the both directions bit too..

 

[That Guy]

Science is not a profession, the title is dumb.

 

[Dubious]

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

Despite enormous progress in recent decades, women still have to deal with biases against them in the sciences.
By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic
PUBLISHED MAY 19, 2013

In April, National Geographic News published a story about the letter in which scientist Francis Crick described DNA to his 12-year-old son. In 1962, Crick was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, along with fellow scientists James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

Several people posted comments about our story that noted one name was missing from the Nobel roster: Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist who also studied DNA. Her data were critical to Crick and Watson's work. But it turns out that Franklin would not have been eligible for the prize—she had passed away four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the prize, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.

But even if she had been alive, she may still have been overlooked. Like many women scientists, Franklin was robbed of recognition throughout her career (See her section below for details.)

She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin's case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.

Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as "volunteer" faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they've made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.

They typically had paltry resources and fought uphill battles to achieve what they did, only "to have the credit attributed to their husbands or male colleagues," said Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, who studies biases against women in the sciences.

Today's women scientists believe that attitudes have changed, said Laura Hoopes at Pomona College in California, who has written extensively on women in the sciences—"until it hits them in the face." Bias against female scientists is less overt, but it has not gone away.


Here are six female researchers who did groundbreaking work—and whose names are likely unfamiliar for one reason: because they are women.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 while still a graduate student in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in England.

Pulsars are the remnants of massive stars that went supernova. Their very existence demonstrates that these giants didn't blow themselves into oblivion—instead, they left behind small, incredibly dense, rotating stars.

Bell Burnell discovered the recurring signals given off by their rotation while analyzing data printed out on three miles of paper from a radio telescope she helped assemble.

The finding resulted in a Nobel Prize, but the 1974 award in physics went to Anthony Hewish—Bell Burnell's supervisor—and Martin Ryle, also a radio astronomer at Cambridge University.

The snub generated a "wave of sympathy" for Bell Burnell. But in an interview with National Geographic News this month, the astronomer was fairly matter-of-fact.

"The picture people had at the time of the way that science was done was that there was a senior man—and it was always a man—who had under him a whole load of minions, junior staff, who weren't expected to think, who were only expected to do as he said," explained Bell Burnell, now a visiting astronomy professor at the University of Oxford.

But despite the sympathy, and her groundbreaking work, Bell Burnell said she was still subject to the prevailing attitudes toward women in academia.

"I didn't always have research jobs," she said. Many of the positions the astrophysicist was offered in her career were focused on teaching or administrative and management duties.

"[And] it was extremely hard combining family and career," Bell Burnell said, partly because the university where she worked while pregnant had no provisions for maternity leave.

She has since become quite "protective" of women in academia. Some individual schools may give them support, but Bell Burnell wants a systemic approach to boost the numbers of female researchers.

She recently chaired a working group for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, tasked with finding a strategy to boost the number of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math in Scotland. (Learn more about Bell Burnell.)

Esther Lederberg

Born in 1922 in the Bronx, Esther Lederberg would grow up to lay the groundwork for future discoveries on genetic inheritance in bacteria, gene regulation, and genetic recombination.

A microbiologist, she is perhaps best known for discovering a virus that infects bacteria—called the lambda bacteriophage—in 1951, while at the University of Wisconsin.

Lederberg, along with her first husband Joshua Lederberg, also developed a way to easily transfer bacterial colonies from one petri dish to another, called replica plating, which enabled the study of antibiotic resistance. The Lederberg method is still in use today.

Joshua Lederberg's work on replica plating played a part in his 1958 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, which he shared with George Beadle and Edward Tatum.

"She deserved credit for the discovery of lambda phage, her work on the F fertility factor, and, especially, replica plating," wrote Stanley Falkow, a retired microbiologist at Stanford University, in an email. But she didn't receive it.

Lederberg also wasn't treated fairly in terms of her academic standing at Stanford, added Falkow, a colleague of Lederberg's who spoke at her memorial service in 2006. "She had to fight just to be appointed as a research associate professor, whereas she surely should have been afforded full professorial rank. She was not alone. Women were treated badly in academia in those days."

Chien-Shiung Wu

Born in Liu Ho, China, in 1912, Chien-Shiung Wu overturned a law of physics and participated in the development of the atom bomb.

Wu was recruited to Columbia University in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project and conducted research on radiation detection and uranium enrichment. She stayed in the United States after the war and became known as one of the best experimental physicists of her time, said Nina Byers, a retired physics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the mid-1950s, two theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, approached Wu to help disprove the law of parity. The law holds that in quantum mechanics, two physical systems—like atoms—that were mirror images would behave in identical ways.

Wu's experiments using cobalt-60, a radioactive form of the cobalt metal, upended this law, which had been accepted for 30 years.

This milestone in physics led to a 1957 Nobel Prize for Yang and Lee—but not for Wu, who was left out despite her critical role. "People found [the Nobel decision] outrageous," said Byers.

Pnina Abir-Am, a historian of science at Brandeis University, agreed, adding that ethnicity also played a role.

Wu died of a stroke in 1997 in New York.

Lise Meitner

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878, Lise Meitner's work in nuclear physics led to the discovery of nuclear fission—the fact that atomic nuclei can split in two. That finding laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb.

Her story is a complicated tangle of sexism, politics, and ethnicity.

After finishing her doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, Meitner moved to Berlin in 1907 and started collaborating with chemist Otto Hahn. They maintained their working relationship for more than 30 years.

After the Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938, Meitner, who was Jewish, made her way to Stockholm, Sweden. She continued to work with Hahn, corresponding and meeting secretly in Copenhagen in November of that year.

Although Hahn performed the experiments that produced the evidence supporting the idea of nuclear fission, he was unable to come up with an explanation. Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, came up with the theory.

Hahn published their findings without including Meitner as a co-author, although several accounts say Meitner understood this omission, given the situation in Nazi Germany.

"That's the start of how Meitner got separated from the credit of discovering nuclear fission," said Lewin Sime, who wrote a biography of Meitner.

The other contributing factor to the neglect of Meitner's work was her gender. Meitner once wrote to a friend that it was almost a crime to be a woman in Sweden. A researcher on the Nobel physics committee actively tried to shut her out. So Hahn alone won the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to splitting the atom.

"Meitner's colleagues at the time, including physicist Niels Bohr, absolutely felt she was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission," Sime said. But since her name wasn't on that initial paper with Hahn—and she was left off the Nobel Prize recognizing the discovery—over the years, she has not been associated with the finding.

The nuclear physicist died in 1968 in Cambridge, England. (Learn more about Meitner's career.)

Rosalind Franklin

Born in 1920 in London, Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA that would change biology.

Hers is perhaps one of the most well-known—and shameful—instances of a researcher being robbed of credit, said Lewin Sime.

Franklin graduated with a doctorate in physical chemistry from Cambridge University in 1945, then spent three years at an institute in Paris where she learned x-ray diffraction techniques, or the ability to determine the molecular structures of crystals. (Learn more about her education and qualifications.)

She returned to England in 1951 as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College in London and soon encountered Maurice Wilkins, who was leading his own research group studying the structure of DNA.

Franklin and Wilkins worked on separate DNA projects, but by some accounts, Wilkins mistook Franklin's role in Randall's lab as that of an assistant rather than head of her own project.

Meanwhile, James Watson and Francis Crick, both at Cambridge University, were also trying to determine the structure of DNA. They communicated with Wilkins, who at some point showed them Franklin's image of DNA—known as Photo 51—without her knowledge.

Photo 51 enabled Watson, Crick, and Wilkins to deduce the correct structure for DNA, which they published in a series of articles in the journal Nature in April 1953. Franklin also published in the same issue, providing further details on DNA's structure.

Franklin's image of the DNA molecule was key to deciphering its structure, but only Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work.

Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 in London, four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel. Since Nobel prizes aren't awarded posthumously, we'll never know whether Franklin would have received a share in the prize for her work. (Learn more about Franklin and Photo 51.)

Nettie Stevens

Born in 1861 in Vermont, Nettie Stevens performed studies crucial in determining that an organism's sex was dictated by its chromosomes rather than environmental or other factors.

After receiving her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Stevens continued at the college as a researcher studying sex determination.

By working on mealworms, she was able to deduce that the males produced sperm with X and Y chromosomes—the sex chromosomes—and that females produced reproductive cells with only X chromosomes. This was evidence supporting the theory that sex determination is directed by an organism's genetics.

A fellow researcher, named Edmund Wilson, is said to have done similar work, but came to the same conclusion later than Stevens did.

Stevens fell victim to a phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect—the repression or denial of the contributions of female researchers to science.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, a prominent geneticist at the time, is often credited with discovering the genetic basis for sex determination, said Pomona College's Hoopes. He was the first to write a genetics textbook, she noted, and he wanted to magnify his contributions.

"Textbooks have this terrible tendency to choose the same evidence as other textbooks," she added. And so Stevens' name was not associated with the discovery of sex determination.

Hoopes has no doubt that Morgan was indebted to Stevens. "He corresponded with other scientists at the time about his theories," she said. "[But] his letters back and forth with Nettie Stevens were not like that. He was asking her for details of her experiments."

"When she died [of breast cancer in 1912], he wrote about her in Science, [and] he wrote that he thought she didn't have a broad view of science," said Hoopes. "But that's because he didn't ask her."

And now we'd like to ask: Who would you add to this list of female researchers who did not get the credit they deserved for their work?

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

Another similar article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html

Science is not a profession, the title is dumb.

Really? what is it then?

A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.


Or more loosely:

a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

 

[That Guy]

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

Despite enormous progress in recent decades, women still have to deal with biases against them in the sciences.
By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic
PUBLISHED MAY 19, 2013

In April, National Geographic News published a story about the letter in which scientist Francis Crick described DNA to his 12-year-old son. In 1962, Crick was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, along with fellow scientists James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

Several people posted comments about our story that noted one name was missing from the Nobel roster: Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist who also studied DNA. Her data were critical to Crick and Watson's work. But it turns out that Franklin would not have been eligible for the prize—she had passed away four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the prize, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.

But even if she had been alive, she may still have been overlooked. Like many women scientists, Franklin was robbed of recognition throughout her career (See her section below for details.)

She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin's case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.

Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as "volunteer" faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they've made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.

They typically had paltry resources and fought uphill battles to achieve what they did, only "to have the credit attributed to their husbands or male colleagues," said Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, who studies biases against women in the sciences.

Today's women scientists believe that attitudes have changed, said Laura Hoopes at Pomona College in California, who has written extensively on women in the sciences—"until it hits them in the face." Bias against female scientists is less overt, but it has not gone away.


Here are six female researchers who did groundbreaking work—and whose names are likely unfamiliar for one reason: because they are women.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 while still a graduate student in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in England.

Pulsars are the remnants of massive stars that went supernova. Their very existence demonstrates that these giants didn't blow themselves into oblivion—instead, they left behind small, incredibly dense, rotating stars.

Bell Burnell discovered the recurring signals given off by their rotation while analyzing data printed out on three miles of paper from a radio telescope she helped assemble.

The finding resulted in a Nobel Prize, but the 1974 award in physics went to Anthony Hewish—Bell Burnell's supervisor—and Martin Ryle, also a radio astronomer at Cambridge University.

The snub generated a "wave of sympathy" for Bell Burnell. But in an interview with National Geographic News this month, the astronomer was fairly matter-of-fact.

"The picture people had at the time of the way that science was done was that there was a senior man—and it was always a man—who had under him a whole load of minions, junior staff, who weren't expected to think, who were only expected to do as he said," explained Bell Burnell, now a visiting astronomy professor at the University of Oxford.

But despite the sympathy, and her groundbreaking work, Bell Burnell said she was still subject to the prevailing attitudes toward women in academia.

"I didn't always have research jobs," she said. Many of the positions the astrophysicist was offered in her career were focused on teaching or administrative and management duties.

"[And] it was extremely hard combining family and career," Bell Burnell said, partly because the university where she worked while pregnant had no provisions for maternity leave.

She has since become quite "protective" of women in academia. Some individual schools may give them support, but Bell Burnell wants a systemic approach to boost the numbers of female researchers.

She recently chaired a working group for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, tasked with finding a strategy to boost the number of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math in Scotland. (Learn more about Bell Burnell.)

Esther Lederberg

Born in 1922 in the Bronx, Esther Lederberg would grow up to lay the groundwork for future discoveries on genetic inheritance in bacteria, gene regulation, and genetic recombination.

A microbiologist, she is perhaps best known for discovering a virus that infects bacteria—called the lambda bacteriophage—in 1951, while at the University of Wisconsin.

Lederberg, along with her first husband Joshua Lederberg, also developed a way to easily transfer bacterial colonies from one petri dish to another, called replica plating, which enabled the study of antibiotic resistance. The Lederberg method is still in use today.

Joshua Lederberg's work on replica plating played a part in his 1958 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, which he shared with George Beadle and Edward Tatum.

"She deserved credit for the discovery of lambda phage, her work on the F fertility factor, and, especially, replica plating," wrote Stanley Falkow, a retired microbiologist at Stanford University, in an email. But she didn't receive it.

Lederberg also wasn't treated fairly in terms of her academic standing at Stanford, added Falkow, a colleague of Lederberg's who spoke at her memorial service in 2006. "She had to fight just to be appointed as a research associate professor, whereas she surely should have been afforded full professorial rank. She was not alone. Women were treated badly in academia in those days."

Chien-Shiung Wu

Born in Liu Ho, China, in 1912, Chien-Shiung Wu overturned a law of physics and participated in the development of the atom bomb.

Wu was recruited to Columbia University in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project and conducted research on radiation detection and uranium enrichment. She stayed in the United States after the war and became known as one of the best experimental physicists of her time, said Nina Byers, a retired physics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the mid-1950s, two theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, approached Wu to help disprove the law of parity. The law holds that in quantum mechanics, two physical systems—like atoms—that were mirror images would behave in identical ways.

Wu's experiments using cobalt-60, a radioactive form of the cobalt metal, upended this law, which had been accepted for 30 years.

This milestone in physics led to a 1957 Nobel Prize for Yang and Lee—but not for Wu, who was left out despite her critical role. "People found [the Nobel decision] outrageous," said Byers.

Pnina Abir-Am, a historian of science at Brandeis University, agreed, adding that ethnicity also played a role.

Wu died of a stroke in 1997 in New York.

Lise Meitner

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878, Lise Meitner's work in nuclear physics led to the discovery of nuclear fission—the fact that atomic nuclei can split in two. That finding laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb.

Her story is a complicated tangle of sexism, politics, and ethnicity.

After finishing her doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, Meitner moved to Berlin in 1907 and started collaborating with chemist Otto Hahn. They maintained their working relationship for more than 30 years.

After the Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938, Meitner, who was Jewish, made her way to Stockholm, Sweden. She continued to work with Hahn, corresponding and meeting secretly in Copenhagen in November of that year.

Although Hahn performed the experiments that produced the evidence supporting the idea of nuclear fission, he was unable to come up with an explanation. Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, came up with the theory.

Hahn published their findings without including Meitner as a co-author, although several accounts say Meitner understood this omission, given the situation in Nazi Germany.

"That's the start of how Meitner got separated from the credit of discovering nuclear fission," said Lewin Sime, who wrote a biography of Meitner.

The other contributing factor to the neglect of Meitner's work was her gender. Meitner once wrote to a friend that it was almost a crime to be a woman in Sweden. A researcher on the Nobel physics committee actively tried to shut her out. So Hahn alone won the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to splitting the atom.

"Meitner's colleagues at the time, including physicist Niels Bohr, absolutely felt she was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission," Sime said. But since her name wasn't on that initial paper with Hahn—and she was left off the Nobel Prize recognizing the discovery—over the years, she has not been associated with the finding.

The nuclear physicist died in 1968 in Cambridge, England. (Learn more about Meitner's career.)

Rosalind Franklin

Born in 1920 in London, Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA that would change biology.

Hers is perhaps one of the most well-known—and shameful—instances of a researcher being robbed of credit, said Lewin Sime.

Franklin graduated with a doctorate in physical chemistry from Cambridge University in 1945, then spent three years at an institute in Paris where she learned x-ray diffraction techniques, or the ability to determine the molecular structures of crystals. (Learn more about her education and qualifications.)

She returned to England in 1951 as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College in London and soon encountered Maurice Wilkins, who was leading his own research group studying the structure of DNA.

Franklin and Wilkins worked on separate DNA projects, but by some accounts, Wilkins mistook Franklin's role in Randall's lab as that of an assistant rather than head of her own project.

Meanwhile, James Watson and Francis Crick, both at Cambridge University, were also trying to determine the structure of DNA. They communicated with Wilkins, who at some point showed them Franklin's image of DNA—known as Photo 51—without her knowledge.

Photo 51 enabled Watson, Crick, and Wilkins to deduce the correct structure for DNA, which they published in a series of articles in the journal Nature in April 1953. Franklin also published in the same issue, providing further details on DNA's structure.

Franklin's image of the DNA molecule was key to deciphering its structure, but only Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work.

Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 in London, four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel. Since Nobel prizes aren't awarded posthumously, we'll never know whether Franklin would have received a share in the prize for her work. (Learn more about Franklin and Photo 51.)

Nettie Stevens

Born in 1861 in Vermont, Nettie Stevens performed studies crucial in determining that an organism's sex was dictated by its chromosomes rather than environmental or other factors.

After receiving her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Stevens continued at the college as a researcher studying sex determination.

By working on mealworms, she was able to deduce that the males produced sperm with X and Y chromosomes—the sex chromosomes—and that females produced reproductive cells with only X chromosomes. This was evidence supporting the theory that sex determination is directed by an organism's genetics.

A fellow researcher, named Edmund Wilson, is said to have done similar work, but came to the same conclusion later than Stevens did.

Stevens fell victim to a phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect—the repression or denial of the contributions of female researchers to science.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, a prominent geneticist at the time, is often credited with discovering the genetic basis for sex determination, said Pomona College's Hoopes. He was the first to write a genetics textbook, she noted, and he wanted to magnify his contributions.

"Textbooks have this terrible tendency to choose the same evidence as other textbooks," she added. And so Stevens' name was not associated with the discovery of sex determination.

Hoopes has no doubt that Morgan was indebted to Stevens. "He corresponded with other scientists at the time about his theories," she said. "[But] his letters back and forth with Nettie Stevens were not like that. He was asking her for details of her experiments."

"When she died [of breast cancer in 1912], he wrote about her in Science, [and] he wrote that he thought she didn't have a broad view of science," said Hoopes. "But that's because he didn't ask her."

And now we'd like to ask: Who would you add to this list of female researchers who did not get the credit they deserved for their work?

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism


Really? what is it then?

A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.


Or more loosely:

a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

Science is an all encompassing term that describes Biology, physics, math, chemistry, medicine...etc. Science is NOT a profession, being a biologist is a profession, being a mathematician is a profession, being a physics professor is a profession.

I repeat, science is NOT a profession. You don't just go to a university and say you want to study science, rather, you say a specific field within science that you want to study (ie medicine, animal biology, nuclear physics...etc.).

 

[Dubious]

Women Scientists Share Their Awful Stories Of Sexism In Publishing

This week a woman scientist tweeted sexist comments made about one of her studies during the peer-review process. BuzzFeed News asked for more stories, and discovered that this kind of thing isn’t all that uncommon.

posted on May. 2, 2015, at 6:25 a.m.

Earlier this week, Fiona Ingleby, a genetics researcher at University of Sussex in the U.K., tweeted some shocking comments one of her studies had received during peer review, the venerated process that scientists use to evaluate one another’s work.

In the study, Ingleby and another woman, Megan Head, had found that male scientists graduate from Ph.D. programs with more co-authored papers, on average, than female graduates.

One particular anonymous reviewer told the women that their paper needed a man. Adding a male author to the paper, the reviewer wrote, would “serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions.”

Follow
Fiona Ingleby‏@FionaIngleby
Reviewer’s conclusion: we should get a man’s name on MS to improve it (male colleagues had already read it) (2/4)

• 6:35 AM - 29 Apr 2015

There was more. The reviewer suggested that men write better papers “simply because men, perhaps, on average work more hours per week than women, due to marginally better health and stamina.”

…and this is a bit hypocritical given the reviewer’s own ideological biases throughout the review, for example: (3/4)



The journal, PLOS One, apologized, originally in the comments at the Retraction Watch blog, and later in a blog post on its website. The journal also asked the editor that handled Ingleby’s review to step down, and removed the unnamed reviewer from its pool. But the controversy is still hot on Twitter, spawning a hashtag (#AddMaleAuthorGate) full of frustrated women and funny memes.

It’s hard to pin down exactly how, or how often, sexism happens during peer review. A 2013 report found that the same studies were rated better if the reviewers thought the author was a man than if they thought it was a woman. That’s just one study, but peer review happens against a backdrop of well-documented gender disparities in the sciences.

Anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to evidence. But given the lack of research, on Wednesday evening BuzzFeed News asked Twitter for more stories of sexism in science.

Over the next two days, that tweet was retweeted nearly 500 times, and a number of women reached out to share their experiences. Some of the stories involved blatant sexism; others were condescending or creepy. One woman’s experience was so bad she founded her own journal to make the process better for others.

Mick Watson @BioMickWatson
#AddMaleAuthorGate

4:08 PM - 30 Apr 2015


One story came from Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard. On top of her work studying lactation (she has a blog called Mammals Suck), Hinde also researches how sexism affects female scientists. She was the senior author on the Survey of Academic Field Experiences, also known as the SAFE study, a groundbreaking survey that detailed the sexual harassment, and even sexual assault, experienced by trainees and young researchers at field sites, such as archaeologists at digs and zoologists studying animals in the wild.

Of the 516 women who took the SAFE survey, 26% said they had been sexually assaulted by colleagues, and 70% reported being sexually harassed, most frequently by their superiors at the sites.

In 2013, the group presented their preliminary data at an anthropology conference. Shortly afterward, Hinde got a call from an established male colleague.

“He said, ‘but 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 which point I literally pulled the phone away from my ear and just looked at it, like, are you freaking kidding me?”

This man, she added, had a reputation for inappropriately touching junior colleagues, and for standing in doorways and forcing female trainees to brush past him as they walked through.

“When that thing broke on Twitter yesterday,” she said, “I was like, yep, that is dismally unfortunate and not a rare occurrence.”

Hinde declined to disclose the professor’s name or institution. The reticence to name and shame is both understandable and common, given the small world of academia: You never know who will end up on your hiring committee, reviewing a paper that only you could write, or otherwise be in a position to professionally harm you and people you are close to.


Networks are incredibly important to academics, said Kate Sang, who studies the sociology of the workplace at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. She also reached out to BuzzFeed News to discuss her experience with sexist peer reviews.

One of Sang’s bad experiences came from a paper in which she tracked patterns of co-authorship in a leading journal in her field over the course of 10 years. She found that white men frequently publish together, whereas female and minority scientists are more often at the periphery of these networks.

“One of the reviewers argued that the reason there are so few women and black academics in the social networks is because the research they produced just isn’t good enough to get into the top journals — and the editor agreed,” Sang said.

Sang and her co-authors revised the paper based on the other, constructive reviews, and resubmitted it to a different journal (she said she would not submit to the original journal again). But the paper was rejected again, receiving a different set of offensive comments. She didn’t keep the emails, but remembers that the reviewer wrote that her research was biased against white men.

Another time, Sang said, she wrote a paper about feminist researchers in the U.K. One of the reviewers “said that they just didn’t agree that women are marginalized in universities, and also felt that gay people are very privileged within universities — which is contrary to all the evidence,” Sang said. She has now decided to submit the paper to an explicitly feminist journal, to avoid those kinds of comments.

These experiences have had such a profound effect on Sang that she founded her own journal, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity, which will publish its first issue later this year. Their guidelines for reviews are public, and attempt to foster a positive environment, especially for early career researchers. One rule, for example, states that reviews “must not use language which is sexist, racist, disabilist or otherwise perpetuates inequalities.”

Sang’s journal will use “double-blind” review, meaning that neither authors nor reviewers will know the others’ names. PLOS One, on the other hand, is moving in a more unusual direction: open peer reviews with the reviewers clearly named.

“We are working on new features to make the review process more open and transparent, since evidence suggests that review is more constructive and civil when the reviewers’ identities are known to the authors,” editorial director Damian Pattinson wrote on the PLOS blog Friday.

Jonathan Roberts‏@TheSarcasticOwl
Just found out about #AddMaleAuthorGate. Naive I know, but shocked such misogyny still exits in 21st century science.



Not all peer reviewers are overtly sexist. Some are just condescending and creepy, like the reviewer who tore apart a paper by Imperial College of London biologist Natalie Cooper and then told her to “Please consider this a light spanking.” Or this one, forwarded to BuzzFeed News by a female assistant professor in the School for Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston:

Many of the researchers speaking out study gender disparity in academia, so they’re hyperaware of sexism as it comes to them. It’s worth considering how many women, not already keyed into these topics, are getting sexist reviews and never talking about them — especially when, according to a report by the Center for Talent Innovation, a nonprofit D.C. think tank that focuses on diversity in the workplace, women are 45% more likely than men to leave a career in science.

Sang has some advice for researchers dealing with discriminatory peer reviews. “If you’re getting those kinds of comments, you’re probably doing something right,” she said. “You don’t want those people to agree with you anyway.”

Women Scientists Share Their Awful Stories Of Sexism In Publishing - BuzzFeed News

Science is an all encompassing term that describes Biology, physics, math, chemistry, medicine...etc. Science is NOT a profession, being a biologist is a profession, being a mathematician is a profession, being a physics professor is a profession.

I repeat, science is NOT a profession. You don't just go to a university and say you want to study science, rather, you say a specific field within science that you want to study (ie medicine, animal biology, nuclear physics...etc.).

So according to your narrowed definition nothing is a profession....

being a biologist is a profession, being a mathematician is a profession, being a physics professor is a profession.

How so?

Accounting can be now specialized further say forensics accounting , financial accounting so does anthropology....So what is a profession then?

Simple google will show you this:

a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

You don't just go to a university and say you want to study science, rather, you say a specific field within science that you want to study (ie medicine, animal biology, nuclear physics...etc.).

Sadly the word profession is older than the branches of science....Like I said even today other degrees are also specializing...

When one says science profession it is understood ....and the word is interchanged with occupation...

 

[Jungibaaz]

Because it's true. I find it difficult to take female scientists seriously. The best scientists have always been and always will be men.

And the term scientists is an all encompassing word for anybody who works in the sciences. Not all scientists are born equal, I know many 'scientists' who's idea of science is spending months in a laboratory running experiments with slight variations in the variables.

What's your experience with female and male colleagues? It seems your were at one time or another a maths or physics student, or at the very least and engineer. Also, this begs the question, why don't you contribute content some content here, we have a lack of pure science guys in our TT, at least that's what I guess on inspection.

 

[That Guy]

So according to your narrowed definition nothing is a profession....

How so?

Accounting can be now specialized further say forensics accounting , financial accounting so does anthropology....So what is a profession then?

Simple google will show you this:

a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.


Sadly the word profession is older than the branches of science....Like I said even today other degrees are also specializing...

When one says science profession it is understood ....and the word is interchanged with occupation...

Seriously? This isn't a debate, what I'm stating is a FACT. This isn't about me narrowing something down, Science is just a TERM that encompasses these various fields. You don't get paid to do science, you get paid to do biological research, chemical research, mathematical calculations. There is no such thing as a science job, but there is a such thing as a biological research career.

When one says science profession, they have no idea what they're talking about. The word is not interchanged with occupation, because scientists aren't all the same. A chemical researcher doesn't do the same job as a biologist, or a physicist.

Again, this is NOT a debate.

 

[kbd-raaf]

What's your experience with female and male colleagues? It seems your were at one time or another a maths or physics student, or at the very least and engineer. Also, this begs the question, why don't you contribute content some content here, we have a lack of pure science guys in our TT, at least that's what I guess on inspection.

I don't have female colleagues. I do have female subordinates. To date I have not met a single female who was capable of a provocative, non pedestrian conversation. Let alone engaging in proper scientific exposition. I'm sure they exist. Just not very many of them.

The thinktank I work for has also enacted an unspoken and unwritten rule, that anybody that bitches about discrimination or any other such bullshit will be fired. Not on the spot, but eventually.

I would certainly be happy to contribute. How do I go about doing that?

 

[Dubious]

This isn't a debate, what I'm stating is a FACT.

A fact is backed by evidence not COZ I SAID SO Machoism

Science is just a TERM that encompasses these various fields.

Yes yet if you google science profession you do find even search engines would lead you to job seeking sites...

You don't get paid to do science, you get paid to do biological research, chemical research, mathematical calculations.

You are paid to be a scientist...which is loosely but still defined!

And if you read the topic it IS referring to all fields of SCIENCE

and the sentence structure is referring to it as a MALE PROFESSION over a SCIENCE profession....meaning field/ occupation..And it is a SCIENCE website so I guess you let them decide what is write in contrast to your COZ I SAID SO HENCE IT IS A FACT attitude

When people want to include ALL THE FIELDS instead of spending time writing each field they call it COLLECTIVELY as science ..

There is no such thing as a science job, but there is a such thing as a biological research career.

Science Careers - from the Journal Science - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers and many other sites do not agree with you

The word is not interchanged with occupation, because scientists aren't all the same. A chemical researcher doesn't do the same job as a biologist, or a physicist.

Oh the sheer ignorance...It is a COLLECTIVE word....

Like saying AUTHORS although there are sub categories of the type of author one cane be
Same goes for Accounting though one can be a forensic accountant, same goes for management - process management, economicas - micro economics....

When one says science profession, they have no idea what they're talking about.

Seriously? Go write to the website pointing out you know more than them

A chemical researcher doesn't do the same job as a biologist, or a physicist.

Neither does a line manager, product manager....yet people still go manager...

Because it's true. I find it difficult to take female scientists seriously. The best scientists have always been and always will be men.

Ah based on your own experience than that is some limited experience indeed

I don't have female colleagues. I do have female subordinates. To date I have not met a single female who was capable of a provocative, non pedestrian conversation. Let alone engaging in proper scientific exposition. I'm sure they exist. Just not very many of them.

 

[Jungibaaz]

I don't have female colleagues. I do have female subordinates. To date I have not met a single female who was capable of a provocative, non pedestrian conversation. Let alone engaging in proper scientific exposition. I'm sure they exist. Just not very many of them.

This I completely understand. I have had a rant recently about this very issue among your average female, especially in the West. Sad thing is, if they don't conform to this brain dead persona and make it their own, they'd be the ones considered weird and a misfit.

The thinktank I work for has also enacted an unspoken and unwritten rule, that anybody that bitches about discrimination or any other such bullshit will be fired. Not on the spot, but eventually.

I've seen this where I've been too, anyone that bitches full stop has no place. Every time we had a new intern, we'd give them a bit of guidance, let them spend their time as they please, the tasks we gave require hard work no doubt, especially for someone just out of studying at their uni or still currently studying. Almost all new interns tend to do the tasks given to them, they are then selected based, solely, on how well they get the job done without whining, how well they work in a team, whether they meet deadlines and whether the hard work is there, irrespective of how well the outcome was.

I recall one female intern showing up, who I and another colleague were charged with showing around. I could tell just within a 5 minute conversation that she'd be out of there in no time and wouldn't be offered a position. The personality (or lack thereof) is very telling, you could tell this one was a dull character, who made it through the uni years memorizing textbooks, having no external knowledge or interest, making no effort to learn something new. And in terms of conversational skills, you'd rather be talking to a vegetable, there's more life in it.

And as expected, because of our 'liberal' time management policy, she procrastinated the first few weeks, didn't even bother learning some of the new stuff that was assigned, which we knew she wouldn't know. She stopped showing up all together for a few days, we had to chase her a lot to ask her what was going on, in the end we got a poorly made and rushed assignment where it was clear no background theory was done. This person then had the gall to blame others and bitch about discrimination.

On the other hand, back in university I have some very capable female colleagues and I still do so now. But from experience, I've found that most women prefer working with male colleagues, apparently, aside from the usual problems colleagues may have, some women don't get along with each other, and there are plenty who prefer working with men.

I would certainly be happy to contribute. How do I go about doing that?

@Slav Defence Is your man.

Just pick a field, or topic you feel passionately about, or care about, or know a lot about. Something you think is worth sharing, write up a piece or article, throw in some references and post it in the relevant section. TT stuff comes after you've got some of these contributions under your belt.

It's not an assignment, you do it your own way and in your own time. I just thought it'd be nice to have a break from the usual military/geo-political stuff here, some science and technology would be nice too, though again, you can write about just about anything within the forum rules limits.

 

[kbd-raaf]

Ah based on your own experience than that is some limited experience indeed

The first part of what I said, yes, certainly. The second is an universal fact.

Just pick a field, or topic you feel passionately about, or care about, or know a lot about. Something you think is worth sharing, write up a piece or article, throw in some references and post it in the relevant section. TT stuff comes after you've got some of these contributions under your belt.

I have something in mind. I'll write it up shortly.

On the other hand, back in university I have some very capable female colleagues and I still do so now. But from experience, I've found that most women prefer working with male colleagues, apparently, aside from the usual problems colleagues may have, some women don't get along with each other, and there are plenty who prefer working with men.

That's just it. I think women are better able to learn in a structured environment. Assignments, assigned reading, etc work well for them. Perhaps even better than the average male.

However we cannot mistake learning for understanding.

 

[Dubious]

The second is an universal fact.

Universal fact backed by no support only coz a male says so doesnt make it a fact

Why do science websites still use it? Let alone a a professional science website/ journal runners called SCIENCE / AAAS ? I am sure they know what they are talking about as compared to random internet people....

Kindly only quote me if you have something substantial...

 

[That Guy]

A fact is backed by evidence not COZ I SAID SO Machoism

No, it's based on what the word means, not what I say.

Yes yet if you google science profession you do find even search engines would lead you to job seeking sites...

I've said it a million times, you can find whatever you're looking for on the internet, even if it is not real.

You are paid to be a scientist...which is loosely but still defined!

A scientist is a loose term, which we both agree on, but loose terms have no clear definition. The closest that comes is this..

sci·en·tist
ˈsīən(t)əst/
noun

1. a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences.

And if you read the topic it IS referring to all fields of SCIENCE

I was talking about the title alone, and that wasn't even your argument.

and the sentence structure is referring to it as a MALE PROFESSION over a SCIENCE profession....meaning field/ occupation..And it is a SCIENCE website so I guess you let them decide what is write in contrast to your COZ I SAID SO HENCE IT IS A FACT attitude

Just because you're good at biology, physics...etc, doesn't mean you have a good grasp of English.

When people want to include ALL THE FIELDS instead of spending time writing each field they call it COLLECTIVELY as science ..

Science Careers - from the Journal Science - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers and many other sites do not agree with you

How about actually going on the site yourself, instead of just posting it as a link. You'd know just how wrong you are, if you bothered to actually check your own sources.

Oh the sheer ignorance...It is a COLLECTIVE word....

I said this a million times already, and you have the guts to call ME ignorant?

Like saying AUTHORS although there are sub categories of the type of author one cane be
Same goes for Accounting though one can be a forensic accountant, same goes for management - process management, economicas - micro economics....

Do you even know what you're talking about? Comparing apples to oranges.

Seriously? Go write to the website pointing out you know more than them

Flawed logic, nothing more.

Neither does a line manager, product manager....yet people still go manager...

A ridiculous comparison, again.

Name me ONE job that is simply science. Not biology, not chemistry, not physics...etc, just science. I'll save you the trouble, you can't.

All you've done is prove my point, nothing more. Science is not a field, it is an all encompassing term for different fields and career paths.

You're arguing for the sake of arguing. There is NO such thing as a science profession, only BRANCHES OF SCIENCE

Branches of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is not me making up things, this is a well established public fact.

You've gone from "Science is a profession" to "Science is a collective term that can be interchangeable with career".