r/science • u/adearman91 • Nov 20 '20

RETRACTED - Social Science The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19723-8
18 Upvotes

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5

u/scotch_scotch_scotch Nov 21 '20

Of note, this paper caused quite a stir and there are multiple calls to have it retracted.

5

u/Garden_Wizard Nov 20 '20

For those interested, in a nutshell it says that junior women in academia do better if they have male mentors. Or in other words, women who have female mentors do worse.

I guess my response is 1. Why are you asking such questions to begin with 2. The result is probably due to underlying institutional sexism, yet this is not mentioned as a possibility.

13

u/madasahatter11 Nov 20 '20

Asking questions in science, what a silly thing to do

4

u/bostwickenator BS | Computer Science Nov 20 '20

This paper is huge I didn't have time to review all of their methods. I'm not sure I agree with their conclusions

  1. It's useful to know if our collective attempts to fix gender bias in science are working well.

2.

One potential explanation could be that, historically, male scientists had enjoyed more privileges and access to resources than their female counterparts, and thus were able to provide more support to their protégés

1

u/omnomelette Nov 20 '20

Ha! "historically"

2

u/[deleted] Nov 23 '20 edited Nov 24 '20

[deleted]

1

u/mhandanna Nov 23 '20

In general the rule is men and women are equal unless women are better than publish away (women are wonderful effect... e.g. completely false data to try and claim female leaders were better at COVID... first data actually shows opposite, stats gymnastics was needed to show otherwise (which they managed e.g. by "pairing" Bangladesh vs Pakistan (60 million more people, or NZ (island with 10,000 miles no neighbours, in summer, size of UK but 5 million population, pre exististing quarantine laws... with Ireland, winter, next to Europe epicentre, etc.... but why even ask this? I mean yes women fared much worse, but its nothing to do with gender, but remarkably they came with opposite conclusions by fiddling numbers.

However, if paper does not meet the above law, do this:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/

1

u/14jvalle Nov 21 '20 edited Nov 21 '20

I have yet to read the paper, so my comments will not be in defense of this paper but in the general need for research in this field.

  1. Why are you asking such questions to begin with

We need to understand these biases at various levels, in order to develop effective strategies to even out the playing field.

It is important to understand the factors that influence an individual's academic/scientific career in order to have data demonstrating of current policies/strategies are working and identify areas for improvement.

The result is probably due to underlying sexism, yet this is not mentioned as a possibility.

Evidently, male scientists have held the grand majority in the scientific community. However, I can anecdotally state that in the past few decades there has been an increase in female faculty members at my university in various department, with some now having a majority. Hopefully, this is true for other institutions.

It is expected that, at this time, male mentorship may generally be "better" not because of some innate ability in males... But just because previously, males were prevalent and as saturated every field of science. Therefore, it is more likely that we are currently in a lag, transition, phase and in the future, as female scientist mature, things will even out.

We just need to have an understanding of how these biases are currently at play, so that we can inhibit any feedback loop.