Posted on 12/13/2013 10:43:32 AM PST by reaganaut1
Despite years of progress for women in science, men continue to dominate scientific publishing in nearly every country, according to new research in the journal Nature.
Not only do men publish far more research than their female colleagues, but papers with men as the dominant author are more likely to be cited by other researchers.
Analyzing the bylines on more than five million research papers published from 2008 to 2012, the researchers determined that more than 70 percent of the authors were men. Nearly the same percentage holds for lead authorship.
Such a gender gap is not consistent with the ratio of male to female science students in most countries, suggesting a “leaky pipeline” is at least part of the problem, said the new paper’s author, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University.
In almost every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, she said, “women are out-matriculating men” in college, “and it’s nearly 50-50 for graduate programs.”
“Where we’re losing them is at the full professor rank,” she continued. “Somehow we’re losing women.”
She emphasized that this did not mean women were naturally unsuited for scientific work, a line of thinking famously expressed by the economist Lawrence H. Summers in 2005, when he was president of Harvard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Larry Summers is owed an apology.”
Indeed.
Solution is simple. Just decree that the number of publishings by men cannot exceed the number of publishings by women and you achieve equality :-)
Of course it's the NYT so it's superficial, but the fact that women are "out matriculating" men doesn't mean a whole lot if they're majoring in soft options that don't really require anything more than a BA.
>>Despite years of progress for women in science, men continue to dominate scientific publishing in nearly every country, according to new research in the journal Nature.
Today is the same as yesterday. What’s the news angle?
Gender Studies Science just doesn’t get enough funding.
Heaven forbid that we realize that men are different from women and that our brains are wired differently. Almost every significant invention, medical breakthrough, device or method used by civilization is the result of work by a white or Asian man. PERIOD.
Men: We Accomplished Stuff
Women: We Did Too
Coming soon to a journal near you...
/s
“men continue to dominate scientific publishing”
This burning issue has kept me awake some nights.
I’m going to have to force myself to think about the idiots in D.C. spending us into oblivion to get my mind off of it.
Gee! maybe it’s because they’re better at it!
What do they want? quotas there too? Enough with the quotas!
Obviously we need to suspend, indefinitely, Men’s athletics and use the money for women’s studies until the publishing gap is eliminated.
LOL.\
Women researchers (AKA women) demand "balance" in their lives, which precludes spending their lives in the lab.
But they make up for that with multitasking.
What I see is that men are better than women at prostituting themselves to secure Grant funds.
Good point.
Political science, anyone?
Today is the same as yesterday: women and minorities hardest hit.
But here is a somewhat more alarming stat:
| Demo | Number | Pct |
| White | 601 | 41 |
| Asian American | 32 | 2 |
| Hispanic American | 16 | 1 |
| African American | 15 | 1 |
| Other US Citizens | 17 | 1 |
| Non-US Citizens | 800 | 54 |
No, not the fact that African Americans constitute barely 1% of PhD physicists. The fact that MOST physics PhD's in American universities are being earned by people who are not US citizens.
And, I will be willing to bet some serious money that most of the 18% of women receiving PhD's are in that category.
Not all published research comes out of academia.
Noted... that is why I made the clarification. The thing to be clear about is all researchers were once graduate students. When they move onto the “real world” they just become Professionals... rather than ordinary Padawan Learners.
Many of them are actually entrepreneurs -- though heaven forfend they would ever admit that to themselves(!) -- who don't want to do somebody else's research. So they find people who'll fund the research they want to do. That isn't whoring: it's free enterprise.
But be that as it may, I suspect your hypothesis is incorrect anyway. Fewer women than men are publishing because fewer women than men are doing research. And I believe that the only one of the hard sciences in which females are anywhere near to parity with males is in biological sciences. As I posted above, the number of women receiving PhD's in physics in the most recent two year period for which AIP has statistics is 18%, and based on reasonable expectation values (they don't actually provide a breakdown) that probably means the number of American citizens receiving PhD's who are females is probably no more than 10%. That number is abominable, but certainly much better than it used to be. In my PhD year, (1978) only one of sixteen students was a woman -- and she didn't pass her candidacy exam [neither did three of the men.] So our percentage was 0%.
All other things being equal, 18% of PhD's will publish about 18% of the research, whether they're in academia or industry. I seriously doubt the numbers are a whole lot higher in mathematics, Chem, Chem Eng, EE, Cmp Sci ... I could be wrong. I haven't looked anything up outside of my discipline. I can tell you that I took 4 graduate level math courses as an undergrad, and there was not a woman in any of them, for whatever that's worth.
I suspect a lot of the research women are being credited with in this article is in education and behavioral science. I made a great deal of money as a grad student writing SAS procedures for clueless education DED candidates and aspiring PhD sociologists. If the kind of data they were misapplying statistics to is any indication, what they were doing was not research in any meaningful sense of the word. [And, BTW, about half of them were guys, so I'm not claiming women don't do good work, or men don't do crappy research. ]
Nothing against women. My wife and I have raised our daughter to believe she can be anything she wants to be. But she is simply not as interested in mathematically oriented disciplines as her brothers, by her own choice.
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