Interesting Features at PWN for 4.4.15

News from the PWN Pipeline:

10 Things Not to Say at Work

Tara Sophia Mohr, career coach and founder of the Playing Big women's leadership program, suggests eliminating 10 common words and phrases from daily workplace speech in order to make thoughts and statements more powerful. Among these suggestions is dropping the word 'just' ("I just want to check in..." "I'm just concerned that...") that can make the speaker sound whiny and dropping undermining qualifiers such as "I'm no expert, but..." or ""I'm just thinking off the top of my head..." which combines both 'just' and an undermining qualifier. Click the link above to check out all of Mohr's tips.

"Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster than female doctoral students."

Among other patronizing and sexist comments, an anonymous peer reviewer of the open access journal PLoS One suggested that the two female authors of a manuscript describing the influence of gender differences on the transition between doctoral and postdoctoral work would benefit by adding male coauthors to ensure that their data were interpreted correctly. The reviewer also commented that only males have the personality and traits necessary to make it to the top jobs in science. The manuscript was ultimately rejected by PLoS One, although the national attention garnered by the sexist review has resulted in an appeal at the journal. It is remarkable that a manuscript describing data that supports ongoing gender bias in academia should yield such unconstructive and gender biased criticism.