Thursday, June 21, 2018

Our Top Picks From June 21st, 2018


PWN's own founders, Dr. Ghazaleh Sadri-Vakili and Dr. Courtney Miller, are two of the many talented speakers featured in this video from Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2017 on "Addressing Issues Facing Women in the Early Stages of their Scientific Career."

Thank you to Jacqueline McGinty for pointing out the NASEM Webinar happening June 26th, as well as sharing this Harvard Business Review article, highlighting reasons that might be holding women back from taking leadership roles in STEM fields.

NASEM Releases Report on Sexual Harassment in Science, Engineering, and Medicine
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) June 12 released itsreport, “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.” The committee recommends that a key area of focus to reduce and prevent sexual harassment (including the most prevalent type, gender harassment) is to create a culture and climate that does not allow such behavior, giving six key recommendations for institutions. To assist institutions, faculty, and students in these efforts, the NASEM report website provides several resources. NASEM is hosting a discussion and responses to the report on June 26 in Irvine, CA, which can also be attended by webcast. Following the report release, Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC President and CEO, issued astatement. Read more at AAMC Washington Highlights. 

Flickr Image from Simon Bleasdale.


In the Personnel Today article by Jo Faragher, a discussion on the woman who coined the term "Glass Ceiling," Marilyn Loden. She introduced this phrase 40 years ago in 1978, but even in that amount of time, she doesn't think things have improved much. On International women's day, she comments on the sad reality that most people can-and do-rationalize women being paid 80% of what a man gets paid and that while some industries appear to be breaking tiny holes through the glass ceiling, other industries have only reinforced it.


Gender-bias research doesn't sell, according to Dr.'s Formanowicz, Cislak, and Saguy in their paper "Bias against research on gender bias." This blog post sums up the fact that while there are many types of bias that happens throughout STEM fields (race and gender bias being the most prevalent) only research done on race bias makes it to the most prestigious journals. There are many reasons why this may be, including people thinking 'women are exaggerating the issue,' or the thought that "there are more 'inter-gender collaborations' than 'inter-racial' therefore the gender issue may not even exist." How does that type of thinking impact the advancement of gender equality, and what can we do to help rectify the situation?


Flickr Image from UN Women Gallery. 


Where did we come from, how are we getting there, and how do we keep going? In Fiona M. Watt's Nature Reviews article (More) Women in Science, she talks about how things have changed from her 2006 opinion articles, as well as how the women in professional settings have gained their success.

Check out the paper "Researchers preferentially collaborate with same-gendered colleagues across the life sciences."
Abstract excerpt: "Here, we test whether researchers preferentially collaborate with same-gendered colleagues, using more stringent methods and a larger dataset than in past work. Our results reaffirm that researchers preferentially co-publish with colleagues of the same gender, and show that this 'gender homophily' is slightly stronger today than it was 10 years ago. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence that homophily is driven mostly by senior academics, and no evidence that homophily is stronger in fields where women are in the minority. Interestingly, journals with a high impact factor for their discipline tended to have comparatively low homophily, as predicted if mixed-gender teams produce better research."

Related to the article above, this piece, "Opinion: Gender Diversity leads to better science" highlights the reasons why data actually suggests there is "gender-diversity dividend in science." 



Check out these research job listings: 

https://jobflash.informz.net/informzdataservice/onlineversion/ind/bWFpbGluZ2luc3RhbmNlaWQ9MjM3MTY5MCZzdWJzY3JpYmVyaWQ9MzYxODMzMTEx


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