Our Picks for January 18th, 2019

Our Picks for January 18th, 2019

Take a look at the following articles selected by the PWN Blog team. The list is short, but interesting!

As we settle in the new year, this article looks back to the 5 most profound changes that the Women in STEM fields underwent in 2018. The author, JR Thorpe, highlights Nobel Prize Laureates, discoveries by women-led NASA teams and the #MeToo movement.

In this article published by the Huffington Post, senior reporter Emily Peck reviews the results of a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The study focused on the influence of sexual harassment in academia on the career advancement of women in the scientific, technical and medical workforce. One of the main results reported is that the best predictor of sexual harassment is the organizational climate of the company, i.e. the culture cultivated by the organization. 

Finally, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) gathered recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2017 American Community Survey) in this short summary explaining the current state of gender pay gap. One of the main conclusions of the data analysis is that, although women are as effective as men in negotiating wages, they are paid less across the board, even with advanced degrees.

Wishing everyone a productive, goal-setting January!

Our first picks for the New Year!

Happy 2019! Hope everyone is doing well and starting off the new year on the right foot.

First up, we have a short piece from Forbes. The Financial Times newspaper in London recently created a bot that detected when a journalist was disproportionately quoting men in their writing. Apparently, 79% of people quoted in the Financial Times were men! With the implementation of this bot, the goal is to break the tendency to rely on old habits and instead have journalists branch out in their sources and create a more diverse, vibrant culture. With companies taking progressive actions like these, it evokes a sense of hope for gender-balance.

However, even with the most progressive companies, there is a sneaky clause called "forced arbitration" buried deep within employee and consumer contracts. Essentially, if there is any grievance or dispute within the company, the employee or consumer is required to waive their right to sue, participate in a class action lawsuit, or appeal. Basically, it's up to the company how they want to settle a dispute, and they don't have to document their resolve or make it public to anyone! You can see how this could be problematic in a variety of cases, and in particular, sexual harassment. Read more about how this unjust clause if negatively affecting the gender balance we strive to achieve.

An in depth post from Buzzfeed introduces us to 5 feminist academics spearheading the rights of transgender people in Britain. These women discuss why trans rights are feminist rights, why they feel the need to take action, and tackle the misconceptions we often hear surrounding the topics of transgender people. Is biology at odds with society? How do you address children who are questioning their gender identity? Who can make the decision in such cases? What does the future hold? Read on to understand the issues at hand and how these women are fighting to make the world a better place.

Next, a study found that when leaders take sexual harassment seriously, so do their employees. This makes sense, right? I know we're all upstanding citizens of the world, but say we started to stroll in late to work every other day and your boss never takes action to correct this behavior, what's the big deal? But if we know our employer will enforce promptness and take action if the offense gets to be too much, we're gonna make sure to be on time. On a much grander scale, with something as serious as sexual harassment, it's incredibly important to let your employees know that there is no room for such behavior and that serious consequences will be implemented. Read on here!

The Chronicle Review asked presidents, adjuncts, scientists, humanists, senior scholars, and junior professors the write about woman and power in academe. Read the plethora of different perspectives here. 

That's all for this week! Thanks for stopping by!

Our Picks for December 16th

Hope everyone in academia has gotten through the semester unscathed!

First, we have an article from the Boston Globe describing that while women are making moves to empower themselves in the workplace, men also have their part to play in being a colleague in the age of #MeToo.

Second, this article highlights that even "woke" men are not immune to implicit bias. It's one thing to believe in equality in theory, but when it comes to practice, it's not quite as simple.

Unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of us can relate to the situations illustrated in this article. Casual sexism does seem to permeate the field of science. An important theme here is if you were in these situations, what would you do? I once had someone tell me my data was "cute" at a conference. Well, my reaction sure was not cute. What experiences have you all had, and how did you react?

This next article does a thorough job of breaking down how sexual harassment claims in the work place are handled and what their outcomes tend to be. Does the problem get addressed? How? Does the person reporting see any benefit in doing so? Does the offender face consequences?

Lastly, an article from The Conversation discusses how women over-invest in their workplace capabilities. Why is that Canadian physicist Donna Strickland did not receive a promotion to full professor until after she had won a Nobel Prize? Simply put: She never applied. Why do women have a greater propensity to over-invest than their male colleagues? What does it mean to over-invest, and what does the research have to say about it? Perhaps more importantly, what can we do with this information?

Thanks for stopping by!

Our Picks for December 7, 2018

Our Picks for December 7, 2018

This interesting article, a collaboration between Violeta Politoff, Senior Researcher for ANROWS (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety) and the National Community Attitudes Survey on Violence against Women, reports recent survey results about public response towards sexual assault and violence against women carried out in Australia. The report includes surprising results, such as 30% of Australians believing that if a woman sends a nude image to her partner, she is partly responsible if he shares it without her permission, 8% attributing responsibility and blame to women who were raped while alcohol- or drug-affected. Moreover, 12% of Australians absolve men of blame if they are alcohol- or drug-affected at the time they perpetrate rape.The article also discusses the disregard for consent and mistrust of women's reports.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to promote faculty mentoring for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, as reported by the University Gazette. This grant, lead by the Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence, Erin Malloy, was resubmitted several times (perseverance matters!) and "seeks to promote the success of women, and in particular women of color, in STEM fields across the University."

In this report, author Virginia Gewin briefly presents the results of a recent study that analyzed the educational impact of female- vs male-authored research. The author of the study, Mike Thelwall, gathered information using the reference manager program Mendeley. After analyzing 2014 articles in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, he reached the conclusion that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India.

The #MeToo movement as allowed to highlight and fight deep disparities between man and women in society. However, this article suggests that not all changes are good, since in certain working environments such as Wall Street finance, men appear to fear women and prefer to exclude them to prevent any possible harassment allegation. The article mentions the big loss this attitude entails for women, and touches on the disparities in mentorship in the finance fields. 

A cool new tool has emerged on twitter to estimate the gender distribution of your followers and those you follow, based on their profile descriptions or first names. The PWN Blog team found it thanks to Maciej Kosiło's post. If you notice an imbalance, don't hesitate to follow more people (men or women) and compensate! 

 

Finally, when visiting this link, you can be redirected to several free PDF books dealing with race, gender, sexuality and culture. Some links are expired but most of them work and can provide interesting reads during the holidays!

Our Picks for December 1, 2018

This week in Gender Bias...

Kathleen E. Grogan wrote an excellent summary for Nature Ecology & Evolution of the research on bias, mostly gender bias, in science. She calls for ALL scientists to take this data seriously and take steps to reduce bias in their fields. Here are some statistics from the piece that stood out to me, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

-"At the current rate of increase of 0.5% in female authors per year, we will not reach gender parity in last author position for at least 50 years in biology and molecular biology."
 -"Once published, manuscripts in high-impact journals with men in key author positions are more frequently cited (38.9 citations per paper) than papers with women in key author positions in those same journals (35.2 citations per paper)."
 -"Faculty, regardless of gender, race or discipline, are more likely to respond to requests from white male prospective graduate students than from any other category of gender or race, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and at private institutions."
 -"The proportion of female speakers at conferences in evolutionary biology is positively correlated with the proportion of female symposia organizers"
 -"Men are 15% more likely to share data when the request comes from another man."
 -"Studies suggest male STEM faculty evaluate research demonstrating gender bias as significantly lower in quality than female STEM faculty do."

If you read all of that and still thought, "well, bias against women is getting better! It's not so bad anymore -- how much can that actually matter?"... I have a fun site for you! This gender bias simulator shows how small amounts of bias can compound through career stages.

Looks kind of like biology fields to me...

And if you're now feeling like you want to do something about gender bias -- check out this list of tips for improving gender balance in the workforce written by Deana Fairchild from Women Who Code. Some of the tips are targeted at companies rather than academic departments, but the some of the ideas could be applied anywhere.

Other Articles of Interest

On Learning and Teaching Coding

With computational analysis becoming a greater part of most research fields, Olivia Guest argues that we should teach coding to students earlier in their careers. Coding just isn't taught in undergrad in female-dominated fields like psychology -- which perhaps has something to do with gender bias -- but also prevents the development of coding-confident women. Read this for a pep talk on (a) why you, too, can learn to code (if you don't already!) and (b) why you should teach that you all of your trainees! In the words of Olivia, "Saying that some people can’t learn to code is a ridiculous, pessimistic, and elitist argument that only results in gatekeeping."

#MeToo for MDs: Dealing with Harassment from Patients

27% of medical doctors face the complicated problem of being sexually harassed by patients. The American Association of Medical Colleges summarizes the problem and recommendations for addressing it.

Dare to Self Promote!

If you missed the session on self-promotion at SfN (moderated by our own Courtney Miller), you can read about it here!