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posted by martyb on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-step-in-the-right-direction dept.

Invited speakers at neuroimmunology conferences in 2016 were disproportionately male, and not because male scientists were producing higher quality work, according to a new study. Instead, qualified female scientists were overlooked by organizing committees. Robyn Klein, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine, of neuroscience, and of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, discussed the findings, published online April 18 in Nature Immunology.

[...] There's a growing body of research showing that female scientists' contributions to their fields are often not reflected in the number of speaker invitations they receive, and that this under-recognition hurts their careers and slows the pace of scientific progress. While this bias may be unconscious, data from sources such as BiasWatchNeuro -- founded in 2015 to track the proportion of female conference speakers relative to the proportion of female faculty in the relevant field -- show that it is widespread. Encouragingly, the data also show that bringing such biases to light helps to reduce their impact.

Robyn S Klein, et al. Speaking out about gender imbalance in invited speakers improves diversity. Nature Immunology, 2017; 18 (5): 475 DOI: 10.1038/ni.3707


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @03:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @03:08PM (#498341)

    Publishing quantity is also a suspect metric for research quality. There's people (teams) who pump out 12 papers a year on the same topic with heavy use of cut and paste and then there's those who write 1 (or fewer) from scratch that contain real insights. And everything in between.

    She could use number of citations as a metric or one of the indices (h-index, etc) that try to distill the magic sauce. But none is The Truth as to quality of research.

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