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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: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Monday April 24 2017, @08:34AM (1 child)

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday April 24 2017, @08:34AM (#498713) Journal

    I read about a maths professor that noticed many of his female students at advanced level had small breasts. Which in turn is dependent on estrogen levels. I had similar hints in night life too in regards to life priorities etc.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Soylentbob on Monday April 24 2017, @01:12PM

    by Soylentbob (6519) on Monday April 24 2017, @01:12PM (#498813)

    Or maybe the more attractive men and women (assuming here that most men prefer bigger secondary sexual characteristics) get more distractions during their education and therefore sometimes drop out earlier :-)
    Most people crave some recognition, and it seems reasonable that attractive people might be less inclined to earn such recognition by hard studies.

    Regarding influence of pre-natal testosterone-exposure, here [plos.org] is an interesting article. (I didn't read it thoroughly enough to say anything about the validity, but looked interesting.) It compares not only math-ability and 2D:4D (index- to ring-finder ratio, as a potential indicator of testosterone-exposure) separated by gender, but also separated by different cities (Manila/Philippines vs. Moscow/Russia).

    We have shown in both Moscow and Manila that the degree to which prenatal testosterone is linked to academic achievement exhibits some nonlinearity, and the precise relationship is dependent on gender, faculty, or subject choice, and on which hand is used to proxy for prenatal testosterone.

    To the extent we do not yet understand the precise mechanism through which prenatal androgens manifest themselves in the right versus the left hand, this suggests that much more needs to be done to learn how we can use these measures to study the effects of prenatal testosterone on achievement. Our research combined with the findings of [17] make clear that the potential nonlinearity in prenatal testosterone’s effects coupled to the differential benefits of abstract reasoning in different contexts would lead to highly particular links of 2D4D to achievement depending on field or choice of achievement measure. We might speculate for example that the strong results in sports or in financial trading are in areas where there is no tradeoff to greater abstract reasoning combined with greater risk taking. In other situations, nonlinearity is more likely to emerge and it might be harder to discern these interactions without further identifying restrictions.