Women scientists author fewer invited commentaries in medical journals than men
October 23, 2019
Science Daily/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Women scientists were 21% less likely to author invited commentaries in medical journals during a five-year period than men with similar scientific expertise, seniority, and publication metrics, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in collaboration with Elsevier. They found that the disparity was larger for women who were further progressed in their careers, reaching as high as 40% for the most senior authors.
In medical journals, publication of an invited commentary is a recognition of expertise and can raise an author's profile.
"I was genuinely surprised by the size of the gender gap we found," said first author Emma Thomas, a doctoral student in the Department of Biostatistics. "As a young female scientist, I hoped that we might achieve gender parity in authorship of invited articles naturally as more women progressed to the top of the scientific pipeline. Our results suggest that may not be the case."
The study will be published online in JAMA Network Open on October 23, 2019.
The researchers analyzed data on all invited commentaries published in English-language medical journals from 2013 through 2017, made available by Elsevier from its Scopus database. The researchers compared the gender of each "case" -- authors of invited commentaries -- to the gender of a group of "controls" -- other researchers who had similar scientific expertise to the case author, identified through text mining of their published abstracts. The final dataset included 43,235 cases across 2,459 journals.
The researchers found that female researchers were approximately 21% less likely than their male peers to publish an invited commentary. The gender disparity was larger for researchers who had been actively publishing for longer. Overall, just 23% of invited commentaries in the dataset had female corresponding authors.
"These findings challenge the common assumption that gender disparities in authorship of prestigious scientific articles exist because there are fewer women with sufficient experience and expertise to write these articles," said senior author Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. "Our results also show that women's voices are not heard as often as men's. This lack of diversity in perspectives can hamper the progress of health research, since diversity of thought is a key driver of innovation."
The authors suggest that journals could expand and diversify their pool of commentary writers by using text mining software to identify researchers with relevant expertise who might not otherwise have been considered.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191023172110.htm
Foodie calls: Dating for a free meal (rather than a relationship)
June 21, 2019
Science Daily/Society for Personality and Social Psychology
New psychology research reveals 23-33% of women in an online study say they've engaged in a 'foodie call,' where they set up a date for a free meal. These women score high on the 'dark triad' of personality traits as well.
When it comes to getting a date, there's any number of ways people can present themselves and their interests. One of the newer phenomena is a "foodie call" where a person sets up a date with someone they are not romantically interested in, for the purpose of getting a free meal. New research finds that 23 -- 33% of women in an online study say they've engaged in a "foodie call."
Upon further analysis, the social and personality psychology researchers found that women who scored high on the "dark triad" of personality traits (i.e., psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism), as well as expressed traditional gender role beliefs, were most likely to engage in a foodie call and find it acceptable.
The research, by Brian Collisson, Jennifer Howell, and Trista Harig of Azusa Pacific University and UC Merced, appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
In the first study, 820 women were recruited, with 40% reporting they were single, 33% married, and 27% saying they were in a committed relationship but not married. Out of them, 85% said they were heterosexual, and they were the focus for this study.
The women answered a series of questions that measured their personality traits, beliefs about gender roles, and their foodie call history. They were also asked if they thought a foodie call was socially acceptable.
23% of women in this first group revealed they'd engaged in a foodie call. Most did so occasionally or rarely. Although women who had engaged in a foodie call believed it was more acceptable, most women believed foodie calls were extremely to moderately unacceptable.
The second study analyzed a similar set of questions of 357 heterosexual women and found 33% had engaged in a foodie call. It is important to note, however, that neither of these studies recruited representative samples of women, so we cannot know if these percentages are accurate for women in general.
For both groups, those that engaged in foodie calls scored higher in the "dark triad" personality traits.
"Several dark traits have been linked to deceptive and exploitative behavior in romantic relationships, such as one-night stands, faking an orgasm, or sending unsolicited sexual pictures," says Collisson.
Collisson and Harig said they became interested in the subject of foodie calls after reading about the phenomenon in the news.
As for how many foodies calls might be occurring in the United States, Collisson says that can't be inferred from the current research.
"They could be more prevalent, for instance, if women lied or misremembered their foodie calls to maintain a positive view of their dating history," says Collisson.
The researchers also note that foodie calls could occur in many types of relationships, and could be perpetrated by all genders.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190621140343.htm