This is me, emoting

As someone whose research (and stipend) comes from NIH, I'm required to go through regular "ethics training" which, for someone at my stage of career, means discussion / seminars. This morning we had one on retractions and authorships and make no mistake, it was a good talk, but.

There was this one area of the discussion that bothered me. Enough to post about, even.



During a discussion on the ways scientists decide who to include as authors on a research paper, it came up that there are three main types. To illustrate the difference between two of the types, the speaker used a soccer analogy, based on a study done by someone else a while ago, on the difference between girls and boys when it comes to picking a goalie. Boys, I was told, would look around for the tallest, most athletic & coordinated looking guy and designate him as goalie. Girls, in contrast, tend to ask "Who wants to be a goalie?" and then have all the girls who want to be goalies take turns being the goalie.

Now, I haven't read the original papers for this study, and there's nothing wrong with girls picking other girls who want to be goalies to be goalies, or anything wrong with boys picking boys who are most likely to be good at being goalies to be goalies. What is wrong is what came after. What came after is that this is used as an example where the boys are employing the "principle-based" form of determination and the girls the "relationship-based" form. What bothered me is that the speaker then proceeded to give us two (anonymous) examples of professors in our school who employ principle or relationship based methods to determine authorship. What really bothered me was the speaker's throw away comment "And you can guess which one's female -- and you'd be right."

I don't think the speaker was even aware of what was happening -- the stereotype was tossed out so casually. The fact remains that there's still a prevalence of "women can not succeed long-term in research because they're too family-based and emotional", and being essentially told that all women will make judgement calls based on "relationship" instead of "principle" (oh the word choices made me cringe) on top of that is just not something that we need in the academia. In reality the reason why fewer women achieve tenure track than men (and have to work harder to achieve it) has, I think, more to do with these sort of stereotypes than the fact that women are too emotional to think logically about things. (Then again, I'm female and here I am being all emotional about things so maybe you shouldn't listen to me, yeah?) (Yes I'm being sarcastic.)

To be fair to the speaker, when the lone female faculty who was there pointed out that she was uncomfortable with the implication that all female faculty do only relationship-based authorship determination, the speaker acknowledged that she had a point ...though the point never got addressed as the speaker then moved on to talk about something else. What was brought up though was that a male faculty said that when he was little he thought that being a scientists is all about finding answers and that now, as a senior faculty, he realized it's all about relationships. This does not make what the speaker said, before, bother me any less, however.

The speaker? Caucasian male faculty in his late fifties.

Sort of but not really related:
Given that faculties in biology and psychology and even pharmacology (biomed don't have a department, we're split between bio, pharm, neurosci, and med but listed as the med department) are approaching near 50-50 gender split, why on earth do I only know one tenured professor who's both female and nonwhite??