Christina Hoff Sommers, a woman with some common sense, exposes such a study.
In May 1997, the distinguished British jour¬nal Nature published a provocative article titled, “Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review.” The authors, Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold, two Swedish scientists from the University of Goteborg, claimed to have found blatant gender bias in the peer-review system of the Swedish Medical Research Council. After reviewing the relevant data, they concluded that to win a postgraduate science fellowship, a female applicant had to be at least twice as good as a male applicant.
The Wenneras-Wold article caused a sensa¬tion both in Europe and the United States and is now a staple in the gender-equity literature. A recent article in Scientific American referred to it as the one and only “thorough study of the real-world peer-review process” and judged its findings “shocking.” When the NSF polled 19 institutions that had received gen¬der-equity ADVANCE grants, it asked which materials “had proved the most effective in their institutional transformation projects?” The Wenneras-Wold study made it to the NSF short list of four must-read “top research arti¬cles.” The Shalala/NAS “Beyond Bias” report describes the piece as a “powerful” tool for edu-cating provosts, department chairs, and search committees about bias. The charter for the October 17 House subcommittee hearing gave particular prominence to the Swedish study.
'At bias-awareness workshops, physicists and engineers watch skits where overbearing male faculty ride roughshod over hapless but intellectually superior female colleagues.
But what does the article actually show? Wenneras and Wold investigated the peer-reviewing practices of the Medical Research Council in 1994 after they had both been denied postgraduate fellowships. When they sought to review the data on which the council’s decisions were based, the Council refused to grant them access, insisting the information was confiden¬tial. But the two researchers went to court and won the right to see the data.
The Swedish study, unlike the MIT report, was actually published, and it presents data and describes its methodology. But there are serious grounds for skepticism: once again, it was a case of women investigating their own complaints; furthermore, what they concluded seemed a lit¬tle improbable. According to their calculations, to score as well as a man, a woman had to have the equivalent of three extra papers in world-class science journals such as Science or Nature or 20 extra papers in leading specialty journals such as Radiology or Neuroscience.
I sent the Swedish study to two research psychologists, Jerre Levy (professor emerita, of Chicago) and James Steiger (pro¬fessor and director, Quantitative Methods and Evaluation, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt) for their review. They both immediately zeroed in on a troubling methodological anomaly: Wenneras and Wold had run separate regressions for only one productivity variable at a time. Since it is unlikely that any single variable adequately characterizes academic productivity, the obvi¬ous approach would have been to enter several of the productivity variables into a single regres¬sion equation. In any event, the dramatic results of the factor-by-factor approach that Wenneras and Wold used should have been tested against the more inclusive, realistic approach.
Certainly, researchers lose data. But these were pretty special data: The researchers had invested the substantial time and expense of a lawsuit to obtain them, and they were the basis of a highly celebrated study with singu¬lar findings.
But even assuming that the research held up, it is odd that a single study of postgraduate fellow-ships at a Swedish university should play such a prominent role in a campaign to eliminate “hid¬den bias” in American universities. Is it twice as hard for women to receive postgraduate fel¬lowships in the science departments of Berkeley or the University of Miami? If it is, would it not be straightforward to demonstrate the prob¬lem through at least one good study—one that followed customary statistical procedures and could stand up to peer review?
the feminism movement goes far enough to grant quota's (which are simply unfair: one shouldn't choose anyone for a certain job, just 'because there should be at least 40% women' - unfair both if there are more male applicants, and unfair that one chooses just for the sake of gender).
It even goes as far as the following:
In today’s Science Times, Gina Kolata explores the fascinating public reaction to the case of Amy Bishop, the university neuroscientist accused of going on a shooting rampage after failing to win tenure.
Internet postings have offered some surprising conclusions about the reasons behind the shooting and whether Ms. Bishop has more to offer to science. Ms. Kolata writes:
Many posted comments like this: “I do not approve of what Dr. Bishop did, but I understand her frustration.” Being denied tenure “in spite of her contributions past and future,” the writer added, “is sufficient to provoke a murderous rage against the chairman and the university.”
Another popular sentiment: “I can’t help but observe that this was a woman in a male-dominated institution in a male-dominated field in a conservative part of the country.”
And on a forum devoted to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a person wrote: “I hope they turn her loose again. Sounds like she knew what she was doing in A.L.S. That’s more than we have now.”
To learn more about the unusual debate surrounding Ms. Bishop, read the full story, “Debating an Accused Professor’s Worth to Science,” and then please join the discussion below.
Murderers cannot be excused, in any case. Furthermore, Gina Kolata points out her research did not even qualify for tenure.
In fact, scientists who have looked at Dr. Bishop’s résumé said they saw no evidence of genius, no evidence of a cure for diseases like A.L.S., no evidence that she even could have gotten tenure at a major university.
Most of her work was on nitric oxide, a gas that can transmit signals between nerves. High levels of nitric oxide, she proposed, might set off degenerative diseases like A.L.S., and cells treated with low levels of the gas might build resistance. But that is far from proven, scientists said, and the idea was not original with Dr. Bishop.
R. Douglas Fields, chief of the nervous system development and plasticity section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said of Dr. Bishop’s work, “I don’t think it was groundbreaking — quite the opposite.”
She had nothing published in 2007 and 2008, and during her six years at the university in Huntsville she published three papers that appeared to be original research articles, none of them in major journals — often a requirement for tenure.