I found out yesterday I'm currently battling a case of Mycoplasma Pneumoniae. This same bug put my youngest daughter in the hospital over X-Mas 2006 because she is allergic to every single antibiotic used to treat it. So I am quarantined in my bedroom to try to ensure she doesn't get it, which is fine by me because pretty much all I want to do is sleep lately (especially after all the fun I had yesterday).
But my rest has been disturbed by news yesterday from the Nature reporter that several senior scientists have given Nature interviews about my recent paper (the paper describes my statistical study of gender inequities in conference allocations at my former experiment). These senior scientists apparently come from various collaborations and labs (not just my former experiment at Fermilab). These senior scientists have purportedly said that the results of my paper aren't really valid because internal publications aren't necessarily a good reflection of peoples' productivity because some people "do lots of other types of work" that "doesn't require documentation", and that these "other" types of work are weighed in the decision to allocate conference presentations. I asked the reporter what the "other" types of work were. He said that the people didn't specify.
Um, hello? In the absence of gender bias aren't males and females equally likely to be doing these "other" types of work?
Internal publications are not an absolute measure of productivity, but they provide an excellent means of figuring out how productive females are relative to males.
In any case, it doesn't really matter because even if you take publications out of the picture, males still get significantly more talks than the females. I revised my paper today to include a sentence to that effect (the revised version of the paper will appear on the preprint server on Monday, well in advance of the Nature article which is supposed to appear late Wednesday or early Thursday).
You know, if the analysis had not included a measure of productivity like publications, those same people would no doubt be saying "but the author didn't take productivity and publications into account, thus her analysis isn't valid".
It really bugs me that the various senior scientists in the field who were contacted by Nature didn't say things like "Up until the time this study came out we were unaware of this phenomenon. But this study raises grave concerns that the field obviously needs to address". No, instead they played devil's advocate, looking for something, anything, that might be "wrong" with the analysis. Because doing so means that they can take comfort in doing nothing, and the status quo of the field can remain unchanged. Because they know that if they, the senior scientists on these collaborations and at these labs, are unwilling to change the status quo, there is no force on earth that will make the changes happen otherwise. And, as I've pointed out in previous posts, the procedures used by my former experiment to allocate conference presentations are used at most particle physics experiments, so it is demoralizing that these senior scientists are apparently from all over; there are a lot of women out there all over the world affected by the status quo of the traditional administrative procedures used by these many experiments.
I'm not sure why I am surprised at this given that I have come across this exact same attitude amongst senior males in the field before. What really gets me is that these males often preface their arguments with comments like "I'm all for gender equity, but.." (then they procede to play devil's advocate in a way that shows they are anything but "all for gender equity").
