I came across this today...a commentary on the Wenneras and Wold article. Interesting how virtually the same things were said about them as have been said about me. Being confronted with hard data appears to be very threatening to some people...they end up doing screwball "meta-analyses", filling in for the fact that they don't have the data by picking numbers out of the air (and then, not surprisingly, coming to the conclusion that the original analysis is flawed).
There have been a couple of similar bizarre "meta analyses" done with my analysis. What is disturbing is that at least one of them has been pointed to as an "alternate analysis of [my] data". Umm, yeah right...neither of those people had my data. They picked numbers out of the air. And the patriarchy finds their made up numbers much more believable than my analysis. Because it is so much more comforting to believe a made up analysis that concludes my analysis is flawed than actually concede that something might be wrong and make the simple changes that would fix the frigging problem.
Speaking of numbers being picked out of the air; the Dzero administrators are quoted in the Nature article as saying that they checked the conference allocations over the past year and found that 10% had been allocated to women. And then said that the experiment was 10% female, so everything looked fine.
Odd. When I was collaborating on the experiment it was almost 15% female. I checked the demographics today using their online public photo gallery of collaborators and discovered that the experiment is currently 14.3% female. So, by their own analysis, women are getting screwed out of around 30% of their fair share of talks. They didn't break the numbers down by seniority, so for all we know the female postdocs are as bad off as they were when I did the original analysis.
