Got Bias? Adventures in Academic Publishing

“…find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors), in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically based assumptions.” 
                                                    -Reviewer to @FionaIngleby

Yep. The recipe for a manuscript to some “colleagues” apparently requires a pinch or two of male. Luckily the internet is a thing, providing the venue to expose this heaping pile of horseshit... 

very quickly even more awesomeness emerged on the twitter #AddMaleAuthorGate

THANK YOU Leon Eyrich Jessen ‏@jessenleon & Mick Watson ‏@BioMickWatson 

Importantly, journalists and academics have already delivered great coverage and exquisite essays on event #721 of recent descriptions of gendered experiences in academia. In recent years, studies have reported real world disparity of invitations to talk, length of conference talks, publications, positions in elite labs, sexual harassment and sexual assault.  

These findings are complemented by experimentally-derived disparities: responses to emails, starting salary, and offers of mentorship that reflect real-world processes of evaluation… as opposed to say… Ceci and Williams 2015

Dr. Ingleby and her co-author Dr. Megan Head, reported to RetractionWatch about their as-of-right-now rejected manuscript:

“In a nutshell, we found that men finished their PhDs with more other-author papers than women, but no difference in number of first-author publications. Then we found that the number of publications affected how long it took PhD grads to successfully find a postdoc job – but this effect differed between men and women. It was interesting, but as it used survey data, it was difficult to gain anything conclusive behind the results – so our discussion was pretty open.”

Aside from really looking forward to this manuscript, once worthy reviewers are secured, I started thinking further about authorship in academia.

Jonathon Eisen @ Phylogenomics vigilantly "advertises" Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting- indeed ALL TOO OFTEN- but the hashtag #YAMMM could equally be used for Yet Another Mostly Male Manuscript. You know the ones I am talking about. But how to assess broader patterns and habitually biased colleagues?

I propose the “B-Index: A Measure of Discrepant Gender Distribution among Academics' Co-Authors"

(can't quite bring myself to hat-tip Niel Hall and his K-index). 

How to Calculate the B-index:

I. For each manuscript (except when riding solo) 

a) divide the number of female authors by the total number of all authors (including self) on the paper to generate the percent of female authors (PFA).

b) import data from NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates for the percent female PhDs in the field most relevant to the manuscript in the year that the manuscript was published (or most recent data available to the year of publication). We’ll call this the Discipline-Specific Female Percentage  (DSFP) (downside, these data are specific to US Universities)

c) (PFA) – (DSFP) = the deviation of the manuscript’s percentage of female authors from the percentage of females at a contemporaneous snapshot of the “state of the science” (since trainees are the ones often doing the cutting edge work). 

II. AVERAGE those deviations to generate the scholar’s B-Index. A positive number reflects greater than expected percentage of female co-authors, while a negative number reflects a greater than expected percentage of male co-authors.

totally arbitrary cut-offs between categories

There can be several permutations of B-index, such as restricting the assessment to first author and/or senior authored pubs, or restricted to the most recent 5 years. Should we expect representative gender distribution for every pub- i.e. needs moar male!- HECK NO! Rather the B-index affords stepping back and looking at patterns of bias within the body of work.

Update 5-1-2015: Things to consider, the index is anchored to the scholar's OWN gender which automatically shift the value away from "0", and is especially meaningful in fields with fewer authors per paper and early career stages with fewer pubs. A permutation would be to NOT count oneself in the index calculation, just co-authors and percent women among co-authors. Update generated from twitter convo w/ David Cox @NeuroBongo 

Folks can do a “quick and dirty” B-index calculation in which the (mean(PFA))-(Percentage of Recent Female PhDs in Scholar's Primary Discipline). My Q&D is: (63.5% lady authors on my papers)-(65.9% Female Anthro Phds in 2012)= -2.5%, ever so slightly male-biased.

Update 5-1-2015 Looking at JUST Co-Authors, and not including my lovely lady self in the equation: (54% lady co-authors)-(65.9% Female Anthro PhDs in 2012)= -12.5%, male biased in my co-author lists. Something for me to think about indeed.

Hopefully a small modicum of transparency as to what extent a scholar functionally promotes and perpetuates a boy’s club or girl’s club may lead to some accountability. You can trumpet all sorts of mentorship and training… but put your money where your mouth is, or rather your B-index into your Broader Impacts Section. 

More importantly though, reflecting on our individual B-index, like Project Implicit, provides us an opportunity to think harder about our professional networks and the emergence of disparities in academia.  

Image in the brochure for the University of North Georgia. Seriously.

Of course the B-index only grapples with gender biases in co-authorship. Not race, gender identity, sexual orientation, faith, or country of origin. That’s a serious inadequacy of the B-index.

WHAT IS NOT AN INADEQUACY of a B-index, however, were it to be embraced and integrated into Google Scholar profiles, is that some folks will game the system. Some scholars will add male and female co-authors to improve their B-index, just as some authors overwhelmingly self-cite. 

But I am a biologist, I heart adaptations. Traits don’t have to be optimal, they don’t have to work perfectly all the time… THEY JUST HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN NOT, or better than otherwise, to be favored by selection.

And if a B-index brings greater scrutiny to and repudiation of gender biases in our academic communities, well that is a great deal better than not.

Update: Dr. Megan Duffy @duffy_ma brought to may attention this and this, other blog posts that tackle ways to calculate gender distribution among one's professional networks in academia.

Further Reading:

Bardolph, D. (2014). A Critical Evaluation of Recent Gendered Publishing Trends in American Archaeology. American Antiquity, 79(3), 522-540.

Clancy, K. B., Nelson, R. G., Rutherford, J. N., & Hinde, K. (2014). Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): trainees report harassment and assault.PloS one, 9(7), e102172.

Isbell, L. A., Young, T. P., & Harcourt, A. H. (2012). Stag parties linger: continued gender bias in a female-rich scientific discipline. PLoS One, 7(11), e49682.

Milkman, Katherine L. and Akinola, Modupe and Chugh, Dolly, What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations (December 13, 2014). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2063742 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2063742

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(41), 16474-16479.

Sheltzer, J. M., & Smith, J. C. (2014). Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,111(28), 10107-10112.

and if you don't find all that evidence compelling, here's evidence about why that is:

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Molenda, A. K., & Cramer, C. R. (2015). Can Evidence Impact Attitudes? Public Reactions to Evidence of Gender Bias in STEM Fields.Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0361684314565777.

__________________________________

One final note,  David Pappano contributed greatly to this blogpost by making me laugh out loud.