Journal will publish heavily criticized paper on gender differences in physics
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I strongly disagree with equality of outcome, since this is basically fighting inequality with sexism.
I did not dare to speak my thoughts to anyone apart from very few colleague friends.
I completely agree with your positions, and I am also “undercover”.
I wonder how many of us are there...
There's more to hiring than numerics, there's always the prerogative and perhaps even need to take a chance. People have not always had similar chances or abilities to produce the results you'd like to see in all candidates, but it just may be you can give a person a place to shine. The candidate that already shone may be safer, but in practice it may as well mean more of the same (that you've hired). Since you're using the same metrics (paper output etc. in your case). Sometimes more of the same is not what you need.
There's a whole universe of reasons for (not) hiring someone. Pretending anyone is hiring (or even able to) based on merit is not seeing clearly. You rarely know, apart from superstar hires for identical roles they've performed elsewhere already, is all about taking a chance. You may as well freshen up the org with atypical hires, in my experience worth their shots far more than 'default' hires, which, in my view, a nearly always just hires most similar to you.
Using your estimate of what a person might do/become given a chance is not at all the same as favoritism. Favoritism is hiring people just like yourself and calling it meritocracy.
I am not, and will advocate for the contrary.
I think clarity would improve your posts.
Maybe you want a better cultural fit, and that's 100% acceptable by my book. But leave gender out of it.
Or that it's illegal in many jurisdictions to select a candidate because of their gender. Can't speak for others, but if I see evidence of this happening in writing, I have no qualms about forwarding the docs/emails/whatever off to the Dept of Labor and a labor attorney to pursue this discriminatory behavior (discrimination is discrimination, whether "anti" a specific gender or "pro") by an employer.
Culture shifts should be a byproduct of effective, non-discriminatory hiring practices (which includes blinding to protected classes).
Good idea, but nearly nobody does it (removing socioeconomic indicators such as name/gender/address from CVs). It is also difficult to insulate yourself from your network when hiring, as well as controlling for other items on a CV (you want Ivy League? Hello bias!).
Which is why I think some active thought on the subject of diversity is essential when hiring. You will never remove bias completely, so we might as well acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla and deal with it directly.
Maybe start with free catered lunches on Fridays or something.
Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org. Even if you do not feel inclined towards a), b) is needed in all dynamic companies, and certainly institutes such as CERN.
It was ambiguous whether or not you were advocating for using gender as a proxy for "better culture fit". The GP was just being explicit that that's a bad idea.
> Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org.
It seems like you're actually arguing for using gender, race, etc as a proxy for "better culture fit" or "fresh ideas". This is illegal in most civilized places as it's immoral and based on dubious assumptions (notably that there is more inter-group intellectual diversity than intra-group diversity, i.e., all men (or women, or whites, or asians, or etc) are the roughly same).
I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own. That creates the barrier I think we are discussing here. Using indicators such as gender (if your type of org has an extreme disbalance) may help you see that, and correct for it, if you so chose.
'Culture fit' is actually one of those criteria I hate: it usually means hiring similar people.
Yeah, I agree that it seems to imply something like that; I meant it in the sense of "hiring people who will move the culture in the direction you'd like it to move", which I think is what we're discussing, but I'm happy to use any such term.
> Most countries here in Europe have not made positive discrimination illegal.
"positive discrimination" is one of the terms I hate. It seems to imply that it is correcting for something when part of the debate is whether or not there is anything to correct for.
> I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own
I'm happy to accept this understanding, but not blindly. I'd like to know that it's based on robust evidence and at least the obvious counterpoints have been addressed. If the understanding is correct, it should survive rigorous debate and analysis; however, many proponents of this conclusion/theory seem to fervently oppose any such debate, analysis, etc. Hopefully we can at least agree that it would be reasonable to be skeptical of this theory/conclusion if indeed its proponents are trying to stifle debate/analysis even if we don't agree that the stifling is real.
And if you don't agree that the stifling is real, do you feel like there is rigorous debate and analysis on the topic? Do you see skeptics of the theory raising interesting or legitimate questions/issues? If so, do you believe those issues are being adequately addressed (and how so / give examples?)? If not, what issues do you perceive them as raising and why are those issues not legitimate? Can you provide a steelman argument?
And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject.
The only appropriate response is for non-scientific concerned groups plus a few politically-minded scientists to put pressure to their institutions to make sure such researchers don't work in the field again.
/s
> During the presentation, he asserted that physics was built and invented by men, and stated on a slide that “Physics is not sexist against women.”
While the premise of the article is that the paper's publication is "a move likely to attract criticism", the person most critical of the paper, who is interviewed in the article, cites substantive non-political reasons why they dislike the paper:
> One member of the editorial board of QSS, which is published by MIT Press and the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), gives Strumia’s paper poor reviews. The study is “methodologically flawed” and “fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington...
So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
Well, the first claim is statistically true (and people who are against e.g. sexism in physics also accept it as true and want to change it).
The second is their opinion, which one might or might not agree with. Don't know about physics, but the biology department in our university was mostly women, for example (contrast with CS, which was 90% men).
>So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
I already covered it in the second part of my response, didn't I?
"if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject"
Many people in real life, forums, etc. Who said it had to be in the article? I'm pointing at a larger trend.
The whole thread is about the political perceptions and opinions of whether such an article should be printed, based on perspectives on various societal issues, plus some meta-discussion on how journals should work.
Check out the (at the moment at least) top voted comment: "In case anyone remembers the incident at CERN (...)" etc.
And of course that meta discussion is much more useful than wether this individual article is correct or not.
> methodologically flawed
How is it flawed?
> fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community
What standards?
These are both unsubstantiated points, there is no counter argument because there is no argument to counter, all that can be done is to dismiss the argument which comes across as snarky.
And again, it's worth reiterating what the critic does not assert: that she doesn't want the paper to be published by her journal. She explicitly tells the reporter that her editor-in-chief has complete authority and independence.
>And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more.
Publishing bad-science and then saying other scientists will show it is wrong is both true and does not address the central complaint: it will cause harm to those outside the scientific community.
This is because as far as the public is concerned publication functions as endorsement. For instance the Antivaxxer movement got an enormous boost when incorrect science was published that purported to show that vaccines cause autism. It is likely that publishing that study has resulted in many human deaths.
If a paper makes a claim which could cause public harm, that study should be held to a significantly higher standard of evidence than a study which is unlikely to cause harm. Consider two papers:
1. A paper which argues that photons travel faster than the speed of light.
2. A paper which argues that diet coke cures cancer.
They both might be sloppy research, they both make extraordinary claims but the second ones harm to society is higher and thus must have very strong evidence to be published.
If "publishing bad science" was the issue people were concerned with, then 80% of published (peer-reviewed and all) papers should be met with the same or worse reactions for they are time and again shown to be bad science.
But I fear that it's the "we don't like the conclusions" more than the "bad science" part. And I fear that the latter (which might very well be the case) is even a priori assumed given the conclusions.
In you response you take for granted what oughta be proved: that the paper would cause "public harm".
Yes, this is exactly my point: If for any paper we conclude that it would cause "public harm" then the burden of evidence should be increased. The above post does not argue that paper does or does not cause harm but that all criticism of publication is void because later papers would show the original to be incorrect. This is a very strong claim.
I did technical things and some math. But it's an edgy conclusion. Can I be published in your journal?
/s
Else, it could very well serve as that.
Neither such positions addresses the real crumbling core which is that the conclusions of the paper do not reasonably follow from the bibliographic methodology, and as such the paper's entire approach is quite illogical from the get-go.
The positions I make fun of accept this insanity.
Toodle-oo~
I was lucky enough to do my Phd with an all-female group of advisors and i m pretty sure it was beneficial for my work. There are all sorts of female-only or female-first awards, funding, prizes, scientist networks and, considering how there are less women in STEM field, conference quotas and funding quotas visibly benefited my advisors and indirectly, me. This provided opportunities for visibility for my (mediocre) work that were just not available otherwise. I 'm not in academia so not sure how this translates to hiring prospects, but AFAIK everyone is struggling, regardless of gender. I'd recommend having a female supervisor however.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.
Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.
In my estimation, the most powerful argument for career obstacles is about competency, pay, opportunity. You need to be educated in order to do anything. You need to get paid so that you can survive, and you need the opportunity of a position in order to get paid. The obstacles from this follow the ordering:
I need to survive, I need something to do, I need to live a life that is not full of suffering (so much that I can even control that), and to do that I need to take on responsibility and work so that there is both something to do, something to reduce suffering, something to get paid for, so that I can survive. I need to be competent because the market pays people based on this notion that you should be educated so that you can actually get any job. Otherwise why be educated at all.
Given this, I would think that the goal of a university would be to reduce the price/performance ratio of a tuition at all possible efforts so that the level of competency can be obtained through quality education at a reduced cost while balancing the incentives such that the resources funnel to the right places where problems can be best solved. In my estimation, this is not even close to what is happening and it's where I would hope things start moving forward - since in large part it appears to the largest possible obstacle for people.
I should note that the latter part of this statement is probably even more important that the first. Which is to say, it is not self-evident that a particular observation is how things actually are. The way in which you articulate things is a formulation of reality based on what you have observed and who you are (in all the millions of years of human development that implies). It's important to note that the observation has to be rooted in evidence: measurements and methods, and causal proofs. Even if, perhaps especially, a particular argument is compelling from the perspective of its ethical implications, it does not necessarily imply it stands on solid ground.
I believe, and perhaps this might be where the ethical implication comes from, that there is reason we formulate compelling arguments along the political spectrum or across anything that doesn't have its roots firmly grounded in the evidence (because maybe not all things can actually be observed, maybe you don't have the data, maybe there's a lot more to it). I believe that we do this because there is some kind of narrative structure that underlies the propositions we lay out. That narrative structure is vital to us because it might be that we base our entire emotional stability on the stability of that structure.
If the structure isn't reliable, or someone challenges our notions of how we see a problem, or how a problem could be solved, when its challenged we get the sense that it is challenging us. We don't like that - we don't believe it. Our entire psychological well being depends on whether the narrative structure of the viewpoint holds weight - perhaps most especially when we don't even want to look at the evidence.
Deciding whether the female-only awards you mention are sufficient to compensate for such obstacles is an inherently apples-to-oranges comparison.
Think about it - whenever someone needs participants for a committee of some sort, a leader for a research centre, or similar, they always want to achieve a better gender balance than the actual average gender balance in their field. This means that female scientists are requested to do significantly more non-science work than male scientists. Of course this has drawbacks.
Since you did your PhD with many women, why not ask them?
I never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
EDIT: I don’t understand the downvotes. Why would someone not want an opportunity to present evidence of their claims and rebut arguments to the contrary? Why are we so adamantly opposed?
One problem is that nowadays, people often don't get presented with the entirety of the available evidence on politically charged questions (like gender equality). Whatever pundit or facebook friend will cherry pick the evidence that suits their agenda, even if that evidence has been thoroughly debunked. So while I agree with you that in the context of academic curiosity, everything that can pass peer review should be published, sometimes publishing something that you know will be debunked later could lead to a net societal loss and should therefore be avoided.
Then again, I'm very against silencing opinions, even for the "greater good" (within some framework I'm sure you could describe China's censorship as for the "greater good")
I cannot express just how strongly opposed to that approach I am. I reserve my use of the downvote to low effort comments, factually inaccuracies, and the like. If we silence people we disagree with we end up with propaganda, not discussion. I’m often hesitant to downvote any comments that espouse a political opinion I disagree with, even if they are eg low effort, because I’m worried about silencing the opposition.
Surprisingly (to me), I don’t see anything about what you should or shouldn’t downvote in the site guidelines, so it’s possible my views don’t align with the hn community as a whole. But I really like being able to have constructive discussion, and would hate to have hn’s quality degrade to that of a political subreddit.
> Strumia “certainly hasn’t attempted any analysis of the relevant systemic problems” that might influence gender differences in physics, such as implicit bias or outright harassment.
Might or mighty, just telling it's systemic actually doesn't show anything.
Questionnaires about hurt feeling in academia don't prove anything either because the same gender bias would apply, everything from what words do you use to implied answers that many time creep in into those "systemic" studies.
This might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo
> I never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
The researcher who reviewed his paper, and is quoted as being extremely critical of it, did not evince the irrational mindset that you imply:
> The study contains “several unsubstantiated claims,” she says, and doesn’t properly cite or discuss papers that come to conflicting conclusions. “Overall,” Sugimoto says, “the manuscript does not provide a convincing understanding of the literature or the methods, lessening the credibility of the results.”
Furthermore, this reviewer is on the board of the publication in question. And despite her critique, she affirms the authority and independence of the editor-in-chief to publish the paper:
> In an email, Sugimoto wrote that “To maintain the editorial integrity of our journal, the Board of ISSI does not interfere with individual decisions on manuscripts: the Editor-in-Chief assumes full responsibility for editorial decisions.”
Who do you attribute this "no one is allowed to question it" mindset to?
If she is referring to major omissions, as in, the omitted papers are generally well-known and respected in the field, then her complaint is not a "lazy cop-out" nor a filibuster in bad faith, but a legitimate rebuttal.
Note: I am not in any way whatsoever suggesting that this paper is substandard. I have not read a word of it. Just pointing out that there are definite scenarios where publishing papers, controversial or not, can be a bad thing.
Literally the first sentence of the article. His original presentation was heavily debated on Twitter and other places. Now that a revised version is published, everyone will be able to publish rebuttals in various (peer-reviewed) journals. That's how it's supposed to work.
And this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Substandard papers don’t get published. Papers from people with no grounding in the subject matter don’t get the big journals. The debate is between legitimate scholars and studies, there’s no evidence this paper passes either bar.
This isn’t politics, this is science. You don’t just publish your opinion and shout “Debate me!”
This is from the paper:
>Acknowledgements I thank the referees for their comments; the InSpire team for clarifications; Guy Madison for discussions and suggestions; Riccardo Torre for (among many things) having implemented the WGND name-gender association; Sabine Hossenfelder for having independently replicated the results in fig. 8b and section 3.1 using arXiv data [Hossenfelder et al.(2018)]; more colleagues who prefer not to mentioned.
I like the last sentence in particular and I'm not surprised :)
No! Papers should be judged by their merits, not by their authors. This is why in many fields, it's customary to send a blinded version of the paper to the peer reviewers, without the author's name or affiliation (this is called double-blind peer review).
This is up for the editors and reviewers to decide. They obviously decided it's ok
> You don’t just publish your opinion
Most big journals have an opinion section, sometimes about policies. Scientific debates are great imho