Science Magazine publishes "opinion" piece targeting a specific student w/ sexist "critique" and then won’t publicly discuss what happened or what they will do about it



Well, I can't even begin to explain how disappointed I am in AAAS and Science Magazine over their actions recently. An "opinion" article was published last week in the "Working Life" section of Science which was stunningly inappropriate for Science Magazine. I first found out about this when I saw a Tweet from a colleague and friend Rebecca Calisi Rodriguez.
And when I started to dig into the story I was nauseated.

 To sum up - the article was by a student who was apparently trying to express some thoughts about #SciComm activities by others that she did not like. And in the piece she named and mocked the activities of another PhD student at her own institution who does SciComm in ways she does not feel comfortable with. Fortunately, when I started looking at social media responses to this, they were overwhelmingly in support of this targeted student - Samantha Yammine who does really quite phenomenal SciComm work. (See for example her Twitter feed and her Instagram feed.

 I am really thrilled and proud of the community that came out in support of her.

There have also been a few news stories related to or directly about the topic which are worth reading.
Also some of the Tweet streams about this are really worth reading. For example, this one from @christineliuart is a must read:



I ended up compiling some of the Tweets about this topic in a Twitter Moment which I share below. 

Hopefully, the student who wrote the article will rethink many aspects of it and hopefully she does not suffer major repercussions from writing this misguided piece.  And though she originally seemed to be defending the article she eventually at least posted an apology to Sam.

 However, there is one part of the story that I believe is in need of a major, detailed examination.  And that is the role of Science Magazine in all of this.  I went on a bit of a rant about this on Twitter when I and other people found that Science's response to the controversy was insufficient.  I embed my posts about that below.







So I started to dig around into what I could do and then I got an email from the Editor in Chief of Science. Apparently, after publishing an article that directly critiqued a PhD student in public in his own magazine he was uncomfortable with responding in social media.  I am not sure whether Jeremey Berg thinks these emails should remain private but I do not think that.  So I am posting my exchange here.

Hi Jonathan: I would like to understand better your views on the Working Life column but I do not think Twitter is the best forum for this. The full Editor’s note is shown below:

Editor's note, 17 March, 12:45 p.m.: In setting the context in this opinion piece, an individual (Science Sam) was identified and many have read the article as a personal attack. This was not the intent of the author or the editors, and we apologize. We are examining our editorial process for these pieces moving forward.

This is an honest assessment of what happened. The author’s concerns about what she perceived as an expectation for her, as a woman, to participate in a certain type of science communication was driven by promotion of this on her campus.

In retrospect, the piece should have been edited so that the person was not identified, but it was not intended to be an attack and was not read this way by several editors and many other readers.

What do you think will be accomplished from “a more thorough investigation”?

I welcome your thoughts.

Best, Jeremy

Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief, Science family of journals
So I wrote back immediately
​Jeremy

Thanks for the email. 
A few comments

1. The author said on Twitter she worked extensively with an editor to craft her piece. I think it is important to know if it was ever discussed that she identified a specific person for her critique and whether they considered that to be a good or a bad thing. For that matter, how was this introduced to the piece - did it come from the author or from the editor?

2. Does Science Magazine have any policy of any kind regarding personal attacks / critiques like this? If yes, were they ever considered in this case? If no, why not?

3. During the editing process, was there ever a discussion of how to get more attention to the piece? I can only assume yes so in that context what was discussed? Did the mocking, demeaning wording come from the editor or from the author and why was it not removed?
  • For example consider "Publicly documenting the cute outfit I wear and the sweet smile I brandish." Given that the article publicly identifies the target of this piece, it is reasonable to assume this is targeting Sam. This is just not OK.
  • And furthermore, who chose to highlight that one line in the piece. Yes, it is catchy. But it is a personal attack against a female graduate student. And it is astonishing that it was published.
4. Why was it deemed reasonable for such a piece to repeatedly disparage outreach efforts of others? Is this a useful thing to publish in this space?

Some examples
  • ".. I am annoyed that the majority of the posts seem to celebrate a very narrow representation of femininity,"
  • "demonstrate that they're interested in clothes and makeup, that they're physically active, and that they are attractive romantic partners"
  • " Time spent on Instagram is time away from research"
  • "Let's not celebrate that."
I believe there is no way to interpret this other than an attempt to shame people like Sam. This basically is saying "you cannot do this - you are to be shamed for focusing on such things".

And that is disgraceful.

5. Are you and Science going to publicly apologize to Sam?

6. Why does this piece not suggest alternative uses of Intagram? Why is it just attacking what other people do?

And much more. I think this article, being published in Science, with the editing help of Science, is in need of a thorough investigation to find out why it ended up the way it did. Why was there a personal attack left in? Why was it deemed OK to mock other people? Why could it not instead have focused on positive suggestions for how to do outreach in other ways that maybe Meghan was OK with? And so on.

I encourage you to have a more public, open discussion of how this happened and how you might try to prevent it from happening again.

Jonathan
And eventually I got a response back from Jeremy
Hi Jonathan: Thanks for your response.

The story unfolded as described in the piece. The author was introduced to Science Sam’s Instagram efforts at a career workshop, started looking into this and other Instagram accounts, found herself uncomfortable with the content and her perceived expectation that she follow suit, and did some self-reflection to conclude that she resented the implications regarding the underlying issues related to women in science. Based on this, the author wrote her essay and submitted it to Science Careers. Her experience with Science Sam’s Instagram account was always a central part of the essay. The editing process involved working with her on the writing to help make her message clearer. There was no attempt to get more attention to the piece or to make it more inflammatory.

I think the perspective that some young female scientists feel pressured to participate in science communication efforts, particularly those of a specific type, is an interesting one. I do not read this as an attempt to disparage the efforts of others but rather to explore the basis for the author’s reactions to these efforts.

We have both publicly and privately apologized to Samantha.

As I said in my earlier email, in retrospect, we should have explored ways to avoid naming an individual specifically in the essay, both to avoid the appearance of an attack and the loss of the message of the essay over this issue. As we indicated in the Editor’s note, we are examining our processes related to these pieces.

Best, Jeremy

Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief, Science family of journals
It did not, well, make me feel like Science was going to be doing anything. And many parts of the response I find troubling.  But I could not deal with all of that.  I focused on what they planned to do in terms of looking into what happened and wrote back.
Jeremy 
I have many questions and comments and concerns about your response here but want to focus on one issue. 
What do you mean by "we are examining our processes related to these pieces." Can you say more about your plans in this regard? 
And I got back an even more disappointing response
Hi Jonathan: At this point, there is not much more to say. The people involved in the process will meet and discuss whether we need to do anything differently to avoid potential problems in the future.

Best, Jeremy

Jeremy M. Berg, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief, Science family of journals
So - basically, it looks like Science Magazine will do nothing. They published an inappropriate article targeting a single PhD student and that article was also loaded with a variety of sexist misguided attacks on specific types of science communication.  And they won't discuss this on Twitter because it is not the right place to discuss it.  And then by email they basically state "We will privately look into it and not tell anyone."

That is just not enough.  I plan to pursue this further via AAAS and see if a formal, perhaps outside review can take place.

FEBS Letters Blames Society and History for their Sexist Meeting … #Boycott

What a joke.

I was pointed on Twitter to a meeting run by FEBS Letters to "celebrate" their 50th Anniversary.  The meeting has some 20 speakers highlighted of which only one is a woman.

See for example
and

And I guess in response to criticism they now write

We acknowledge that it is disappointing that there is currently only one female speaker in our line up. The FEBS Letters editorial team based its speaker selection on authors of some of the best papers published in FEBS Letters over the past 50 years, based on citations and downloads. Unfortunately, women are strongly underrepresented in this list, as a result of the fact that women in science were few over the last century. In addition, other women invited to speak at the event were not able to accept the invitation. The result below is thus currently a historical and social reflection of the past 50 years. FEBS Letters is looking at ways to address this.
That is right - for their own meeting they are blaming history and society.  How about this.  How about you take some $#$*()!@#()$!@ responsibility for the meeting you are running rather than blaming society and history for your lack of diversity?  And how about this - I call for a boycott of this meeting. Nobody should help them celebrate when this is their approach.




UPDATE - made a Twitter Moment with various Tweets on the topic



Another white men’s microbiome meeting from Kisaco #YAMMM #manel #STEMDiversity

Well, this is really unpleasant.

Last year I blogged about a what I called "The White Men's Microbiome Congress." The gender balance of the meeting was so bad I called for a boycott. And my call seemed to have some impact as many people refused to participate and then the meeting organizers from Kisaco Research responded, apologized for the gender bias, and made some attempts to at least try to fix things. For example they posted on my blog:
We recognize that it is our responsibility to help ensure that the speaker faculty reflect the diversity and culture of the field and science as a whole. In this instance we failed to live up to our own standards of sensitivity and diversity, for which we sincerely apologize. Kisaco Research is deeply committed to producing events that represent the diversity of the scientific fields we work with. We are embarrassed that this has been previously overlooked and are currently working to make this, and all other programmes, ones that the top scientists are proud to be a part of. 
And they did seem to try to make the meeting I critiqued less biased.

And thus it was really disturbing to me when someone sent me the invite they received to a microbiome meeting organized by this group and pointed out that it had the same issue. I went to the web site for this new meeting - the "3rd annual European microbiome congress (see The Microbiome Congress – Europe – Kisaco Research). And it confirmed my fears.



95% of the highlighted speakers are male (as always, I note, assessing the gender balance of a meeting is not always straight forward.  In this case I looked at the web sites of the speakers and other descriptions of them to see what pronouns were used to describe them.  I think my assessment is accurate but I apologize if I made mistakes). And all of them appear to be white.  It is a meeting for white men to speak at.  The field of microbiome studies is rich and diverse in many ways - including in the scientists and others who work on the topic.  It would not have been hard to come up with a more diverse set of speakers.  In fact, the field is so diverse in terms of researchers that I think this speaker line up - especially in light of the previous meeting - is evidence for bias.   I am not sure where that bias comes in (it could be at invitations, at acceptances, or other places) but it is pretty clear this is not a random selection of top microbiome researchers.

As this is a pattern from Kisaco Research I am calling for the following
  • People should boycott this meeting. That is, do not attend this meeting.
  • People should Boycott all Kisaco meetings. This is a pattern for Kisaco, and not a good one.  Nobody should attend any of their meetings
  • The meeting sponsors should withdraw support for this meeting. The listed sponsors include Synthetic BiologicQiagenProDigestAffymetrix and Zymo Research. I encourage people to contact them about this and pressure them to rescind their sponsorship.  I have already contacted Zymo, for which I am an advisor.  I will let people know how they respond. 
  • The speakers should cancel their participation.  A meeting cannot go on without the speakers. The listed speakers include:
Of course, it would be better to prevent such things from happening in the future.  Some things to consider that will start to shift away from meetings with poor diversity of presenters:
  • Make diversity of presenters one of the factors you consider when deciding whether or not to accept invitations to speak at or attend a meeting. Some ways to make an informed decision here include
    • looking at past meetings by the same organizers
    • asking for a list of presenters for the meeting one is invited to
    • asking if the meeting has any policies on diversity
  • When you are involved in organizing a meeting work to make it a stellar meeting that also happens to have a diverse collection of presenters (diverse in background,  race and ethnicity, kills, perspectives, gender, types of institutions, careers stages, country of origin, and more). 
  • Develop diversity policies for meetings in which you are involved
  • If you are on the sponsorship side of things - require meeting organizers to have a diversity policy and to show their prior track records before you offer support
  • Develop and support practices and policies that would help make meetings more diverse 

Also check out some of these articles and posts

It is entirely possible to run meetings where there is no bias against particular groups in the presenter line up.  It is also possible to embrace diversity and all of its benefits and make a meeting that is simply better than a meeting where diversity is not embraced.  It does take some effort.  But it is worth it.

UPDATE. Making a Storify of some responses



On my evolving thoughts on the #UCDavis saga involving Chancellor Linda Katehi

Still trying to wrap my brain around the controversy at UC Davis involving our Chancellor (the head of the University) Linda Katehi (see some of these news stories if you are not aware of what is going on).  In some sense I could just watch this all from the sidelines and see what happens.  But that is not in my nature.  And, over the last month I have gotten a near endless stream of comments and suggestions (some in private, some in public) about the topic.  Some say I need to be more vocal in condemning Chancellor Katehi (e.g., a student in my lab told me the other day that they have talked to faculty who are wondering why I am being so hesitant to condemn Chancellor Katehi).  Other people (many) say any negative posts about Katehi are damaging UC Davis.  Still others say and and all actions of Katehi must be considered in the context of overwhelming sexism against female leaders.  And so on.  In total I have probably gotten dozens of private comments and even more public comments about the case with suggestions for what I should be doing here.

For those who know me or know about me, I assume you know I am not exactly shy about expressing my opinions on topics like behavior of academics or academic institutions.  For example, just after joining UC Davis I wrote a post that was shared widely, condemning a UC Davis Vice Provost over her misuse of her position in support of Closed Access publishing: Vice Provost of U. C. Davis on the wrong side of Open Access.



I give out all sorts of snarky awards on my blog to friends, colleagues, and other folds in the world for doing things I think are inappropriate (e.g., see this STAT story). Sometimes I go overboard in this, but certainly I am not hesitant at expressing thoughts when I think there has been something untoward going on.  I try as much as possible to turn my microscope on myself and UC Davis too.  For example, see this post from a few weeks ago: UC Davis Storer Lecture series - since 1963 87% of speakers are male.
Again, I know I overdo this sometimes but I am certainly not hesitant to make my feelings know.

But the case of Chancellor Katehi leaves me on the fence and with my fingers unclear what to type somewhat.  And so I thought I would try to write up what my thoughts are here, even if they are muddled.  I wonder what other people think of the situation and would love feedback (as always) on this post.

So - what is so complex here?  What am I trying to wrap my brain around?  I think my challenge here comes down to the following: I don't know whether some of the responses (including mine) to Chancellor Katehi's actions are tinged with bias, especially sexism.  Or, in other words, are the actions and inactions of Chancellor Katehi "firing offenses" or have they been overblown by biased and sexist points of view.

And honestly, I do not know exactly how to figure this out.  On the one hand, I accept that there are massive amounts of sexism in society and certainly in regard to how we judge women in power.  On the other hand, I think the actions and inactions of Chancellor Katehi and her administration have been serious (in a bad way).  I note - one thing I have done to try and better understand my own feelings and actions in this saga is to compile all my posts and communications as best I can and go through them.



This has helped me sort out my thoughts and also helped show me at least that I was certainly not going easy on the UC Davis administration over these cases.  I also re-examined my posts about the Pepper Spray incident and aftermath from 2011 which has many parallels to the current situation and also involved Chancellor Katehi. See here for those: posts about the UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident and Aftermath.



Below is a discussion based in part on going through the news stories and posts of others and posts of mine.

Maybe it is best to start with this.  A few weeks ago I was pondering the fate of Chancellor Katehi and I wrote a detailed post about this The #UCDavis Chancellor's Board Positions and the Need for a More Public, Open and Early Disclosure System.




I also included in that discussion some possible conflicts of interest of my own that might be clouding my judgment.  Those are relevant to this post too and I encourage people to read them.  Anyway, this post was written at the beginning of the latest controversy when all that had been disclosed was her acceptance of a set of outside Board positions that were controversial.  I had written many mini posts and Tweets about the situation such as those below:





And I also had started to see some calls for her to be fired and such and made a point to say I did not feel things were that far along and I also linked to some of those posts.

 








Anyway I discussed all of this in the longer post linked above. In the post, I concluded two things at the time.  First, the Board positions were not good ideas and second, that her actions in regard to these Board positions did not raise to the level of firing or asking for her to resign.

And I note - all of this was not just a remote discussion for me.  I was part of the story in relation to one of her Board positions. And I got grief and support from people about my comments about this (even though I was clear to say to everyone I did not know anything about the Chancellor's interactions with this university).



I confess, I found the responses of the "Pro-Katehi" people really disappointing in this story.  The Board positions seemed clearly to be bad ideas - riddled with potential or real conflicts of interest and poor judgement about what the response would be to these positions.  And I wrote publicly as such. For example:



But I still tried to temper my positions and thoughts to give Chancellor Katehi the benefit of the doubt.  And also a student protest began in response to the initial stories and eventually the students "occupied" the Chancellor's main office.  I don't have the time in this post to cover the protests, the response to the protests and the response to the responses.  But it got ugly.  And this made things extra complex.  But the protests were quite important in keeping attention on the stories and in revealing both the good and bad sides to some of the critical responses to the Chancellor's actions.

Since that time much else has happened.  First, it was revealed that UC Davis had a set of contracts with outside agencies to do damage control PR of various kinds.  This literally exploded into a PR nightmare for UC Davis with news coverage from across the globe and massive criticism on social media.  I was one of the people throwing out negative comments.  I was angry and embarrassed and wrote about this extensively.

And I went out of my way to share critical posts about the administration and to also share some past posts of mine about the pepper spray incident.


And I just decided that I felt the need to post about it a lot. For example:



But for both of the above stories alternative more supportive narratives were being presented by the UC Davis administration and by various friends and colleagues of mine (and even myself).  These supportive narratives basically took four forms:
  • First, many suggested that many of these actions were perfectly acceptable normal behavior by a university and its leader.  UC Davis and many others kept saying things like that the PR campaign was just about promoting good things UC Davis did.  
  • The second form of supportive narrative was that even if these actions were wrong, there were minor infractions.  
  • The third form of supportive narrative, which I myself discussed and struggled with, was that the Chancellor had done many good or great things and that evaluating her actions should be done with the big picture in mind.
  • The fourth form of supportive narrative, which was not shared much publicly at first, was that the response to Chancellor Katehi's role in these actions was tinged with sexism. 
I did not buy the first two supportive narratives (that this was normal behavior and that the infractions were minor) and still do not. And I posted about this repeatedly. See for example:
And the third supportive narrative was complicated.  After all just liking what people have done in some area is not enough to grant them a pass on transgressions.  We needed to examine the current actions in detail to figure out just how bad they were.  But the fourth supportive narrative struck a cord with me.  Why?  Well, because I have worked for years with Chancellor Katehi on some issues in bias against women.  And I have become actively involved in fighting implicit and explicit bias against women in academia and it is pervasive.  And I deeply respect the people who kept bringing up this issue.

So as the story continued to evolve it came to a head early last week.  Various emails were circulating around campus suggesting that UC President Napolitano had asked Chancellor Katehi to step down.  And some were happy about this.  But others were not.  I was asked to sign a letter to Napolitano about the case and on first read it simply seemed to be saying "Back off and give the case some time" and so I signed it.  But then I reread it and felt it was too supportive of Chancellor Katehi's actions (and made some statements for which I did not know of any evidence) so I removed my name.  And then an email came which included a letter written by a colleague of mine Linda Bisson who I believe is very level headed and fair and reasonable. The letter was to President Napolitano and it discussed possible sexism in the responses to Chancellor Katehi's actions.  And even though I was not sure how I felt about the letter, I felt that it had to be shared publicly.  So I asked - and Linda Bisson allowed me to post it on my blog: Letter from #UCDavis Profs to Janet Napolitano about possible sexism in responses to Chancellor Katehi's activities.



Just sharing the letter itself generate some heated discussions.  I again note - I was not endorsing the letter.  I just felt the ideas in the letter needed to be brought into the discussion even if I was not sure how I felt about the letter.

The more I think about it the more I realize that sexism is clearly a part of the response to Chancellor Katehi's actions.  Egregious actions of other UC leaders who are male have not been met with the same level of response.  Repeatedly.  This just seems unfair in many ways.  And also the reaction from President Napolitano seemed pretty extreme and overly personal and reactionary (e.g., some of the charges in it were not part of the current discussion).



And so I went back an reexamined the first three supportive narratives I outlined above trying to consider how they could be viewed in the face of sexism. Regarding the first supportive narrative I guess a question to ask is - what do other universities and university leaders do?  But even if things are done by others I don't think that justifies them.  I think the PR campaign was massively misguided.  I think the Board positions were unwise and riddled with potential and real conflicts of interest.  So regardless of what others do I think these were missteps.  They show a lack of foresight in thinking about what others would think about these activities.  And the leader of a major university needs to use such foresight and use it well.

Regarding the second supportive narrative, I think this is more complicated.  At first it seemed the Chancellor and her staff were defending all of her actions (the first narrative) which I found unseemly.
 

But then she did (sort of) apologize and said she would work to fix any mistakes.  I found the apology unconvincing to be honest but was happy to see it.  So she was accepting some responsibility for mistakes and thus I could in a way cross of the first narrative.  Thus we could now discuss whether these mistakes were enough to lead to firing / stepping down.  At that point after consulting many colleagues, I decided that I was still displeased with the Chancellor and her administration in many ways, but that I was hoping that we could move forward in some way.


I think the third narrative (that I felt she had done many good things for UC Davis) played a big role in my thoughts here.

But then, just thereafter there came some new revelations.  And these ones I think rewrite the situation a bit.  First, President Napolitano had apparently asked Katehi to resign (as mentioned above).  And Katehi apparently decided not to.

And then the hammer came down from President Napolitano including various new accusations.  And also the Sacramento Bee revealed further details about the recent social media "listening campaign" paid for by the UC Davis Administration.


These two stories together were particularly distressing to me.  And most distressing they revealed a side of the story I have not discussed move above which was there throughout.  This involves the communications from Chancellor Katehi and her administration about all of these topics.  Napolitano,  for example, was angry about the possible misleading statements about Chancellor Katehi's role in the PR contracts.  And though I think the Napolitano letter has some problems (e.g., no consolation consultation of anyone from UC Davis apparently before taking this action) I also did feel that some of the communications from the UC Davis administration were misleading.  The UC Davis Administration had been trying to say in regard to these PR and social media contracts that they were all about promoting UC Davis and not about watching or trying to clean up the reputation of Chancellor Katehi.  But if you look at the listening reports published by the Sacramento Bee - they are all about Katehi.  And even more disconcerting, they included a lot of material about me and my brother and many colleagues.  It just smelled really off to me.  And so I got angrier and angrier.  And less forgiving.



And the fact that the reports published by the SacBee included a lot of material about me and my brother and close friends and colleagues really threw me into a bit of a rage.



And these were just the latest examples of disastrously bad or misleading or inaccurate communications coming from the UC Davis Administration.  The press releases they had been putting out were pretty awful. The statements they made were frequently incomplete or downright misleading.  And they seemed to never really get the seriousness of any of the situations.  I had been pointing this out along the way but it just never got better.  It just got worse.  A good summary of the communications problems has been discussed by Marcos Breton in a series of articles in the Sacramento Bee.  For example:



So after all the saga, after all the rehashing of my prior responses, I feel torn still.  I get that there is real sexism in how women and women leaders are treated.  I have been fighting such sexism for years and been inspired by how Chancellor Katehi fight's fights such sexism with action.  But I think even in the face of this, there are real and distressing mistakes that Chancellor Katehi and her administration have made and keep making.  And these mistakes are doing damage to my beloved UC Davis.  In addition, and also very important,  I worry deeply about unfair charges of sexism against critics of Chancellor Katehi. There are real and valid criticisms of Chancellor Katehi and her actions and her administration and discounting them all just because some aspects of the situation involve sexism is also damaging.

In the end, am I willing to wait for the results of the planned investigation by the University of California into Chancellor Katehi's actions?  Yes I am.  Do I think she will be absolved of the more serious charges?  I do not know but I truly hope so.

But regardless of the results of this investigation, I am deeply worried about how the entire situation impacts UC Davis.  Yes, Chancellor Katehi deserves to be treated fairly.  And yes, she has done some very good things for UC Davis.  And yes I like her personally. And yes there is a great deal of subtle and not so subtle sexism in the world and likely some in the response to her actions.  But I am unable to stop coming back to the series of clear mistakes that have been made.  Of actions and inactions that have shown poor judgment.  And of repeated, baffling, and damaging poor communications in response to the ongoing situation.  I have given as much benefit of the doubt as I am able to give I guess.  And at this point in time I have just really had enough. I hope we can move UC Davis back to a better path as soon as possible.  Maybe this could happen with a rapid (very rapid) and complete and open investigation of Chancellor Katehi and of her being cleared of all major accusations.  I hold out hope for that to happen.  However, it seems to me that the most obvious way forward, unless something else drastically changes, is going to be with a new Chancellor.




Some responses and comments






UPDATE May 4, 2016. 9 PM. After a lot of thought and discussions with many many many people about this post and about Chancellor Katehi I have come to the conclusion that we need a new Chancellor at UC Davis. I have come to this conclusion for many reasons which I will try to write about as soon as possible.

Rule #1: Don’t ever emulate @lifesciadvisors – #everydaysexism

Representative Speier Calls on AAAS to Address Sexism in Science

In an open letter to Rush Holt (PDF – 974KB), the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of Science, Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) writes:

Women who speak out about these incidents have been subjected to torrents of online abuse, including rape and death threats. Female scientists from underrepresented minorities, already a small group, have been subjected to even more vociferous abuse and have received limited support from scientific institutions…At the beginning of the 21st century, while we are in the midst of exploring the solar system, unlocking the human genome, and creating ever-more-advanced technology, the demographics and attitudes of scientists and engineers must not be trapped in the 19th century.
Representative Jackie Speier

One of the things that was made apparent in the revelations about Geoff Marcy’s assaults on students was that our inherited culture of institutionalized science has favored protecting those in power over protecting those without. In many ways, the AAAS represents the scientific legacy of the United States. Representative Speier notes some missteps in Science that reflect that destructive culture.

The AAAS also has the opportunity to represent the future of science – a future that is inclusive and prioritizes the humanity of all. Representative Speier also notes the recent editorial by Bernard Wood in Science that chastises his fellow established scientists for failing to substantively address misconduct in their own ranks as a small step in the correct direction.

The third “A” in AAAS stands for “Advancement”. Representative Speier is asking the AAAS to recognize that overcoming its sexist heritage is a critical issue for the advancement of science into the 21st Century.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: AAAS, Feminism, Jackie Speier, Rush Holt, Sexism

Any Publicity is Good Publicity?

If you wonder why Twitter seems to have no interest in protecting individual users from harassment, maybe you need to think about how the companies that pay for the annoying “promoted” tweets think about harassment negative online behavior (UPDATE: It has been pointed out that McCaffrey doesn’t address harassment per se or what may differentiate this from “hating on”). For example, here is HBO director of development Kathleen McCaffrey on the Nerdist Writer’s Panel having an honest discussion* how their social media and marketing teams think about Internet “haters” with host Ben Blacker:

McCAffrey: The thing about Girls which is kind of amazing is the haters. And it makes our social media team very happy because they just put one thing out and people come out of everywhere and just start to hate on it. And, so, it is very loud and very strange…just so many people hate it…

Now, bear in mind that the hating on it she refers to will invariably include negativity directed not just at HBO and the show, but at the individuals involved in creating the show:

McCaffrey: but on social media – on Twitter and everywhere – Lena is very polarizing and people love to hate on her. It still surprises me…

Blacker: But, but that’s, that’s good for you, because it’s a loud conversation and it means that the people who do love her will probably come out to defend her.

McCaffrey: Yes. It becomes this weird fight that she’s kind of even not really a part of, like the people around her just yelling about her. It’s very strange and fascinating.

*McCaffrey expresses disappointment with the continuing negative reaction, while acknowledging the utility of the reaction for marketing.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Ben Blacker, Feminism, Girls, HBO, Kathleen McCaffrey, Lena Dunham, nerdist, Nerdist Writer's Panel, Sexism, Twitter

Cinema Veritas

On the Pop My Culture podcast, actor Josh McDermitt described his first audition scene for the role of Eugene on The Walking Dead.

…I was taking to a girl. We were both backstage about to give this big presentation in front of, like, the world’s top scientists about some, you know, medical breakthrough we just had; and I’m backstage talking with her and I’m, like, berating her and, like, telling her how stupid she is, and then, and then, I try to sleep with her…

The scene, although fiction, rings very true, because this scene happens – not always in such a confined time frame, with those particular details, or with that intensity – but the aggression, denigration, and sexual objectification of women in science is ever present.

The focus of the description is on how the abuse of the female character illustrates flaws in the male character, because the description of the scene exists to illustrate the process of auditioning for a specific character. In real life, however, should we be more concerned with the character of the jerk or the life experience of those who have such behavior directed at them? As Janet Stemwedel notes in her column in Forbes on Tim Hunt’s controversial comments:

What if, when asked to say a few words to the Korean women scientists and the science journalists at the luncheon, he had recognized the audience he was speaking to was likely to have had quite different experiences in science than he had?


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Feminism, Forbes, Janet Stemwedel, Josh McDermitt, Podcast, Pop My Culture, science, Sexism, The Walking Dead

You can’t win ’em all: My (unpublished) letter to PNAS re Hiring Bias Study

First published at Marie-Claire Shanahan’s personal blog, Boundary Vision, on 1 July 2015.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post in response to Williams and Ceci’s paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: National hiring experiments reveal 2: 1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. I was concerned about the way that the findings were interpreted, generalized and compared to the wider literature. In the media comments that followed their piece, Williams and Ceci were very clear, however, that they felt that critics of the paper were being unfair and unscholarly. I didn’t agree and I wanted to ensure that genuine scholarly concerns were discussed not only in a blogged and public venue but also through traditional channels. So I wrote a letter to the editor, expressing the concerns raised in my blog post.

I think Rosie Redfield’s dual work in criticizing NASA’s arsenic life paper both on her blog and through a letter to Science, for example, is a very important model. High visibility science, reported in large media venues, often doesn’t receive public critique. People may write letters to the editor or complain to each other at conferences, but too often that critique is not available to most of the people who have read about a story in the news. Or it is only available so long after the initial results are reported that it has little impact on how that science is understood publicly. As I’ve written before, the back channels of criticism of cold fusion were quickly refuting the findings, but those of us reading about it on the sidelines were left out of that conversation for a long time. Blogged commentary and social media responses are a very important way of making all of science–including the messy processes that go into building scientific consensus about a topic–available.

The editors of PNAS weren’t entirely moved by my letter and declined to publish it. The letter and the editor’s comment are below. Even though it wasn’t published, I’m still happy to have worked to express my concerns both publicly here and through the more formal channels of the journal. This is an important model for scholarly critique, and I would do it again in heartbeat.

Editor’s Remarks to Author:
While interesting we do not feel this adds weight to the discussion.

Lack of hiring bias in STEM? Interpretive caution needed

The recent article by Williams and Ceci [1] addresses an important issue: identifying precisely where women leave or are shut out of scientific careers. The results of their study suggest that when hypothetical faculty candidates are identical except for gender, women may be favored at the point of hiring. Within the constraints of experimental research of this type, their study addresses a meaningful and specific literature gap. In a context like this, however, where findings will contribute (and are explicitly intended to contribute) to public discourse and policy making, the interpretations of the evidence and the implications that are drawn are of at least equal importance. So it is especially troubling that, in this article, the interpretations stretch well beyond the experimental evidence.

The experiment is framed with two base assumptions: that hiring bias is the most prominent explanation for women’s underrepresentation and that fear of hiring bias is a key motivator for women to withdraw from seeking tenure-track positions; neither is compellingly supported. On the latter assumption, no evidence is provided that hiring bias is a central worry for women despite claims such as “One reason (for fewer applicants) may be omnipresent discouraging messages about sexism in hiring”. In reference to the former claim (“The underrepresentation of women…is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring”) the evidence provided is contradictory and weak. Of all of the literature they cite in support of this claim only one study [2] examines this type of hiring bias. Sheltzer and Smith [3], for example, examined the employees of elite labs and found fewer women employed there. They, however, are appropriately tentative in their interpretation saying explicitly that they have no evidence to suggest or negate hiring bias and they propose multifactorial explanations for their observations. Similarly, the 2010 American Association of University Women report “Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” [4] is used to support the claim that “numerous blue ribbon panels … have concluded that implicit, and sometimes explicit, attitudes pervade the hiring process“; but on hiring bias, which it addresses only briefly, the report references the same National Research Council (2010) report that the authors cite to support their own findings. This report concludes that women declining to apply for tenure track jobs is a more pressing issue than bias at the point of hiring.

Gender-based hiring bias, as a factor isolated from the many other day-to-day experiences that influence women’s participation and progression, is not the dominant explanation for women’s underrepresentation in the literature. That hiring bias may not (under experimental conditions) be a barrier to women on the tenure track is therefore just one of many contributions to understanding a complex phenomenon. There is little to support the far-reaching conclusion that, as a result of these findings, this “is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science”. A great deal more nuance and tentativeness in interpretation would have been appropriate.

[1] Williams WM, Ceci SJ (2015) National hiring experiments reveal 2: 1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(17): 5360-5365.

[2] Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ, Handelsman J (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(41): 16474-16479.

[3] Sheltzer JM, Smith JC (2014) Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111(28):10107–10112.

[4] Hill C, Corbett C, St. Rose A (2010) Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (American Association of University Women, Washington, DC).

[5] National Research Council (2010) Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty (National Academies Press, Washington, DC).


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: boundary vision, Feminisim, Letter to the Editor, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Rosie Redfield, Sexism, Stephen Ceci, tenure, Wendy Williams

Ending gender-based harassment in peer review

A few days ago Fiona Ingleby, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex (she’s an evolutionary biologist who works on sex-specific behavior and other phenotypes in Drosophila) sent out a series of Tweets reporting on a horrifically sexist review she had received after submitting a paper to PLOS ONE. 

There is so much horrible and wrong here, it’s hard to know where to begin. It is completely reprehensible that anyone would think this, let alone write it; that someone would think it was OK to submit a formal review of a paper that said “get a male co-author”; that they would chastise someone for supposed biases without seeing their own glaring ones; that the editor asleep on the job and didn’t look at the review before sending it out or, worse, read the review and thought it wasn’t problematic; that the editor was willing to reject a paper based on an obviously biased review; that the editor didn’t realize that one of their most important roles is to make sure that reviews like this never get sent out or factored into publishing decisions; that PLOS not only allowed this happen but didn’t respond to the authors’ complaint until they took to Twitter several weeks later.

(Let me just disclose for anyone reading this who doesn’t know – I am a founder of PLOS and am on its Board of Directors.  I’ll probably get chastised for commenting publicly on this, but I think it’s important to not just subject PLOS to the same scrutiny and criticism I would bring to the table if it were some other publisher, but to hold PLOS to an even higher standard. This should not have happened, and PLOS needs to not only learn from this, but fix things so that it never happens again. Also, I should add that I have no inside information about this case – I know nothing about it except what has been written about publicly.)

I wish I could say that this review was shocking. But sadly it’s not. As anyone who is paying even the slightest bit of attention should know, science has a serious sexism problem. These kinds of attitudes remain commonplace, and impact women at all stages of their careers in myriad ways. And so it defies credulity to think this is an isolated incident in publishing – if one review like this got through, one has to assume many more like it have been and will be written (indeed they have been) and so we not only have to respond to this event, but we have to do whatever it takes to stop it from ever happening again.

Furthermore, I’ve seen all manner of profanity applied to the review and reviewer – all deserved – for their awful sexist attitudes and acts. But it’s critical that we not dismiss this as just an asshole being an asshole. This happened in a professional setting and clearly targeted the gender of the authors in a way that was not only inappropriate, but which would have had a negative effect on their careers by denying them publication and appropriate credit for their work. So let’s call this what it is – an unambiguous case of harassment.

So what do we do about this? Obviously gender-based harassment happens all over the place. But this particular case happened in the context of science publishing, and PLOS in particular, and I am writing this to ask for help in thinking about what PLOS should do to prevent this from happening (and just to be clear – I don’t run PLOS – but I will do everything I can to make sure all good ideas get implemented).

How do we respond to this reviewer and any future reviewer who engages in harassment in their review?

Once the case became public, PLOS quickly removed the reviewer from its reviewer database, and presumably they will never be asked to review for PLOS again. (I’m still not 100% sure exactly what this means – it seems like we need to do more than remove them from the database – they need to be blacklisted in some manner so that they are never asked to review for PLOS again).

This is obviously a necessary response. But it is also insufficient. First of all, it’s  pretty light punishment – it’s not like people are clamoring to review for PLOS (or any other publisher for that matter). But more importantly, PLOS is but one of many publishers, and accounts for only a few percent of all published papers. This reviewer is still in a position to review for the thousands of other publishers on the planet, so not very much has been accomplished with this action. One can hope the reviewer has learned something from the public discussion of their review, but we certainly can not count on that. So something else needs to be done.

Which bring us to a sticky issue. To do anything more than PLOS has already done would require revealing the reviewers identity either publicly, or at least to the publishers of other journals for which they are likely to review – and reviewers agree to review with the clear expectation that their identity will be kept secret unless they choose to reveal it. While publishers clearly have a duty to protect the anonymity of their reviewers, they also have a responsibility to protect people from harassment. And in this case these two are in conflict. My first instinct is to say, “You do something like this, you lose the right to hide behind the veil of anonymity”, but it’s not as clearcut as I’d like it to be.

It’s no secret to people who read this blog that I have long been against anonymous peer review. But I do recognize that it has a real value, especially to people who are at vulnerable stages in their careers and would not feel comfortable giving their honest opinions if they had to attach their identity to it. In the long run I think we can change the culture of science so they wouldn’t feel that way, but that’s a separate issue. The fact is that right now reviewer anonymity is the norm, and I think it would make a lot of people nervous if publishers granted themselves the right to reveal reviewer identities.

But surely, publishers would reveal reviewer identities in some situations – say if a reviewer physically threatened an author or engaged in some other frankly illegal activity in their review. So clearly anonymity is not inviolable, and the question is whether sexist and harassing reviews raise to the level where the publisher’s interest in protecting others from abuse trumps its interest in preserving reviewer anonymity. I think it does, and furthermore feel it’s a cop out on the part of publishers to hide behind review anonymity here. Engaging in harassing behavior in peer review should void your guarantee of anonymity, full stop.

Obviously, one superficial way to resolve this conflict is to intercept all harassing reviews and make sure they never are seen by the authors – a sort of “no harm, no foul” response. But while this protects the authors from the proximal harms of a biased and sexist review, it doesn’t deal with the harasser. The responsibility of the journal to prevent others from being harassed shouldn’t change because their behavior was caught early.

There are serious challenges in implementing something like this – for example, who would make the decision that something is harassment? – but I am confident we can figure them out. One thing that all publishers can do is to spell out very clearly the kinds of behavior that are unacceptable and what the consequences are for engaging in them. It seems like you shouldn’t have to say “don’t harass people”, but clearly you do. And having very clear policies would likely both help prevent harassment and make it easier to deal with harassers. When this case first came to my attention, I looked around to see if PLOS has some kind of “code of conduct” policy for reviewers, but I couldn’t find one. Maybe I missed it, but if so, then it’s likely not being seen by reviewers. I thought I might find them at the Committee on Publication Ethics, but their code of conduct policy doesn’t seem to deal with this either. Does anyone know of such a policy? I was at a meeting last month sponsored by India Bioscience – the program guide has a great “Code of Conduct” for meeting attendees – this would be a good place to start. [UPDATE: A comment from Irene Hames pointed me to this “Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers” from COPE].

I’m very curious what other people think about this, especially because I’m a bit concerned that my overall feeling that anonymous peer review is bad is coloring my judgment here. But seriously, what could be more important for a publisher to do than protect their authors from harassment? If they’re not willing to do whatever that takes, they should just close up shop.

The role of editors in preventing harassment

It’s hard to fathom how a review as blatantly sexist and harassing as this one was not only sent back to the authors, but used as the sole basis for a negative publication decision on the submission. There are really only two possibilities – neither of them good: the academic editor handling the manuscript failed to fully read the review, or they read it and didn’t find its contents objectionable. So either the editor doesn’t take their job seriously or they are complicit to harassment. Whatever the answer, they shouldn’t be handling manuscripts, and PLOS has asked them to resign their position (and, presumably, will not send them any more manuscripts even if they don’t formally resign).

This editor (again, I don’t know their identity, or anything about their past performance for PLOS) was one of approximately 7,000 academic editors who handle manuscripts for PLOS ONE. The vast majority of the people who edit and review for PLOS take their work seriously and are constructive in their reviews. However, with that many editors it’s inevitable that some are going to do their job poorly. But we can’t just write this off as a bad editor. PLOS has intentionally (and for good reasons) devolved a lot of autonomy to its editors. But in doing so it has magnified the effect that a bad or negligent editor can have, and this increases the need for PLOS to train its editors well, to oversee their work carefully, and to respond rapidly when problems arise – all of which PLOS failed on here.

One issue has to do with the way that editors conceive of their job. It’s always seemed to me that many academic editors think that their primary responsibility is to identify reviewers and then to render decisions on papers after reviews are in. They recognize that they sometimes have to adjudicate between reviewers with different opinions – making them a kind of super reviewer. But I seldomly hear academic editors talk about another – arguably more important – aspect of their job, which is to protect authors from lazy, capricious or hostile reviewers. In my experience most editors almost always pass on reviews to authors even if they disagree with them or think they were inadequate – it’s somehow felt to be bad form to have asked for a review to then turn around and not use it. This needs to change. I would argue that protecting authors from reviewer malfeasance or malignancy is the most important role for editors in our current publishing system. Maybe PLOS and other journals already do this, but every academic editor should be trained to recognize and deal with the various types of harassment and other bad reviewer behaviors that we know exist.

But training can only go so far, and we have to assume that there is going to be considerable variance in the manner in which editors work and that some fraction of papers will be handled poorly, especially for a journal like PLOS ONE where a large number of the editors are young and relatively inexperienced. PLOS knows this, of course, and has long wrestled both with how to get more consistent behavior out of its editors and to deal with problems when they arise. There are two general possibilities: there could be a second layers of more experienced editors or staffers who review every decision letter for its adherence to PLOS’s editorial standards and code of conduct before it goes out, or PLOS could assume that most decisions are good and rely on feedback from authors (aka complaints) to identify problems.

You can understand why PLOS ONE and most other journals that already rely heavily on academic editors generally choose the later solution – it’s hard enough to find people to handle manuscripts – adding a second layer of review would slow things down even further and make them more expensive. But if you’re going to use this strategy, then it seems like it’s imperative that you respond to issues – especially serious ones – quickly. And PLOS failed to do this – the authors say they had been waiting for almost a month for PLOS to respond to their complaint about how their manuscript was handled.

PLOS really has to fix this. But I also think they should consider what it would take to have every decision letter screened before sending it out to authors. This would not only go a long way towards preventing harassment in the review process, but also ensuring that the whole process is more fair (I’ve fielded a fair number of complaints about the failure of editors to properly implement PLOS ONE’s editorial policies – one decision letter I saw described a paper as “technically sound, but not of sufficient interest to merit publication in PLOS ONE” – a clear contradiction of PLOS ONE‘s standards for inclusion).

How much would this cost? Seems like you could hire someone who looks at 2-3 decision letters an hour, so lets say 20 a day, or 5,000 a year. Even if you pay this person a very good salary, you’re only talking $20-$25/article to make sure people aren’t being harassed and are otherwise being treated fairly. Considering that we spend around $6,500/published article on average across the industry, this seems like a pittance.

Protecting authors in an open review/post-publication review world

I’ve written a lot about why I think the whole system of pre-publication peer review that dominated science publishing needs to be replaced with a system where papers are published whenever authors feel they are ready, and peer review happens post-publication and is not limited to 2 or 3 handpicked reviewers. I’m not going to rehash why I think this system is better – you can read my arguments here and here. PLOS will begin the first stages of this transition soon. More open peer review will discourage some of the bad behavior that takes place when reviewers are anonymous. Taking away the power individual reviewers currently have to influence the fate of a paper and thus the careers of its authors should make review more fair. However, protections the formal structure of peer review affords authors from bad reviewer behavior could easily be undermined if we try to rely too heavily on the wisdom of the crowd to police peer review.The sexist attitudes that reared their ugly head in this case are not going to go away because we change the way peer review works. So it’s very important that, in trying to fix other aspects of science publishing, we don’t end up increasing authors exposure to abuse. In this world I think the things discussed above – very clear codes of conduct for reviewers, and proactive policing of reviews – become even more important. And while I’ve been convinced that it’s important to allow reviewers to be unnamed to authors and readers, it’s imperative that they not be truly anonymous – somebody (publisher, scientific society, etc…) has to know who reviewers are so that harassment and other abusive behaviors can be discouraged and dealt with appropriately when they occur.

Please let me know what you think about these issues. I’m sure others have better ideas than I do about how to prevent and deal with harassment in science publishing today and in the future.


 

UPDATE: Several people on Twitter have noted that the term “sexual harassment” is specific to cases involving unwanted sexual advances. The terms “sexist” and “gender bias” were suggested by some, but I don’t think that captures the egregiousness of the offense, so I changed the title and text to “gender-based harassment”, which I think is more appropriate.