Science and sexism: In the eye of the Twitterstorm
November 20, 2015 9:30 AM   Subscribe

When Fiona Ingleby took to Twitter last April to vent about a journal’s peer-review process, she didn’t expect much of a response. With only around 100 followers on the social-media network, Ingleby — an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK — guessed that she might receive a few messages of support or commiseration from close colleagues. What she got was an overwhelming wave of reaction. Social media has enabled an increasingly public discussion about the persistent problem of sexism in science.
posted by sciatrix (11 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
That is a really great article.
In many ways, #shirtstorm and other Twitter conversations about sexism are not new. It is only the venue that has changed, says Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who is active on Twitter. “Guys have been wearing girly shirts forever,” she says. “The women around them have been rolling their eyes and going home and saying, ‘What a buffoon. I’m so sick of this crap.’ They’ve been doing it in the women’s room and doing it in the coffee room.” But now, Jahren says, “Twitter is that thought under your breath.”
The bolded last line finally articulates for me what I knew in my bones but could not properly express: the importance of, the indispensability of Twitter.
posted by jamjam at 10:53 AM on November 20, 2015 [7 favorites]


Sadly, nothing in this article is remotely surprising, and I think it's telling that, while there are stories of people at least feeling that their jobs were threatened after pointing out sexism, I have never heard of anyone being disciplined in any significant way for sexual harassment in the labs, reviewing, etc. It's maddening. I mean, I don't really want promotion and tenure directed by Twitter, but it would be nice for administrators to take at least as much notice of the events that produce the tweets as by the inevitable trolling that follows.

"Made to feel momentarily bad on the internet" is not the equivalent of "hounded out of the profession."
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:54 AM on November 20, 2015


"Made to feel momentarily bad on the internet" is not the equivalent of "hounded out of the profession."

I dunno. Forcing a tenured professor at Berkeley to resign is kind of a big deal. I think an interesting point of the Marcy case was that the twitterstorm did what the administration refused to do.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:58 AM on November 20, 2015


There is a bit of a difference between, say, foolishly wearing a sexist shirt to an important news conference or saying stupid things about women in laboratories in public and a well-documented pattern of a professor harassing students for a decade....
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:14 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


I have never heard of anyone being disciplined in any significant way for sexual harassment in the labs, reviewing, etc.

Hard to discipline journal reviewers, because journal's don't pay them. And no journal will ever "out" a reviewer, no matter how egregious his/her comments. Depending on the journal, the editor may or may not be getting paid to co-ordinate the review process. In the case of PLoS One, the vast majority of reviewers are not paid. So not many disciplinary options there.
posted by kisch mokusch at 1:16 PM on November 20, 2015


Hard to discipline journal reviewers, because journal's don't pay them.

The journal could decline to use them as reviewers in the future. That isn't an immense punishment, but reviewing is academic work and getting a reputation for writing poorly-considered reviews is not a great step for your career.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:10 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm sure that editors do stop using reviewers for a variety of reasons, but you'll never hear about that.

The review process is anonymous. Nobody has a reputation for writing reviews, good or bad. There is no career benefit, or loss, for the quality of your reviews. It is nice to be able to say you've reviewed for certain journals in your resume, but PLoS one isn't one of them.

The mechanism of "discipline" here is being applied to the journal more than to specific individuals. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. It has evidently made the very influential Nature Publishing Group pay attention. But don't expect personal repercussions for sexist reviews. Saving for an entire re-structuring of how the peer review process works, it will never happen.
posted by kisch mokusch at 2:28 PM on November 20, 2015


But don't expect personal repercussions for sexist reviews.

For that to happen, the majority of STEM fields would have to decide that sexism was something they weren't going to tolerate, which is a much larger hurdle and a much closer one. Compared to that, the weak anonymity of peer reviewing is a simple thing.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:46 PM on November 20, 2015


Yeah, not really that simple. The European Molecular Biology Organization and a couple of journals have tried to break the anonymity of the review process, to combat the inherent problems that accompany it. But it isn't something that has been adopted by the big for-profit publishers such as NPG and Elsevier.

Scientific publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry, underpinned by the free labour of scientists acting as reviewers. Despite all its flaws, changing the way peer review is performed is such a momentous task that I don't see it changing within my lifetime.

It's probably worth noting that PLoS has disrupted elements of the for-profit model, leading the way with "open access" journals. In fact, Science even commissioned a guy to send fake data to a variety of "open access" journals to discredit the PLoS-initiated approach. So it's not surprising that NPG is evidently happy enough to publish this article, which embarrasses PLoS One, but you won't hear them endorse a process in which reviewers are named and their comments published together with the paper. There's too much money at stake.
posted by kisch mokusch at 3:13 PM on November 20, 2015


OK, I am obviously part of the problem here, but can we focus on sexism in science rather than anonymity in peer reviewing?

Part of the problem is that universities have not been willing to discipline faculty (or administrators) for violations of sexual harassment policies, especially when those faculty bring in grant money. The story about Geoffrey Marcy, linked above suggests that the man's pattern of harassment emerged almost as soon as he had been hired, but the university was willing to respond to a decade of destructive behavior by basically saying "now promise you won't do it again." I mean, that's taking a bold stance, you must admit.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:51 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]


“Guys have been wearing girly shirts forever”

The shirt in question is so not what I was expecting from the phrase "girly shirts," being unfamiliar with #shirtstorm.
posted by pwnguin at 5:35 PM on November 20, 2015


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