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Robert Neubecker
By Lindzi Wessel
A massive study on mentoring, gender and career outcomes published by Nature communications sparked a storm of criticism for its findings, which have been labeled sexist by many scientists on social media. The study is a “black eye” for the famous open access titleA bioengineer tweeted, adding that she no longer examines papers for the journal.
In response to the outcry, the journal’s editorial team announced Thursday that it is reviewing the study, which concludes that mentorship by women can harm the careers of students and early-career scientists; instead, he recommends encouraging male mentors for women.
The study, published on November 17 by a trio of researchers at New York University, Abu Dhabi, used a dataset of more than 200 million scientific papers published over more than 100 years to identify several million mentor-mentee pairs. He then followed the professional achievements of the mentees, based on quotes from articles they wrote in their first 7 years as “senior scientists” – here only determined by time since the first publication of a researcher.
They found that early-career scientists who co-authored papers with what the authors call “high-profile” researchers – defined by their annual citation rate – achieved above-average citation rates themselves. . More controversially, they report that, overall, the more female mentors an early-career researcher had, the less the impact of the papers published when they became a senior scientist. They found that the effect on impact, measured by citation rates, was particularly strong for female mentees. They also noted that female mentors to women “suffer on average an 18% loss of citations on their framed articles”.
“Our gender-related findings suggest that current diversity policies promoting mentorship among women, however well-intentioned they are, could hamper the careers of women who remain in academia in unexpected ways,” concludes the discussion section of the paper. . “In fact, female scientists can benefit from opposite-sex mentors in terms of publication potential and impact throughout their post-mentorship careers.
This conclusion and the methods used to reach it have attracted strong criticism. On social media, many researchers claimed the dataset had been misused, arguing that mentoring relationships and senior status were poorly defined, and that the citation rate alone is not an issue. adequate measure of the success of a growing scientist. And many pointed out that, while the conclusions were valid, there was no reason to discourage female-to-female mentorships, especially because the document little consideration for institutionalized biases that might explain the data. All the study done, critics say, is to find evidence of systemic sexism. And he offered more sexism as a solution, they added, encouraging researchers to avoid working with other women. Hundreds of researchers from all scientific disciplines called for the article to be reexamined and sought to form teams to write rebuttals.
“The conclusions … are based on flawed assumptions and flawed analysis,” wrote Rockefeller University neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall in an open letter to Nature communications calling for the withdrawal of the newspaper. “I find it deeply disheartening that this message – avoid a female mentor or your career will suffer – is amplified by your journal.
Much of the criticism was how researchers defined mentorship. The authors assigned mentor-mentee pairs based on co-authors – a connection, many critics pointed out, that could occur with the two researchers having little or no interaction at all. Other criticisms focused on how the authors defined seniority; Scientists were considered junior for the first 7 years after the publication of their first paper, and senior for the next 7 years, a distinction that many researchers have called arbitrary. Commentators were also pained by the use of citations during this period as the sole measure of researchers’ success.
In response, tweets from scientists of all genres thanked their mentors for supporting them in particular challenges, creating a harassment-free space, or keeping them in science despite tough times. “Using this [paper] to remind me to thank some of my brilliant official and unofficial mentors, ” tweeted Andrea Fields, a doctorate in psychology. student at Columbia University. “I am convinced that I would have no publications and no chance of making an academic career without them.”
Coral biologist Sarah Davies of Boston University collected more than 1,000 such testimonies in a Google spreadsheet that she and her collaborators created in response to the article.
Davies, who recently co-authored a prepublication suggesting strategies to support female academic scientists during the pandemic, points out that citation rates are known to be biased in favor of men. Recent studies suggest that men cite themselves more than women and that academics consider articles to be of higher quality when they think they are written by men. Researchers are also more likely to cite articles and authors that easily come to mind, regardless of their quality. That leaves plenty of room for implicit gender biases to play a role, she says. And the Nature communications The study runs counter to other recent research suggesting that female role models may be important in keeping women in science.
Davies is also concerned about the study’s use of first names to determine gender, an approach she says could lead to inaccuracies, but also leaves no room for recognizing non-gender binary researchers. “Treating the genre itself as binary is also detrimental in today’s climate,” she says.
The study’s authors declined an interview with ScienceAn insider citing childcare responsibilities, but defended his work in an emailed statement:
In our article, we emphasize that the rise of women in science depends on the achievement of at least two objectives: retaining women in scientific careers – for which female mentors are essential, as mentioned explicitly in our article – and maximize the long-term impact women in the academy. As we conclude: “The goal of gender equality in science, whatever the goal, cannot and should not be supported by high-level women scientists alone, rather it should be adopted by the scientific community as a whole. We believe that open inquiry and debate are the engines of science, and we welcome the review launched by the Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications, which we believe will lead to a thorough and rigorous discussion of the work and its implications. complex.
Such a review is needed, says Joshua Miller, postdoctoral researcher in conservation genomics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, whose newspaper Twitter removed has collected over 3,500 likes and thousands of retweets. Adding to his frustration, he says, is the fact that “many of these concerns raised by me and others on Twitter were raised by peer reviewers,” whose comments were made available with the post.
“I think a dialogue in Nature communications is definitely justified, ”Miller says. “Highlighting everything we know about equity, diversity and inclusion seems at least the bare minimum.”
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