Interesting gender thing here. I suppose it's not headline news that male scientists can be sexist, but the 'his work is much better than his sister's' comment was quite... amusing.
Or his work might have been steadily improving over time independently of the entire gender issue.
(It's depressingly hard to get a properly controlled experiment in this sort of area. You can't get a scientist to go back and present the same work under a different name and gender, so you're always left with doubt as to whether the different work or the different gender was responsible for the different treatment.)
Or you could just get two groups of scientists and go, "Here are some papers by up-and-coming people you probably haven't heard of - please rate which you think are the most promising," and then gender-switch some of the author names between the two groups, and see if people rated the same paper more highly if they thought it was written by a man. I think things like that have been done a lot. But it still doesn't tell you whether *the same person* will rate *the same person* more highly as a man.
Comments 5
Reply
(It's depressingly hard to get a properly controlled experiment in this sort of area. You can't get a scientist to go back and present the same work under a different name and gender, so you're always left with doubt as to whether the different work or the different gender was responsible for the different treatment.)
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Reply
Leave a comment