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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 his conclusions, which were labeled sexist by many scientists on social media. The study is a “black eye” for the popular open access title, a bioengineer tweeted, adding that he will no longer review the papers for the magazine.
In response to the hype, the journal’s editors announced Thursday that they are reviewing the study, which concludes that mentoring by women can harm the careers of female students and early career scientists; instead recommends encouraging male tutors for women.
The study, published on November 17 by a trio of researchers from New York University, Abu Dhabi, used a dataset of more than 200 million scientific articles published over the course of more than 100 years to identify several million mentor-mentee pairs. He then followed the trainees’ career outcomes, based on citations from articles they wrote during their first 7 years as “senior scientists”, here determined only from the time of a researcher’s first publication.
They found that early career scientists who co-wrote articles with what the authors call researchers “big shots” – defined by their annual citation rate – continued to have citation rates that were above average. The more controversial, they report that, on the whole, the more women mentors a scientist are early in their career, the less impact the articles they published when they became senior scientists. They found that the effect on impact, as measured by citation rates, was particularly strong for female students. They also noted that female mentors of women “suffer an average of 18% loss in citations on their mentor papers.”
“Our gender findings suggest that current diversity policies promoting female-to-female mentoring, however well-intentioned they may be, could hamper the careers of women who remain in academia in unexpected ways,” concludes the discussion section of the document. “Female scientists, in fact, can benefit from opposite-gender mentoring in terms of publication potential and impact during their post-mentoring careers.”
This conclusion and the methods used to reach it have attracted hot criticism. On social media, many researchers argued that the dataset had been misused, arguing that mentoring relationships and senior position were poorly defined and that the citation rate alone is not an adequate measure of success. of a scientist in bloom. And many pointed out that, even if the results were valid, there was no justification for jumping into discouraging female-to-female mentoring, especially since the document gave little consideration for institutionalized prejudices which could explain the data. All the study done, critics say, is to find evidence of systemic sexism. And he proposed more sexism as a solution, they added, encouraging female researchers to avoid working with other women. Hundreds of researchers from across the spectrum of scientific disciplines called for the document to be reconsidered and tried to form teams to draft rebuttals.
“The conclusions … are based on wrong assumptions and wrong analyzes,” wrote Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in an open letter a Nature Communications requesting the retraction of the newspaper. “I find it deeply disheartening that this message – avoid a female mentor or your career will suffer – is amplified by your diary.”
At the heart of the criticism was how the researchers defined mentoring. 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. Other criticisms have 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 called arbitrary. Commentators were also saddened by the use of citations during this period as the only measure of the researchers’ success.
In response, tweets from scientists of all genders thanked their female mentors for supporting them in particular challenges, creating a space free from harassment or keeping them in science despite tough times. “Using this [paper] as a reminder to recognize some of my brilliant official and unofficial mentors ” tweeted Andrea Fields, a PhD in psychology. student at Columbia University. “I am confident that I would have 0 publications and 0 chance of an academic career without them.”
Coral biologist Sarah Davies of Boston University collected more than 1,000 of these testimonials in a Google spreadsheet she and her collaborators created in response to the paper.
Davies, who recently co-authored a preprint suggesting strategies to support academic scientists during the pandemic, points out that citation rates are known to be biased in favor of men. Recent studies have suggested that men quote themselves more than women and that scholars consider documents to be of higher quality when they think they are written by men. Researchers are also more likely to cite articles and authors that come to mind easily, regardless of quality. That leaves a lot of room for implicit gender bias to play a role, he says. And the Nature Communications the study flies in the face of other recent research that suggests female role models may be important in keeping women in science.
Davies is also concerned about the study’s use of names to determine gender, an approach she believes may lead to inaccuracies, but leaves no room for researchers to recognize non-binary gender. “Treating gender itself as a binary is also harmful in today’s climate,” he says.
The study authors declined an interview with ScienceInsider citing childcare responsibilities, but defended their work in an emailed statement:
In our article, we highlight that the elevation of women in science depends on achieving at least two goals: retaining women in scientific careers – for which female mentors are indispensable, as explicitly mentioned in our article – and maximizing women’s impact to long term in the academy. As we conclude: “the goal of gender equality in science, regardless of the goal pursued, cannot and should not be supported by senior scientists alone, rather it should be embraced by the scientific community as a whole”. We believe free inquiry and debate are engines of science and welcome the review launched by the chief editor of Nature Communications, which we think will lead to a thorough and rigorous discussion of the work and its complex implications.
Such a review is needed, says Joshua Miller, a postdoctoral scholar in conservation genomics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, of which Twitter removed the newspaper has collected more than 3500 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 along with the publication.
“I think a dialogue in Nature Communications it’s definitely guaranteed, “says Miller.” Highlighting everything we know about equity, diversity and inclusion seems at least the bare minimum. “
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