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Ok all, this new paper in @NatureComms really has me sad/confused/angry
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19723-8#MOESM1
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19723-8#MOESM1
A Thread 1/
The authors analyze an insanely large body of scientific papers from across disciplines to look at how mentorship of junior researchers (<7 years from their first authored paper) by senior researchers (>7 years) goes on to influence the careers of the junior researchers
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measured as the number of citations on publications they have post mentorship. They also look at the effect of the “qualities” of the mentor in terms of their being a “big-shot” (average number of citations prior to mentoring) or a “hub” (number of collaborations).
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After employing statistics to control for other covariates (e.g. number of years active post mentorship) they find that there is a larger positive effect for having “big-shot” mentor than having a “hub” mentor. While the implications of this is depressing, it is not shocking.
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What was shocking was the next set of analyses that aimed to look at the influence of gender on mentorship. Here the authors looked at the difference in outcomes of mentees who had varying numbers of female mentors:
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Quoting from the paper “having more female mentors is associated with a decrease in the mentorship outcome, and this decrease can reach as high as 35%, depending on the number of mentors and the proportion of female mentors”.
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Also “by mentoring female instead of male protégés, the female mentors compromise their gain from mentorship, and suffer on average a loss of 18% in citations on their mentored papers”.
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Again, really depressing, and to me points to implicit biases and institutional barriers faced by female scientists. Things that we as an academic community should be fighting to fix.
But this was not, from my reading, the answer the authors put forward.
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But this was not, from my reading, the answer the authors put forward.
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Quoting their conclusion “Our gender-related findings suggest that current diversity policies promoting female–female mentorships, as well-intended as they may be, could hinder the careers of women who remain in academia in unexpected ways...
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Female scientists, in fact, may benefit from opposite-gender mentorships in terms of their publication potential and impact throughout their post-mentorship careers.”
At this point my brain broke.
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At this point my brain broke.
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That is not the conclusion. It implies women-women mentorships have no value and policies promoting them should be abandoned. This is not true. We know that representation matters! Having the one metric the authors highlighted show a decrease is reductive and harmful.
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Shout out to all the organizations who are working to make things better for women and other underrepresented people in STEM!
A few I have personal experience with @SWEEET_ecoevo @WISAYale @WISESTualberta
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A few I have personal experience with @SWEEET_ecoevo @WISAYale @WISESTualberta
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