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1/7 The gender-based conclusions/recommendations of this paper are not supported by the study results, and despite the incredibly damaging message, and peer reviews raising red flags @NatureComms still chose to publish this.
1/7 The gender-based conclusions/recommendations of this paper are not supported by the study results, and despite the incredibly damaging message, and peer reviews raising red flags @NatureComms still chose to publish this.
2/7 Firstly, there are several questionable points considering the methods. 1) “Mentorship” was assumed from “co-authorship” which is a huge leap. The authors used a survey to check this link, but had only 169 respondents (compared to the 3 million mentor-protégé pairs involved).
3/7 Secondly, the protégé also needn’t have been first author, which means they could have just been contributing a particular analysis or having been the one to collect the data with only marginal involved as co-author.
4/7 Thirdly, co-authorship identified ‘mentorship’, but then mentorship was assumed to continue throughout the entire junior career period of the protégé (up to 7 years), based on this one co-authored paper.
5/7 These and other major assumptions aside, let’s assume for a second, for the sake of argument that female-mentored junior researchers end up being less impactful (which I do not agree that it has been shown here)…
6/7 the deep-rooted systemic barriers to women over the past century or more (the timeframe of this study by the way) could easily explain such a result (e.g. gender inequality in academic funding and associated feedbacks of being under-resourced).
7/7 And yet the conclusions drawn and the recommendations made are not ‘we must do more to reverse the legacy of past inequality’ but instead (shockingly) the conclusion is to ‘just let the men do it’. I am beyond appalled
