Posted on behalf of Lesley Evans Ogden.

{credit}Council of Canadian Academies{/credit}

They call it a leaky pipeline. But the leaks are women, not oil. A substantial number of young women enter into potential research careers but drop-off at various stages, says a report released this week by the Canadian Council of Academies analyzing the gender gap amongst Canada’s University researchers.

There are more than twice as many male than female researchers at Canadian research institutions, despite the fact that undergraduate enrollment achieved gender parity in 1989, and more than 50% of Canadian PhD students are now female.

The CCA panel sought to explain this attrition of women at ascending rungs of the faculty ladder. Low female numbers in the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) programme, and their absence from the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) program, were key drivers in the commissioning of the report.

One challenge was the paucity of data for tracking career trajectories. Data is scarce at the postdoctoral stage and beyond, making this phase a particular mystery.

But there are clues.

Despite progress in institutional policies allowing career interruptions for child rearing, “there are still important difficulties that women researchers face more than men with respect to having a family”, says the University of Ottawa’s Michael Wolfson, a report co-author. The traditional pressures of institutional culture may trump policy in an increasingly competitive funding environment, explains Janet Halliwell, President of J.E. Halliwell Associates, one of the report’s external reviewers.

Male faculty father children in their late 20s and early 30s, while women faculty have fewer children, and postpone childbearing to later ages, “which we took to be a signal of the more difficult choice or trade-off that women faced with respect to balancing a research career,” says Wolfson. Some call it the “maternal wall”.

“The relatively low proportion of women at the full professor level suggests that the glass ceiling remains intact in Canada as well as in several comparator countries,” says the report.

Are things improving? Yes. The gap is closing, but not fast enough. If we take a wait and watch approach, parity is still decades away, explains Wolfson.

What can be done? The report makes many suggestions. We need better data on research career trajectories from granting councils and academic institutions. Second, we need a more family-friendly academic environment that is flexible with respect to part time work and interrupted careers.

With leaky pipelines, maternal walls, and glass ceilings to fix, the report is a call to action at all levels. Canada needs to “engineer” more women into research, and find mechanisms to collect the very data we need to both monitor and make it happen.

Read Nature‘s editorial on what we are doing to try and improve our coverage of the contributions of women to science.

Posted on behalf of Ed Yong.

Psychologists are going through a period of intense self-reflection regarding the reliability of research in their field, fuelled by recently uncovered cases of fraud, failed attempts to replicate classic results, and calls from prominent psychologists to replicate key results in disputed fields.

The latest volley in this debate is a special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, consisting of 18 papers that outline the scope of the so-called “replicability crisis”, and potential ways of fixing it.

Among the contributions, Matthew Makel from Duke University and two other colleagues have uncovered just how uncommon replications are in psychology, especially from independent groups. By scanning the top 100 psychology journals since 1900, and analysing 500 randomly selected articles more deeply, they showed that just 1% of publications are replications of earlier work. Of these, only 14% are direct replications that follow the original experimental recipes, while the others are conceptual replications that test related hypotheses using different methods and settings.

Makel also found that around half of these replications are done by the same scientists behind the original experiments (and many are published as part of the original papers). This matters because the odds that the replication will be successful are 92% if the original authors were involved, but just 65% if done by an independent group.

This lack of independent replications, combined with the low statistical power of many studies and the tendency to only publish positive results, is a serious problem, according John Ioannidis from Stanford School of Medicine in California. In a commentary, Ioannidis, probably the biggest name in the meta-field of scientific credibility, writes that “the overall credibility of psychological science at the moment may be in serious trouble”.

Later papers in the issue outline potential ways of fixing these problems by encouraging more replications, including: using undergraduate projects as a route for replicating existing studies; encouraging adversarial collaborations where sceptics replicate studies alongside original investigators;  providing accessible outlets for publishing replications; opening up data, methods and workflow; and pre-registering studies including all the intended methods and analyses.

Many of these reforms should be enacted in parallel, argue the issue’s editors, Hal Pashler from University of California, San Diego and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers from University of Amsterdam. They write that psychologists have “found ourselves in the very unwelcome position of being… the public face for the replicability problems of science in the early 21st century”. But they also see a solid opportunity “to rise to the occasion and provide leadership in finding better ways to overcome bias and error in science generally”.