Archive by category | Faculty

Last-author spot tough to nail for scientists who are not white or male

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , , ,

Last-author spot tough to nail for scientists who are not white or male

The analysis—which covered 486,644 biomedical articles with two to nine authors published between 1946 and 2009—found that female, black and Hispanic authors were less likely than were white men to hold prestigious last-author spots. And while all scientists tended to land more last-author spots as their careers went on, that trend was slower for women and minorities. “There’s a lack of progression for those groups,” says Bruce Weinberg, a co-author of the study and an economist at Ohio State University in Columbus.  Read more

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How do you draw the line between volunteer work and unpaid labour?

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , ,

How do you draw the line between volunteer work and unpaid labour?

But questions remain about the plan’s actual intent and its potential impact on US universities’ current and future policies around existing faculty members.  Read more

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Where are the female first and last authors?

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , , , ,

Where are the female first and last authors?

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle gathered names of first and last authors from papers published from 2005-2017 in 15 major science and neuroscience journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Review. Nearly 10% of the names were excluded because they were relatively gender neutral, but the rest told a clear story: In these journals, authorship is a male-dominated enterprise.  Read more

When conferences collide with family needs

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When conferences collide with family needs

Calisi, a behavioural neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and a group of 45 other scientist-parents, have turned their frustrations into a call for action. In a paper published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers detail the shortcomings of past conferences and offer a blueprint for making conferences more welcoming and accessible to parents of young children.  Read more

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March for Science 2018 gears up

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March for Science 2018 gears up

Caroline Weinberg, an organizer for the upcoming march in Washington DC, expects smaller crowds than last year, although she admits her prediction may again be off the mark. “Last we expected 40,000 people, and we got around 100,000,” she says. She adds that most of the marchers in the nation’s capital city were concerned citizens, not practicing researchers.  Read more

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Still more gender differences are identified

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , , ,

Still more gender differences are identified

One study suggests that the concept of “brilliance” in science might discourage some women from following certain career paths or education opportunities. Another found that women are more likely than men to offer “honorary authorships” to scientists who may not or do not deserve it—a courtesy that might obscure the magnitude of their own contributions.  Read more

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Know the odds

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , ,

Know the odds

Both supply and demand have contributed to an research-and-development (R&D) career bottleneck, according to a 15 December Science article signed by the 10 research leaders, who call themselves the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science. US federal research funding, when adjusted for inflation, declined by nearly 20% from 2003 to 2016, according to the article. Meanwhile, PhD candidates continue to enroll in doctoral programmes. The result is that only one in 10 trainees will gain a tenure-track position within five years of receiving their PhD. Many PhD holders then spend longer than they had anticipated in postdoc training positions, sometimes taking multiple fellowships while waiting for academic job openings to materialize. And the ones who do land such positions are taking longer to secure their first independent grant.  Read more

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Tackling the #manel problem

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , ,

Tackling the #manel problem

The study, the latest in a lengthy string of gender-disparity findings in academia, quantifies a type of discrimination to which female scientists have long objected—the low number of speaker invitations that they receive compared with male scientists. One of the most egregious examples—speaker panels comprised solely of Caucasian males—has spawned the hashtag #manel (for ‘male panel’) on Twitter.  Read more

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Joining a new college: prepare your superpowers

Posted by Rebecca Wild | Categories: , , , , ,

Joining a new college: prepare your superpowers

Congratulations on your faculty position at a newly established college! You think you know what the job entails: teaching, research, and some administrative service. As you read job advice, you wonder why so many pieces include the phrase “survival tips.” “Surviving” was your most-commonly-used word during your PhD and postdoc. Surely, there‘s no more surviving to be had in a brand new college?  Read more

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Boyfriends and husbands may put female researchers at a hiring disadvantage

Posted by Karen Kaplan | Categories: , , , , , , , , ,

Boyfriends and husbands may put female researchers at a hiring disadvantage

Female candidates’ – but not male candidates’ — relationship status was a primary consideration in hiring committees’ discussions and decisions, according to study co-author Lauren Rivera, an associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She found that committee members assumed that heterosexual female candidates whose partners or husbands held academic or high-status jobs could not relocate for the job, and excluded them from offers when the committee had viable male or unpartnered female options. Yet, she says, committees — whose members included women — rarely discussed male applicants’ relationship status and assumed that those candidates’ partners or wives would be able to move for the position if an offer were made.  Read more

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