Thread by @zra_research

Sooooo....about that article on gender and "mentoring" in science. It's actually an article about publishing. The paper uses a dataset of published papers and a survey. But mentoring is operationalized as co-authored publishing. I get that this is science 1/

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where co-authoring is the norm for publishing, but this operationalization devalues the work of mentoring by only focusing on its highest status product. Reasons they might have found diffs in publishing based on the gender of the more experienced co-author are actually more 2/

likely to be about gender disparities in funding for labs and research. The other part that IRKS me about this study is that it assumes selection processes are equal. It is highly likely that the men in this sample and in others are NOT willing to work with just any student. 3/

What if women tend to work w/ students who have less prior experience? Have life issues that are going on that interrupt their ability to "just focus on research"? None of that is captured in either the study of publication counts OR the survey analysis. Basically, the main 4/

finding of this article is that IF you are so lucky as to publish with a "big shot" (their term not mine) then you will have better publishing outcomes........

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