1/ UCU free speech survey🧵. It is not good practice to invite people to take part in a survey by telling them what their views should be. One likely effect is to dissuade those who disagree with you from participating, thus biasing the results.
2/ Questions are highly disclosive, taken together they would give a high risk of identifiability. Although questions are optional, this isn't made clear. Given that the ruling faction in the union is hostile to some members, leading to low trust, these considerations are
3/ important. Some reassurance should have been provided that the data and analysis would be handled independently, both to ensure ethical treatment of the data and impartial data analysis.
4/ "The next questions are about your identity". This will obviously antagonise some of the respondents whose academic freedom has been most threatened in recent years.
5/ If you want to know people's response to a statement like this, attributing the statement to a source (e.g. UK govt) will bias how people respond.
6/ Not sure how meaningful this question is.
7/ How did they come up with this list of options? Doesn't include the key threats in my view, and mentioning IHRA but not biological sex and women's rights seems perverse.
8/ List of options continued...
9/ We are generously allowed to make some other suggestions.
10/ The next part is quite repetitive
11/ No "don't know" option, seriously? How many people do you think have seriously engaged with this legislation?
12/ I wonder how they'll analyse this?
13/ Finally, the most important question.
14/ This is a survey designed for propaganda purposes. I hope that people will complete it in order to undermine this. It is unbecoming for an academic union to do bogus "research".

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More from @ProfAliceS

17 Mar
1/ Quantitative social scientists have been trying hard to explain to ONS that data on sex matters since 2019. I wrote a paper on this for @TheIJSRM tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… Open access version here papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… So how did the question end up in court?
2/ 80 quantitative social scientists wrote to the census authorities explaining our concerns. The arguments and scientific consensus could not have been clearer. parliament.scot/General%20Docu…
3/ This only ended up in court because the views of experts were not given due weight. How did this happen? @mbmpolicy provide some insights into this murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2020/01/13/los…
Read 6 tweets
12 Mar
🚨Please read and RT!🚨 1/New paper on "The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education" with Judith Suissa published in @JPhilofEd onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
2/ We often hear it claimed that there is no such thing as a crisis in academic freedom, cancel culture is a myth, etc. This paper demonstrates that there is a serious problem with academic freedom regarding the ability to discuss sex, gender and gender identity.
3/ The problem is fundamental and far-reaching. Inevitably so, given that sex is a vital concept across the human and social sciences and the humanities. Gender identity extremists are succeeding in making it difficult for academics to talk about and collect data on sex.
Read 18 tweets
11 Feb
Letter in the Times today from quantitative social scientists. "We are on the brink of losing robust, high quality data on sex in the UK. Once gone, we may never get it back".
Story in the Times by @mikewadejourno "Plans to ignore biological sex when collecting census data in favour of self-defined gender threaten to undermine robust statistics in a move that is creating “deep-seated alarm” among leading academics." thetimes.co.uk/article/plan-t…
Longer version of our letter: "It is our strong view that the burden of proof remains with the respective Chief Statisticians to articulate why data on biological sex is no longer salient." ukdataexperts.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/open-l…
Read 4 tweets
24 Jan
1/ It is great news that ONS @ons appear to have moved away from a self-id approach for the Census thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-qu…
2/ Quantitative social scientists have discussed with ONS the importance of accurate sex-based data. As far as we are aware, the detail of the guidance is still under review, but I welcome this indication that ONS has moved away from framing sex in terms of gender id.
3/ As I said to the Times: “Sex is an important predictor of outcomes across all areas of life, including education, wages, crime, and physical and mental health. If we do not monitor sex differences, we cannot tackle sex discrimination."
Read 6 tweets
20 Jan
1/ People often claim that the numbers of people identifying as the opposite sex are too small to make a difference statistically. This is a clear example showing why that is false. The proportion of child sexual abusers who are women is tiny. Therefore, stats can be...
2/ ...seriously distorted by including males who 'self-id' as women in the female category. In this case, it is reported that the number of female child sex abusers has rocketed by 80% in the last few years. As a researcher, I would ask "why has that happened?"
3/ And, if there's no plausible explanation of why such a change may actually have occurred, your thoughts turn to whether there is a problem with the data. Is this artefactual? Is there a disjunction in the time series, e.g. because a key variable is being collected differently?
Read 6 tweets
14 Jan
1/ Thanks to @BBCr4today for having me on to discuss data collection on sex and why it matters. This follows the extraordinary claim by Scotland's Chief Statistician, Roger Halliday, that sex should typically not be asked unless there is a medical reason.
2/ In fact, those of us who use quantitative data overwhelmingly believe that sex is important. It matters across a wide range of domains: education, wages, crime, political attitudes, religion - you name it, sex is almost always a big predictor!
3/ Sex and gender identity are two different things, and gender identity is not a clarly defined concept. Ciaran McFadden Young (who is not a quantitative social scientist as far as I can see) claimed that sex doesn't matter, effectively it is always trumped by gender identity.
Read 11 tweets

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