Can’t have politically incorrect scientific findings published.
A research paper concluding that working with female mentors might hurt young women’s careers in the sciences has been retracted after fierce criticism from “group email threads” and on social media. The academic journal that published the paper apologized for “any unintended harm derived from the publication of this paper.”
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications was retracted following backlash from people who were uncomfortable with the paper’s findings, according to a report by Inside Higher Ed.
The research paper studied a variety of dynamics within three million mentor-mentee research pairings, including the “possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career,” reported Inside Higher Ed.
The authors — which studied the disciplines of biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, geology, materials science, medicine, physics, and psychology — wrote that their study “suggests that female protégés who remain in academia reap more benefits when mentored by males rather than equally-impactful females.”
“Our findings also suggest that mentors benefit more when working with male protégés rather than working with comparable female protégés, especially if the mentor is female,” the authors add.
The study created a firestorm of criticism. “Let me be blunt: for the good of the global scientific community and for the reputation of Nature Communications, you must retract this paper,” wrote Leslie Vosshall, an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Robin Chemers Neustein Professor at Rockefeller University, in an open letter to the editor-in-chief of Nature Communications.
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Open letter to the Editor-in-Chief of @NatureComms about the AlShebli paper, which claims that training with #WomenInSTEM damages the careers of young scientists pic.twitter.com/NvuBK3Z5T6
Study Concluding that Male Mentorship Is Better for Women’s Careers Retracted After Backlash