Social Media as a Weapon to Harass Women Academics

George Veletsianos and Jaigris Hodson
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published May 29, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Before beginning our inquiry, we assumed that the people who responded to our interview requests would be women who studied video games or gender issues, as prior literature had suggested they would be more likely to face harassment. But we quickly discovered that women are harassed when writing about a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: feminism, leadership, science, education, history, religion, race, politics, immigration, art, sociology and technology broadly conceived. The literature even identifies choice of research method as a topic that attracts misogynistic commentary.

So who exactly is at risk of harassment? They form a long list: women scholars who challenge the status quo; women who have an opinion that they are willing to express publicly; women who raise concerns about power; women of all body types and shapes. Put succinctly, people may be targeted for a range of reasons, but women in particular are harassed partly because they happen to be women who dare to be public online. Our respondents reported that they are harassed because they are women. Because they are women, they become targets.

At this point, if you are a woman reading this, you might be nodding your head, or you might feel frustrated that we are pointing out something so incredibly obvious. We might as well point out that rain is wet. But unfortunately, for many people who have not experienced the reality of being a woman online, this fact is still not obvious, is minimized, or is otherwise overlooked. To be clear, there is a gendered element to how both higher education institutions and technology companies handle this issue.

The article is here.

Authors of premier medical textbook didn’t disclose $11 million in industry payments

Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky
www.statnews.com
Originally published March 6, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“These findings indicate that full transparency of [author conflicts] should become a standard practice among the authors of biomedical educational materials,” according to the authors, whose study appears in the journal AJOB Empirical Bioethics.

McGraw-Hill, which publishes Harrison’s, did not respond to STAT’s requests for comment.

Financial disclosures have become de rigueur in scientific journals, where many of Harrison’s authors also publish and are subject to guidelines for such disclosures. Textbooks, however, have typically not required disclosures — and that means they’ve fallen even more behind standard practices.

The researchers, led by Brian Piper, a neuroscientist at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pa., acknowledge that simply looking at patent awards and fees from biomedical companies doesn’t prove the existence of biased work. But they note that medical textbooks are enormously influential due to their perceived authority and the wide readership they receive.

The article is here.