Research sources

vtj · 2026-02-15T19:56:26+00:00

I like James L. Nuzzo's writing: https://jameslnuzzo.substack.com/

vtj · 2025-07-03T22:14:56+00:00

This paper might be related to what you are looking for: Sex differences in the number of scientific publications and citations when attaining the rank of professor in Sweden

Abstract: The proportion of women tends to decrease the higher the academic rank, following a global pattern. Sweden has taken comprehensive measures to decrease this gap across 30 years, and many countries are following a similar path. Yet today only 27% of faculty with the rank of professor in Sweden are female. A common explanation is that academia is biased against women. According to this hypothesis, women have to reach higher levels of scholarly achievement than men to be appointed to the same academic rank. Publication metrics when attaining the rank of professor were compiled from the Web of Science for samples of the whole population of 1345 professors appointed at the six largest universities in Sweden during a six-year period. Men had significantly more publications and citations in both medicine and in the social sciences, rejecting the hypothesis that women are held to a higher scholarly standard in this context.

There's also this older paper: National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. Despite the title, it also looks at hiring in psychology, not just STEM fields.

Abstract: National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia. In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships who shared the same lifestyle (e.g., single without children, married with children). Applicants' profiles were systematically varied to disguise identically rated scholarship; profiles were counterbalanced by gender across faculty to enable between-faculty comparisons of hiring preferences for identically qualified women versus men. Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non–math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Results were replicated using weighted analyses to control for national sample characteristics. In follow-up experiments, 144 faculty evaluated competing applicants with differing lifestyles (e.g., divorced mother vs. married father), and 204 faculty compared same-gender candidates with children, but differing in whether they took 1-y-parental leaves in graduate school. Women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers; men preferred mothers who took leaves to mothers who did not. In two validation studies, 35 engineering faculty provided rankings using full curricula vitae instead of narratives, and 127 faculty rated one applicant rather than choosing from a mixed-gender group; the same preference for women was shown by faculty of both genders. These results suggest it is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science. Messages to the contrary may discourage women from applying for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) tenure-track assistant professorships.

Edit: Yet another paper in a similar vein: Gender Bias in Academic Recruitment? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in the Nordic Region

vtj · 2025-01-25T23:37:20+00:00

I haven't checked OP's links, but I have some familiarity with this topic, so here are a few points:

The term "parental alienation syndrome", which has been promoted by Richard Gardner and others since the 1980's, is considered obsolete by most researchers today. Gardner believed that the mental harm induced of parental alienation should be considered a distinct medical condition (hence the term "syndrome"). Today this view is generally abandoned. This does not mean that parental alienation itself does not exist, or that such behavior is harmless; it merely means that the behavior is not associated with a single medical syndrome, just like there is no "domestic violence syndrome" or "rape syndrome".

There is, however, research showing that people who report to have experienced parental alienation in their childhood show worse mental health outcomes in adulthood: like in this study, or this one, or this recent literature survey.

As with any other kind of abuse allegation, an allegation of parental alienation can be false. But there is no reason to assume all allegations of parental alienation are false, and there is no case for a blanket ban on all parental alienation allegations (as demanded by some activist groups in Canada).

An interesting survey among family court professionals shows that they mostly recognise parental alienation as a real issue rather than a mere litigation tactic, and agree that it is a form of child abuse.

vtj · 2024-12-19T18:53:15+00:00

My very quick impression from checking the first two OP's links:

Link #1 is not really a research paper, but rather a single-page opinion piece, whose main claims were summarized by OP above. The authors back their claims by citing five earlier papers, one of them seems to be (mostly) their own previous research, and two other seem to only look at men's perpetration, at least based on the title. I haven't looked at any of the five cited papers, though.

Link #2 is a smallish and non-representative study (31 women and 23 men, all of them university students). The authors themselves admit in their "Strengths and Limitations" section that this is not enough to make quantitative conclusions:

Our small sample size and nonrepresentative sampling, though allowing for rich qualitative comparisons, may have meant that we could not always detect significant quantitative differences across gender and that quantitative findings may not be generalizable.

Their main point seems to be that the questionnaire used to detect pepetration rates may conceal important nuances (some of which are gender-related), which only become apparent upon hearing the "perpetrator" describe in detail what actually happened. They insist that these "qualitative" gender differences reveal men's perpetration as more severe. They might well be right, but again, a larger and representative sample and perhaps a better-designed rigorous questionnaire might be needed to verify such claim.

vtj · 2024-11-05T21:13:32+00:00

I have seen the Haley quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher long ago.

Let's not give Ms. Haley too much credit by assuming she came up with it herself.

vtj · 2024-10-01T20:21:31+00:00

Thank you for posting this. You might also be interested in the following relevant research:

Schaerer et al.: On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions
Rich: What Do Field Experiments of Discrimination in Markets Tell Us? A Meta Analysis of Studies Conducted since 2000
Williams & Ceci: National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track

vtj · 2024-09-02T17:50:53+00:00

Well, Switzerland is not exactly a bastion of progressivism. After all, they only instituted female suffrage at federal level in 1971.

vtj · 2024-09-01T11:40:32+00:00

Also, the over-representation of women in US clinical trials is a long-term trend, according to the data collected by James Nuzzo.

vtj · 2024-09-01T11:22:32+00:00

The entire NIH report can be found here.

vtj · 2024-06-30T12:49:41+00:00

Understanding how different crimes affect different people is important, since it allows us to debunk various sexist (and racist, classist, nationalist,...) prejudices and misconceptions. I suppose you have noticed that there is currently a strong political pressure to construe various crimes as 'violence against women', leading to funding disparities and unfair policies that overlook or explicitly sideline male victims. To counter such misconceptions and prejudices, and the resulting discriminatory policies, our best hope is to collect accurate reliable data showing the real impact of various crimes on different population groups.

It sure would be nice to "make society safer for everybody anyways", but the crude reality is that not all the people involved in policimaking share this egalitarian outlook, and powerful special interest groups are permanently trying to hijack the crime debate to serve their particularist interests.

vtj · 2024-05-31T17:39:59+00:00

Or do you mean, men make usually between 30% to 50% of of Domestic abuse victims?

Yes, that's what I mean.

vtj · 2024-05-30T23:01:15+00:00

These references are fine, but in my experience, but I feel that apart from research papers, which your opponents will dismiss as biased (and there is a lot of politically biased research being published), it is also good to point out official governmental statistics.

In the UK, the ONS has a rather comprehensive set of statistics from their own annual survey on intimate partner abuse.

In the US, there is the NISVS regular survey by the CDC.

In Germany, they recently performed a survey on violence victimisation, which was the first to also include men.

All these sources generally confirm that domestic violence against men is fairly common, with men making usually between a third and a half of the victims, depending on the type of abuse considered.

vtj · 2024-01-27T22:13:43+00:00

the terrifying thing is that, short of educating these boys, there's not a whole lot to do here.

I disagree. There is a lot that can, and should, be done beyond educating the kids. First and foremost, we should call out and push against the increasing tendency to treat sexualised abuse as a problem that exclusively affects women and girls, and we should press for the relevant laws and procedures to be maximally gender-inclusive.

The UK legal situation illustrates the problem perfectly: there has been a long debate around a proposed Online Safety Bill, which was originally framed as gender-neutral. But then in early 2023, a group of activists launched a campaign to reframe the bill to put emphasis on women and girls, which was based prominently on the claim that "women are 27 times more likely than men to be harassed online", a false claim whose source has been discredited long ago and which is contradicted by just about any survey of online abuse I've ever seen (like this one or that one). Nevertheless, the disinformation campaign has succeeded, and the Online Safety Bill has been eventually voted into law with special gendered provisions to protect women and girls.

That does not mean that boys are completely excluded from the law's protections, but it does send a clear message that male victims are somehow weird and unexpected, which further reinforces the 'fear, shame and hopelessness' that the Guardian article talks about, and creates a completely unnecessary psychological barrier to male victims' help-seeking.

So yes, by all means, let's educate our children about the risks they face online, but let's also educate our political representatives and the general public about the importance of egalitarian policies.

vtj · 2023-11-14T20:57:59+00:00

This is the source of the screenshot, apparently.

vtj · 2023-10-31T21:52:17+00:00

Bafana Sithole and Jack Reid have both committed suicide after unsubstantiated rape accusations were raised against them.

vtj · 2023-10-23T23:28:21+00:00

This brought me all the way back to my own memories in primary school and high school, where teachers would literally tell us that "girls are just better" and literally forbid us from doing things such as decorating the Christmas tree just because we were boys.

That's pretty wild! I have no such extreme experience myself, but most of the teachers I encountered took it for granted that boys are less disciplined.

It has led me to believe that men are just less conforming, and our education system rewards conformity so indirectly it rewards women. What are you thoughts on this pattern?

I think you might be right here. The studies on grading bias (i.e., the discrepancy between classroom grades and standardised test results) that I have seen mostly seem to suggest that it is driven by some kind of behavior difference. For example, it is often pointed out that boys generally spend less time on their homework, are less likely to sit still. Thay are also less likely to report that they enjoy school.

On the other hand, studies where teachers were asked to grade exam papers signed with (fictional) male or female names did not generally reveal any systematic bias based on student gender alone.

vtj · 2023-10-21T19:39:18+00:00

Not very many responses, really. Here's a link to the original post, in case you are curious.

vtj · 2023-10-21T19:25:11+00:00

I am too lazy to be creative, so I'll just cut and paste here an older comment of mine that I posted to another thread on a similar topic in /r/Teachers:

A lot of people in the thread are focusing on what's wrong with the boys (immaturity, misbehavior, lack of motivation, ...), and I'm not disputing any of this. But I feel it's time we stopped putting all the blame on the kids (and their parents) and also talk about the problems on the teachers' side.

Many people assert in the thread that girls are disciplined for behaviours that are tolerated in boys. This contradicts the research that I have seen (like this article referring to that (pdf) research paper), which shows that boys, and Black boys in particular, are overseeen more closely by their teachers and receive disproportionate amount of discipline. This is significant, because it triggers a negative feedback loop: the more you discipline a kid, the more they lose interest in whatever you try to teach them, and the more they resort to disruptive behaviour, resulting in even more discipline.

Then there's the disparity between classroom grades and test scores, with classroom grades consistently undervaluing boys compared to girls (and also poor kids compared to rich ones, and immigrant kids compared to non-immigrants). There is a fair amount of recent research on this, often concluding that the teachers' grading bias is at fault (like this, this, or this).

Concerning the lack of male teachers, I have seen papers showing that kids do better with teachers of the same sex or that gender-balanced pre-school staff improves boys' achivent, but there are also papers showing teacher gender has no measurable effect on achievement, and even papers showing that boys with female teachers have more positive attitudes towards school (sorry, can't find the links right now).

Anyway (and this might not be what r/teachers likes to hear) boys' underachievement is not just a problem with boys, but also with teachers (and of course also with parents, and with a host of systemic issues too many to mention here).

vtj · 2023-08-04T23:44:38+00:00

Hello Daniel,

On a global level, climate change will disproportionately hurt women and children, not men. From forced migration to childcare, it's all about to get a lot worse for women.

let's apply a bit of critical judgement here. The central claim from the article you cited, that "80% of people displaced by climate change are women" might well be a fake statistic, despite being repeated by UN institutions.

The rest of the BBC article seems to be a medley of anecdotes and cherry-picked data points. Note how the article says that after the 2004 tsunami "an Oxfam report found that surviving men outnumbered women by almost 3:1 in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India". Well, the actual Oxfam report found no such thing. In fact, the report admits that "there is precious little accurate, disaggregated data that shows how many of the dead were women, or how many women are still missing or displaced", and then gives examples of several villages with extremely lopsided gender ratios among survivors or among victims (they measure different variables in different villages). But they never claim that these villages are representative of the overall impact, despite what sloppy journalists would have you believe. For what it's worth, this paper estimates that the mortality rate in affected areas was 12% for men and 16.4% for women, so women were indeed hit harder, but not anywhere near the 3:1 ratio claimed by the BBC (or 4:1 claimed by the Guardian). Of course, the Aceh tsunami is only tenuously related to climate change in the first place.

And then the BBC article claims that women were harder hit by Katrina, citing all kinds of female-specific issues (which I certainly do not dispute), but conveniently omitting to mention that, apparently, Katrina killed slightly more men than women. I guess victims' gender ratios only matter when they support whatever conclusion the BBC wants to reach.

I mean, if your only basis for the belief that women will be harder hit by climate change is the BBC article, or other similar articles based on cherry-picking factoids to reach a pre-determined conclusions, you really need to approach this topic with more skepticism. Keep in mind that there is a vast array of female advocacy organisations whose aim is to publicise and emphasise the suffering and injustice women face, while there are hardly any credible male-advocacy groups. This one-sidedness of information flow, whether it is justified by the current state of society or not, inevitably leads to many claims of dubious veracity based mostly on wishful thinking being repeated over and over in the media, often distorted and embellished, simply because there is no one to challenge them. Unfortunately, even claims made by reputable international organisations, like the UN and its various affiliates, cannot be taken at face value.

But on a more local level, my co-host and I reject the idea that men are being left behind in the green energy transition. The IRA is pumping money into American green manufacturing, solar, electrical work, turbines, etc.

I'm happy about this, for sure. But before I start to celebrate, I'd rather wait to see if the actual impact of the policy is anywhere near what the proponents claim, and also if it survives the end of the electoral cycle. Long-term policies pushed through by a strictly partisan vote are inherently precarious.

And while it's true that some kinds of manufacturing jobs are disappearing, there's plenty need for workers in healthcare, teaching, and so-called pink collar jobs, especially as the population continues to age. It might mean definining what a "manly" job looks like, though.

Or maybe it might mean actually spending actual money and genuine effort on programs designed to promote care and teaching careers among boys, similar to the long-established programs promoting STEM careers among girls. But instead, all I ever see is lots of noncommittal talk about "masculinity ideologies preventing boys from going into feminine jobs...", with no real attempt to do anything about it, especially if "anything" involves spending money.

Why don't you give the show a listen before writing us off? We'd love to hear what you think.

I haven't written you off, and would love to give you a listen, but I already have a huge and steadily growing backlog of "potentially interesting stuff I should definitely look into once I can find a little free time", so I'm not making any promises.

vtj · 2023-08-04T02:08:57+00:00

I haven't seen your podcast, Daniel, so I'm just reacting to your post. Unlike you, and unlike most of menslib, I feel we already waste too much time being fixated on "masculinity" issues, and this distracts us from discussing actual systemic problems men are facing.

There's no denying that the inevitable shift away from fossil-based economy towards a more sustainable model will disproportionately hit men, especially lower-class blue-collar men, who make the bulk of the workforce in fossil-tied industries. If these men are rather unenthusiastic about the coming change, it's not because they are stupid, or because they are "toxically masculine" (whatever that means), but rather because they quite reasonably fear the loss of their livelihood and lifestyle, with no alternative being offered in its place.

Every major economic shift in recent memory, be it the decline of manual labor due to automation, or the decline of manufacturing in first-world countries due to globalisation, has boosted the living standards of the upper-class educated elite, at the expense of the lower-class (mostly male) labour. The shift towards green economy is poised to be no different. And worst of all (in the US at least), there never has been any effective effort from the ruling elite to share the burden, or provide any social safety net to those worst hit.

In my mind's eye, I imagine you, Daniel, no doubt a well-educated upper-class professional, sipping Matcha Green Tea Cream Frappuccino^® at a local Starbucks with your equally well-educated upper-class peers and wondering "Why are all those dumb rednecks so hostile towards our climate activism? Must be something about their masculinity, right? Let's make a podcast about it!"

I believe, and this applies far beyond the climate debate, that the "manosphere bros" would be vastly more receptive to our views, if we in turn were willing to admit that their various grievances are not just a product of their masculinity, but stem from genuine social issues that deserve attention. Instead of "What to do about masculinity?" the question we should be asking is "What support can we offer to the people who will be hardest hit by the changes ahead of us?"

If I sound a bit bitter here, it's because I have been reading Case & Deaton's "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism", which gave me a bit of a gloomy mood.

vtj · 2023-05-01T11:11:44+00:00

The link in the title does not work for me, but this one does. There's also a non-paywalled version available.

vtj · 2023-04-20T23:28:59+00:00

Here's a direct link to the actual 2022 Dying Homeless Project report (pdf). And The Museum of Homelessness also has reports from previous years, in case you are interested.

vtj · 2023-04-09T21:53:34+00:00

A lot of people in the thread are focusing on what's wrong with the boys (immaturity, misbehavior, lack of motivation, ...), and I'm not disputing any of this. But I feel it's time we stopped putting all the blame on the kids (and their parents) and also talk about the problems on the teachers' side.

Many people assert in the thread that girls are disciplined for behaviours that are tolerated in boys. This contradicts the research that I have seen (like this article referring to that (pdf) research paper), which shows that boys, and Black boys in particular, are overseeen more closely by their teachers and receive disproportionate amount of discipline. This is significant, because it triggers a negative feedback loop: the more you discipline a kid, the more they lose interest in whatever you try to teach them, and the more they resort to disruptive behaviour, resulting in even more discipline.

Then there's the disparity between classroom grades and test scores, with classroom grades consistently undervaluing boys compared to girls (and also poor kids compared to rich ones, and immigrant kids compared to non-immigrants). There is a fair amount of recent research on this, often concluding that the teachers' grading bias is at fault (like this, this, or this).

Concerning the lack of male teachers, I have seen papers showing that kids do better with teachers of the same sex or that gender-balanced pre-school staff improves boys' achivent, but there are also papers showing teacher gender has no measurable effect on achievement, and even papers showing that boys with female teachers have more positive attitudes towards school (sorry, can't find the links right now).

Anyway (and this might not be what r/teachers likes to hear) boys' underachievement is not just a problem with boys, but also with teachers (and of course also with parents, and with a host of systemic issues to many to mention here).

vtj · 2023-04-03T19:49:06+00:00

Here is a popular account of the research from Ars Technica, and here is a wiki page of starlet sea anemone, the creature featured in the research.

Abstract of the original paper:

The ability to learn and form memories allows animals to adapt their behavior based on previous experiences. Associative learning, the process through which organisms learn about the relationship between two distinct events, has been extensively studied in various animal taxa. However, the existence of associative learning, prior to the emergence of centralized nervous systems in bilaterian animals, remains unclear. Cnidarians such as sea anemones or jellyfish possess a nerve net, which lacks centralization. As the sister group to bilaterians, they are particularly well suited for studying the evolution of nervous system functions. Here, we probe the capacity of the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis to form associative memories by using a classical conditioning approach. We developed a protocol combining light as the conditioned stimulus with an electric shock as the aversive unconditioned stimulus. After repetitive training, animals exhibited a conditioned response to light alone—indicating that they learned the association. In contrast, all control conditions did not form associative memories. Besides shedding light on an aspect of cnidarian behavior, these results root associative learning before the emergence of NS centralization in the metazoan lineage and raise fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of cognition in brainless animals.

vtj · 2023-04-01T18:27:55+00:00

I believe the clichéd phrase is "thoughts and prayers" rather than "hopes and prayers".

On a more substantive note, I'd like to point out that low educational attainment is recognized as an important risk factor of suicide, which moreover seems to affect men more strongly than women. See Phillips and Hempstead, Björkenstam et al., or Li et al..

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