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When this project was first introduced in class my immediate response to the essential question was "well of course society has moved forwards, everyone's legally equal now". Throughout my research I have decided that society has moved sideways. Yes, in written legal documents all people are considered equal regardless of race, gender, religion, etc., but that is not how our society behaves. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is still commonly occurring. Our society still grants the white male so many subtle privileges that people of color or women just aren't. In order to move upward we must stop associating people with stereotypes and look beyond physical appearance.

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Gender Bias Dissected in eLife’s Peer Review

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Gender Bias Dissected in eLife’s Peer Review

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This was a study done on gender bias in the workplace. Not only was the information hard to get a hold of, which says a lot in general, but it revealed that there is gender bias present. A majority of the data was from peer reviews, which showed that women had lower rating on their reviews if the panel was all men as opposed to a gender mixed group. This subtle discrimination in peer reviews can affect a career very much, which may have connect with why women seem to be payed less (since their review scores are lower). Subtle sexism in our society has leaked into the workplace and is effecting salaries. As discussed in the previous source, "I've Lived as a Man & a Woman - Here's What I've Experienced", women are seen of as less intelligent, even though it is clearly not true. Stereotypes and discrimination of women still very much exist in our society.

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Gender bias is present in a variety of scientific settings including faculty hiring, scientific publishing, grant funding, and more. Yet the review processes that generate these skewed outcomes largely happen behind closed doors, making them difficult to study.

A preprint posted on bioRxivon August 29 takes a peek behind the curtain, providing insight into how bias creeps into the review process at the journal eLife -and suggests ways in which the review process could be improved to mitigate biases in the future.

The Scientist spoke with coauthors Jennifer Raymond, a neurobiologist at Stanford University and a reviewing editor at eLife, and Andrew Collings, executive editor at eLife, to learn more about their recent study.

TS: What motivated you to look for gender biases in peer review?

Jennifer Raymond: Recently, there was a meeting at AAAS on implicit bias and peer review. It was called in response to inquiries from some members of Congress wondering whether federal funds were being distributed in a way that might violate Title IX [a law prohibiting sex discrimination]. Representatives from all the federal funding agencies and from many publishers attended the meeting. I went to represent eLife.

I came back realizing a couple of things. The first is that it is just really hard to get your hands on data to assess how bad the problem might be. Most journals and funders are worried about their reputations, so they hold their data quite close. The second thing is that other publishers were interested in the eLife review model, which is innovative because after independent reviews come in, the reviewers consult with each other. They know each other's identity, and that holds them accountable a little bit. The editor then synthesizes the feedback into a consensus review, along with the decision to accept, reject, or revise. Many of the other publishers were interested in whether this might be a way to mitigate implicit bias. But we didn't have any data on any of those things at eLife.

TS: What were the main findings?

JR: We see that authors with different demographic characteristics [gender and nationality] have different success rates. The ideal is that excellent science would be published regardless of where it comes from. The question of whether that science is all getting a fair shake in peer review is what we are trying to get at. An important point to make is that unequal success rates don't necessarily mean that there's bias, because maybe researchers from some countries have better funding, and you might expect them to have better success rates.

But what we found suggested that there is bias in the peer review process, because the success rates are dependent on who reviewed the papers. Men were more successful than women when the reviewers were all male, and had more similar success rates as women when there was a mixed review panel. Similarly, we saw that an author was more likely to have their paper accepted if at least one of the reviewers was from the same country. In each case, we call this homophily-a preference of the reviewers for authors that share demographic characteristics.

Our study is probably underestimating bias, because there's been lots of evidence that people from the group that is discriminated against often share the same biases. So women tend to under-rate women to some extent, just like men do. The ideal study would be to do a randomized, controlled trial of double blind review. The idea would be to have manuscripts come into a journal, randomly assign them to have reviewers who know who the authors are-or not-and then look for differences in success rates between authors from the different groups. It's the obvious way to look for bias in the peer review process. Nobody has done that, to my knowledge.

TS: Do you think similar findings would apply to other journals, too?

JR: We'd love to have other journals follow suit and see if there are examples where the biases are smaller. That will provide important clues about how common this is across review processes. Maybe there's certain types of peer review, certain editorial policies, or even administrative policies that reduce these effects.

We're going to do more analysis of the eLife data we have to see what's happening in the process of review and consultation among reviewers. We'd like to see whether we can find evidence that the reviewer consultation process mitigates bias. It is also possible that it could go the other way.

TS: What is eLife planning to do to remedy gender biases in its peer review process?

Andrew Collings (via email): We'll need more time to reflect on the findings, but in the first instance we are writing to all our editors in the next few days, so they can consider the findings as they assess submissions and select reviewers. We will certainly start to encourage editors to consider selecting a diverse group of reviewers whenever possible for the papers they handle.

In addition, we will place a greater emphasis on increasing the gender balance and international representation on the editorial board. When we looked in early July this year, 29 percent of current Reviewing Editors were female, with 43 percent from outside of the US. While we haven't set targets at this stage, we'd like to improve upon this as we recruit new editors.
Editor's note: The interviews were edited for brevity.
Update (September 17): We corrected the credit for Raymond's photo. The Scientist regrets the error.

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Gender Bias Dissected in eLife's Peer Review

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Gender bias is present in a variety of scientific settings including faculty hiring, scientific publishing, grant funding, and more. Yet the review processes that generate these skewed outcomes largely happen behind closed doors, making them difficult to study.

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This is a slam poem written about the roles society has placed us in since the moment we were born, simply according to gender. It discusses how women must be graceful and how society has tied us down to these labels. It also discusses the stereotypes of men, about how they shouldn't show emotion unless it's pride. The other gender sources have focused on discrimination against women specifically, but this source is just as important because it discusses the stereotypes placed upon us by society. Stereotypes are leading causes of discrimination. We, as a society, must stop assuming things of each other on the basis of physical things like race and gender.

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What is gender? Is gender an identity? Certainly gender is not a choice. But gender is shaped, molded to young new minds, strings hang from children's joints to dance as society tells them No matter man or woman, we are born into roles.

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I've Lived as a Man & a Women - Here's What I've Learned

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I've Lived as a Man & a Women - Here's What I've Learned

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This TED talk is from a transgender women, meaning she's been able to experience life as a man and a women. She spoke of her first experience on an airplane as a women when a man had taken her seat and instead of double checking his boarding pass as people had previously done when this had happened, the man in her seat insisted that she was wrong. Even another passenger behind her on the plane complained that she was holding up the line with her "arguing". She also tells of her encounter with an employee at a bike shop in Denver, and his assumption that she didn't know what she was talking about until the manager came over and answered her simple question. Yes, women and men are equal in the eyes of the law, but the playing field is still unequal and subtle discrimination against women still exists.

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I've lived as a man & a woman -- here's what I learned | Paula Stone Williams | TEDxMileHigh

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A Call to Action on the Cannes Red Carpet

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A Call to Action on the Cannes Red Carpet

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Women represented themselves on the red carpet in December of 2017. The filmmaking business is dominated by men, but these 82 women got in front of the cameras and were able to discuss their contributions to the industry. Women coming together in front of the public for this event was groundbreaking, and it shouldn't have been in this day and age of "equality". Women are still being discriminated against in subtle ways all across our country, for example the equal pay issues. Feminists are often viewed negatively, as being "dramatic" or thought to believe that women are superior to men, but those assumptions are beyond incorrect. Feminists believe that women and men are equal and should be treated as such in the legal system, in the workplace, and everywhere in society.

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Uber Faces Federal Investigation Over Alleged Gender Discrimination...

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Uber Faces Federal Investigation Over Alleged Gender Discrimination...

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This article is about Uber, a very popular app that essentially acts as a taxi. In July of 2018, when it was published, the company was being investigated because of the claims made by people both inside and outside of Uber, saying that it discriminated against women. Not only are the numbers of women working within Uber low compared to the number of men, but it also seems they are being payed less. Gender inequality seems to be over and solved as women legally have equal rights, but is it really? It is true that women have the right to vote and own property just as men do, but these subtle acts of gender discrimination are still very present in our current society.

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This slam poem written by Alex Dang expresses the ignorance of Americans toward Asian culture. He discusses stereotypes of "driving with the blinker on for a half mile" and being an "awkward math genius" but also touches on dark matters like eating pet food because it's cheaper and, even darker, heads splitting open when struck with assault weapons. This slam poem is about stereotypes and ignorance, relating to the previous source "The Danger of a Single Story". Again, another continent of people grouped into one person, one image, one story. Another time proving that our society has moved sideways and still currently associates people with their stereotypes every day.

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Alex Dang (Ft. Alex Dang) - What Kind of Asian are You?

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So he said to me: "What kind of Asian are you?" / And I said back: / That's a loaded question. / What kind of Asian do you EXPECT me to be? / Because any way you slice that egg

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Adichie grew up in Nigeria and came to the US at 19 to attend a university. She spoke of how her American peers has expected her to not speak English or have grown up starving because of the single story told about Africans, the single story that labeled an entire continent of people as one type of person; poor and illiterate. This explains a lot about current racism in our society because Americans typically only know the one exploited story of those outside of our borders. Like how Mexicans have the single story of trying to illegally cross our border to bring crime, or Muslims being a threat to the safety of our communities, totally ignoring that there are many, many more stories aside from just the negative ones. In order to decrease racism in our society we must eliminate stereotypes, and tell the numerous stories that exist. This source is a good example of how our society has moved sideways, because the telling of a single story is still very commonly occurring.

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Please [contact us](https://www.ted.com/contact) and let us know what happened.

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Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies

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Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies

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The friendship between Daryl Davis and Robert Kelley was completely normal aside from one thing. would go to each others' homes for dinner, Kelley would attend Davis's music performances, and Davis would attend Kelley's rallies. The only thing was Kelley's rallies were for the KKK, whom Kelley was a national leader of, and Davis was a black man. In this TED talk he talks about how through friendship and respect, Mr. Kelley eventually stepped down from the KKK. He expressed the idea that if you have respect and can listen to each other's opinions, even if you disagree, change can occur.

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Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies. | Daryl Davis | TEDxNaperville

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"What is Whiteness" is about how White Identity has evolved over time. Before anthropologists announced there were only three races, (white, black, asian) there was discrimination against certain white people, from other white people. There was hatred towards the Irish-Americans, or Celts, for being Catholic and "drunk", and there was a superior attitude towards German-Americans, or Saxons, for being Protestant and beautiful. But, in the 1940s, anthropologists announced that all white people were white people, and the discrimination amongst faded away. Perhaps the discrimination against non-white people could fade away as well?

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Opinion

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Clergy members singing in 1965 at a police barrier in Selma, Ala., that became known as the Berlin Wall. Credit Credit Dan Budnik/Contact Press Images

THE terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal's yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder is, of course, more consequential than one woman's fiction. But the two are connected in a way that is relevant to many Americans.

An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between "bland nothingness" and "racist hatred."

On one side is Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old charged with murdering nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday. He's part of a very old racist tradition, stretching from the anti-black violence following the Civil War, through the 1915 movie "The Birth of a Nation," to today's white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and gun-toting, apocalyptically minded Obama-haters. And now a mass murderer in a church.

On the other side is Ms. Dolezal, the former leader of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., who, it seems, mistakenly believed that she could not be both anti-racist and white. Faced with her assumed choice between a blank identity or a malevolent one, she opted out of whiteness altogether. Notwithstanding the confusion and anger she has stirred, she continues to say that she identifies as black. Fine. But why, we wonder, did she pretend to be black?

Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness, although that is not where these answers lie. It has become a common observation that blackness, and race more generally, is a social construct. But examining whiteness as a social construct offers more answers. The essential problem is the inadequacy of white identity.

We don't know the history of whiteness, and therefore are ignorant of the many ways it has changed over the years. If you investigate that history, you'll see that white identity has been no more stable than black identity. While we recognize the evolution of "negro" to "colored" to "Negro" to "Afro-American" to "African-American," we draw a blank when it comes to whiteness. To the contrary, whiteness has a history of multiplicity.

Constructions of whiteness have changed over time, shifting to accommodate the demands of social change. Before the mid-19th century, the existence of more than one white race was commonly accepted, in popular culture and scholarship. Indeed, there were several. Many people in the United States were seen as white - and could vote (if they were adult white men) - but were nonetheless classified as inferior (or superior) white races. Irish-Americans present one example.

In the mid- to late-19th century, the existence of several white races was widely assumed: notably, the superior Saxons and the inferior Celts. Each race - and they were called races - had its characteristic racial temperament. "Temperament" has been and still is a crucial facet of racial classification since its 18th-century Linnaean origins. Color has always been only one part of it (as the case of Ms. Dolezal shows).

In the 19th century, the Saxon race was said to be intelligent, energetic, sober, Protestant and beautiful. Celts, in contrast, were said to be stupid, impulsive, drunken, Catholic and ugly.

The mass immigration that followed the Irish famine of the 1840s inflamed nativist, anti-Catholic bigotry that flourished through the end of the century. Then new waves of poor Eastern and Southern European immigrants arrived, inspiring new racial classifications: the "Northern Italian" race, the "Southern Italian" race, the "Eastern European Hebrew" race, and so on. Their heads were measured and I.Q.s assessed to quantify (and, later, to deny) racial difference. They were all white, members of white races. But, like the Irish before them, the Italians and Jews and Greeks were classified as inferior white races.

By the early 20th century, the descendants of the earlier Irish immigrants had successfully elevated Celts into the superior realm of northern Europeans.

Meanwhile, World War I dampened Americans' ardor for "Saxon" - given its German associations - and increased the popularity of a new term liberated from Germanic associations. The new name was "Nordic." Many German-Americans even altered their surnames during and after the war, but the notion of plural white races held on until World War II.

By the 1940s anthropologists announced that they had a new classification: white, Asian and black were the only real races. Each was unitary - no sub-races existed within each group. There was one Negroid race, one Mongoloid race, one Caucasoid race. Everyone considered white was the same as everyone else considered white. No Saxons. No Celts. No Southern Italians. No Eastern European Hebrews. This classification - however tattered - lives on, with mild alterations, even today.

The useful part of white identity's vagueness is that whites don't have to shoulder the burden of race in America, which, at the least, is utterly exhausting. A neutral racial identity is blandly uninteresting. In the 1970s, long after they had been accepted as "white," Italians, Irish, Greeks, Jews and others proclaimed themselves "ethnic" Americans in order to forge a positive identity, at a time of "black is beautiful." But this ethnic self-discovery did not alter the fact that whiteness continued to be defined, as before, primarily by what it isn't: blackness.

Ms. Dolezal seems to have believed that the choice to devote one's life to fighting racism meant choosing black or white, Negroid or Caucasoid. Black was clearly more captivating than a whiteness characterized by hate.

We lack more meaningful senses of white identity, even though some whites, throughout history, have been committed to fighting racism and advocating for social justice. In the 19th century, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown helped end slavery. In the early 20th century, Mary White Ovington helped found the N.A.A.C.P. Lillian Smith depicted the South's nexus of "sin, sex, segregation" in her writings. White Communists, priests and rabbis stood beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Where would America be without these white allies of black freedom fighters?

Given that the monolithic definition of whiteness is antithetical to social justice, perhaps we should encourage a rebellion against it. Just as blacks and whites joined together as "abolitionists" to bring down American slavery in the 19th century, anti-racist whites in the 1990s called themselves "race traitors," believing that social justice for all demands treason against white supremacy.

Eliminating the binary definition of whiteness - the toggle between nothingness and awfulness - is essential for a new racial vision that ethical people can share across the color line. Just as race has been reinvented over the centuries, let's repurpose the term "abolitionist" as more than just a hashtag. The "abolition" of white privilege can be an additional component of identity (not a replacement for it), one that embeds social justice in its meaning. Even more, it unifies people of many races.

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Opinion THE terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal's yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder is, of course, more consequential than one woman's fiction.

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This article discusses what actually is "White Privilege". To clarify, it does not suggest that white people have extreme advantages over people of other races and therefore have everything in life given to them merely because of their race. The article explains this White Privilege in three ways. "The Power of Normal", how Band-Aids are sold exclusively in a color that blends with white skin, how hair products for non-white people are referred to as "ethnic hair products", and similar examples showing that American society has declared the white race as the default, or normal race. "The Power of the Benefit of the Doubt", explaining how white people, both commonly on the street or in the eyes of the law, are given the 'benefit of the doubt' meanwhile non-white people are more likely to be treated poorly and watched more carefully. And, "Power of Accumulated Power" suggesting that this White Privilege is an endless cycle that stems from previous racism in America's history. White Privilege is in our society today, at Walmart or on the street and even in our government.

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Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.