{"id":1073,"date":"2020-06-24T11:58:48","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T11:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2021-12-22T11:59:05","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T11:59:05","slug":"coronavirus-coverage-call-for-more-visibility-of-female-scientist-expertise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/?p=1073","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus Coverage & Call for More Visibility of Female Scientist Expertise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u0418\u0437\u0432\u043e\u0440: WUNRN \u2013 24.06.2020<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

With male voices dominating the pandemic narrative, female scientists are lamenting the loss of diverse perspectives<\/em><\/p>\n

BY<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>TERESA CARR<\/strong><\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

FOR A SWEEPING\u00a0and much-lauded New York Times\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0on how the pandemic may play out over the next year, veteran science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. consulted nearly two dozen experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology, and history. Initially, I only scanned the nearly 5,000-word story, and the names of experts sluiced by as I picked out predictive nuggets on lockdowns, death tolls, and vaccines. But after several women scientists\u00a0called out<\/a>\u00a0McNeil for bias towards men on Twitter, I went back for a closer look.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, only two of 19 experts cited were women: Luciana Borio, a former director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, and Michele Barry, director of the Center for Innovation and Global Health at Stanford University. McNeil included quotes from both that mention family.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Top: Biomedic Andressa Parreiras and biologist Larissa Vuitika extract genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus on March 24, 2020 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Visual:\u00a0<\/em>Pedro Vilela \/ Getty Images<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Once you notice the dominance of the (typically White) male expert, it\u2019s hard to un-see it. Writing for prominent outlets, journalists have hailed men as\u00a0scientific heroes<\/a>\u00a0of the coronavirus era and\u00a0defenders of fact<\/a>. They\u2019ve quoted all \u2014 or nearly all \u2014 male scientists on\u00a0epidemiological models<\/a>,\u00a0herd immunity<\/a>,\u00a0viral spread on surfaces<\/a>,\u00a0why some people get sicker than others<\/a>, and\u00a0how to prepare for a likely Covid-19 resurgence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only are women being passed over and ignored, but also we\u2019re getting people that don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing supporting decision makers,\u201d said Caroline Buckee, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy having these very loud, usually male, voices in the media touting expertise when they don\u2019t have it,\u201d she added, \u201cthat risks undermining the public trust in science itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Women are also noticeably less visible in the flurry of scientific publishing on the pandemic. Early analyses of both\u00a0research databases<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0preprint servers<\/a>, which publish studies before they\u2019ve undergone peer review, suggest that women are starting fewer projects and publishing less research than men. \u201cRight now, in Covid, we know for a fact that women are submitting fewer papers, they\u2019re submitting fewer grants, and there are real downstream effects for that,\u201d said Lisa Carlson, an instructor at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health and president of the American Public Health Association. If you aren\u2019t getting recognized, funded, and published, she said, you\u2019re not going to succeed as an academic scientist.<\/p>\n

As a Black woman, Sara Suliman, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, said that it\u2019s been especially hard as the global protests sparked by the killing of\u00a0George Floyd<\/a>\u00a0last month bring to the fore centuries of dehumanization and discrimination. Being disenfranchised during the lockdown period wasn\u2019t just about being a woman, she said. \u201cI felt it was just a cumulative effect of all the microaggressions that I have been feeling in academia for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0commentary<\/a>\u00a0published last month in Times Higher Education magazine, lead author Buckee and 34 other women scientists from North America and Europe expressed frustration bordering on rage at losing ground during a pivotal moment in scientific discovery. \u201cWe all share the same experience: The scientific response to Covid-19 has been characterized by an extraordinary level of sexism and racism,\u201d wrote the women, who span the academic pipeline from graduate students to tenured faculty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe worst impacts of the coronavirus will undoubtedly be the loss of lives, the collapse of economies, the disruption of humanitarian aid, and the decay of democracies,\u201d they acknowledged. \u201cBut we fear that the hard-won progress for women in science will be collateral damage of this crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE IDEA THAT<\/strong>\u00a0women in science face systemic barriers is hardly news. Last year, the Lancet medical journal devoted an entire\u00a0issue<\/a>\u00a0to research, commentary, and analysis on gender inequities in science, medicine, and global health. Women of color face the\u00a0double jeopardy<\/a>\u00a0of racial as well as gender bias.<\/p>\n

Amid the current pandemic, several women who contributed to the Times Higher Education commentary told me that those barriers started to seem insurmountable. \u201cThe checks and balances meant to promote merit and protect against the default bias towards White men have broken down,\u201d said Buckee. \u201cThe emergency and chaos of the pandemic has triggered longstanding male networks, with a lot of ad hoc, quick linking of men to decision makers.\u201d<\/p>\n

One complaint is that the media and policymakers overwhelmingly turn to men as figures of scientific authority. When I asked about the controversy over why her\u00a0story<\/a>\u00a0on European scientific heroes was devoid of women, New York Times Brussels correspondent Matina Stevis-Gridneff referred me to her\u00a0comments on Twitter<\/a>. They \u201clooked hard,\u201d she wrote, and \u201cstruggled to find women\u201d who were the public face of the coronavirus response.<\/p>\n

In fact, women outnumber men in the health sciences according to the APHA\u2019s Carlson. While scores of women are at the forefront of Covid-19 research, men are more visible, said Angela Rasmussen, an associate research scientist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. \u201cThere are just more men to choose from,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd they tend to be more upfront and more willing to go in front of a camera and take credit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suliman suggested that this is entirely common. \u201cThere\u2019s a systemic issue of men feeling like they can become experts in a new domain in a way that women feel like maybe we need more time to assert ourselves before taking up that space,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The American Association for the Advancement of Science IF\/THEN Ambassadors, pictured here at a 2019 conference, are group of 125 women in STEM who promote their work through press kits and other media.\u00a0Visual:\u00a0Liz Crocker, AAAS<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s documented that we have to work a lot more to gain the same level of external validation,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd we internalize that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Women who do take a public role have to armor up. Rasmussen, a widely quoted virologist, has to deal with creepy men sending her direct messages, she said. \u201cWomen are more reluctant to put themselves out there,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I think a big part of it is knowing that you might put yourself at risk for these really gendered insults and slurs, and even stuff that\u2019s scarier than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another issue is that women take on\u00a0teaching, mentoring, and academic service work<\/a>\u00a0more regularly than men, and are more likely to serve in operational roles \u2014 or as the Times Higher Education commentary put it: \u201cgetting shit done.\u201d In the context of the current pandemic, that often means working at a breakneck pace to coordinate multiple investigations, at multiple sites, often in multiple countries, said Rasmussen. That leaves the men, who are nominally in charge, to talk to the press, she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not because that\u2019s their designated job, but that\u2019s who people call rather than the women who actually would be running a lot of these collaborations.\u201d<\/p>\n

On top of all that, stay-at-home orders have foisted absurd expectations onto working mothers. Surveys by\u00a0The New York Times<\/a>, the\u00a0Council on Contemporary Families<\/a>, and YouGov in partnership with\u00a0USA Today<\/a>\u00a0and LinkedIn, all find that while men have taken on more housework, childcare, and homeschooling during the pandemic, women still carry the larger share of the burden.<\/p>\n

Taken as a whole, the trend towards disenfranchising women is bad for science. A\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0of evidence in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, concludes that greater gender diversity in scientific organizations pays a \u201cinnovation dividend\u201d in terms of smarter, more creative teams and new discoveries. And the same is true for racial diversity, said Suliman, noting that a \u201ccolonial lens\u201d prevents Americans from recognizing the expertise of China and the Global South. \u201cIf there\u2019s true diversity, if there\u2019s true equality and equity, and people can actually look at experts horizontally and not vertically, I think we would have averted the kind of crisis that we\u2019re having right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Suliman, who said her anxiety level is multiplied by 100 when she walks by uniformed police on the street, the protests are a stark reminder that equality and equity are not part of existing power structures. \u201cUsually, Black people and women are held to a higher standard at work anyway, regardless of being in a crisis situation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrying to do that while carrying a burden both because of the revolution and because of our gender roles in society in general,\u201d she added, \u201cputs us at a huge disadvantage.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION<\/strong>\u00a0commentary called attention to deeply entrenched societal issues of racism and sexism. The women who wrote didn\u2019t pretend that these were easily paved over. \u201cI did have pushback from people saying \u2018You\u2019re not suggesting solutions. This just seems like a rant,\u2019\u201d said Buckee. And, yes, more programs that have been developed over the last several decades \u2014 to support childcare, examine female candidates seriously, keep checks and balances to make sure we\u2019re being fair \u2014\u00a0would be welcome, she said. \u201cBut until you change the culture and change how people view the world, especially the people that have clout \u2014 senior White men \u2014 until that changes, I\u2019m not hopeful.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have any tidy fixes either, but I do know that science journalists like me can work harder to better represent the world we report on. Would McNeil like to have diversified his \u201cmanel<\/a>\u201d of experts commenting for The New York Times? I don\u2019t know. In an email, he said that he was \u201cin the penalty box\u201d and temporarily banned from talking to press after an\u00a0appearance on CNN<\/a>\u00a0where he sharply criticized the administration\u2019s inadequate Covid-19 response.<\/p>\n

For my part, I\u2019ve been reflecting on my own blind spots. I realized with embarrassment that in a recent story I wrote on Covid-19, my editor and I wound up cutting sections containing the perspective of a Black female internist who specializes in infectious disease. Considering that, according to data from New York City, African Americans are dying of Covid-19 at\u00a0<\/em>twice the rate<\/em><\/a>\u00a0of Whites, her insight could have made the story stronger.<\/em><\/p>\n

Freelance science journalist Tara Haelle told me that she follows a lot of women scientists on Twitter because they provide her with valuable information as a journalist. \u201cThe grunt work, the scientific work, the meaningful, important stuff that\u2019s happening related to the pandemic, including communicating that information to the public directly without any kind of filter or gatekeepers, [is being done by] women,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In a recent\u00a0column<\/a>\u00a0for the Association of Health Care Journalists, she also advised journalists to look for high-quality sources that can speak precisely to your subject. \u201cIt\u2019s not just seeking out diverse sources and ensuring that you\u2019re quoting people of color and men and women, and other genders \u2014 it\u2019s not just an academic issue. It\u2019s not just a ticking-the-box issue. It\u2019s not just a social justice issue,\u201d she told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a journalistic responsibility to ensure that you are truly capturing all the perspectives that are relevant to the topic you\u2019re covering.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re not hearing women\u2019s voices, you\u2019re not getting the best science or representing science as it actually is, Buckee said. \u201cOf course, there are inequalities, but there are plenty of really good women scientists,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd without reflecting that adequately during a crisis \u2014 and in the press \u2014 you are doing a disservice to science overall.\u201d<\/p>\n

https:\/\/undark.org\/2020\/06\/22\/coronavirus-coverage-silencing-female-expertise\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u0418\u0437\u0432\u043e\u0440: WUNRN \u2013 24.06.2020 With male voices dominating the pandemic narrative, female scientists are lamenting the loss of diverse perspectives BY\u00a0TERESA CARR FOR A SWEEPING\u00a0and much-lauded New York Times\u00a0article\u00a0on how the pandemic may play out over the next year, veteran…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vesti","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1075,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthrights.mk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fpost_series&post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}