Eine Studie, die in „Nature Communications“ veröffentlich wurde führt zu erheblichen Aufruhr:
We study mentorship in scientific collaborations, where a junior scientist is supported by potentially multiple senior collaborators, without them necessarily having formal supervisory roles. We identify 3 million mentor–protégé pairs and survey a random sample, verifying that their relationship involved some form of mentorship. We find that mentorship quality predicts the scientific impact of the papers written by protégés post mentorship without their mentors. We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.
Quelle: The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance
Man hat also festgestellt, dass mehr weibliche Mentoren dazu führen, dass weibliche Unterstützte schlechter abschnitten und der Mentor ebenso.
Aus der Studie:
Und aus dem Text:
Next, we turn to a different exploratory analysis where we investigate the post-mentorship impact of protégés while taking into consideration their gender as well as the gender of their mentors. To this end, let Fi denote the set of protégés that have exactly i female mentors. We take the protégés in F0 as our baseline, and match them to those in Fi for i ∈ {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, while controlling for the protégé’s average big-shot experience, number of mentors, gender, discipline, affiliation rank, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper. Then, we vary the fraction of female mentors to understand how this affects the protégé. More specifically, for any given i > 0, we compute the change in the post-mentorship impact of the protégés in Fi relative to the post-mentorship impact of those in F0, which we refer to by writing Fi vs. F0. The outcomes of these comparisons are depicted for male protégés in Fig. 3a, and for female protégés in Fig. 3b. As shown in this figure, having more female mentors is associated with a decrease in the mentorship outcome, and this decrease can reach as high as 35%, depending on the number of mentors and the proportion of female mentors.
Schade, dass sie die Grafik und die Zahlen nur für die Anzahl weiblicher Mentoren haben und nicht auch für die Anzahl männlicher Mentoren. Dennoch ist der Unterschied relativ groß.
Weiter aus dem Text:
So far in our analysis, we only considered the outcome of the protégés. However, mentors have also been shown to benefit from the mentorship experience1. With this in mind, we measure the gain of a mentor from a particular protégé as the average impact, 〈c5〉, of the papers they authored with that protégé during the mentorship period. We compare the average gain of a female mentor, F, against that of a male mentor, M, when mentoring either a female protégé, f, or a male protégé, m. More specifically, we compare mentor–protégé relationships of the type (f, F) to those of the type (m, F), where f and m are matched based on their discipline, affiliation rank, number of mentors, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper. Similarly, we compare relationships of the type (f, M) to those of the type (m, M), where f and m are matched as above. The results of these comparisons are presented in Fig. 3c. In particular, the figure depicts the gain from mentoring a female protégé relative to that of mentoring a male protégé; the results are presented for female mentors and male mentors, separately. These results suggest that, by mentoring female instead of male protégés, the female mentors compromise their gain from mentorship, and suffer on average a loss of 18% in citations on their mentored papers. As for male mentors, their gain does not appear to be significantly affected by taking female instead of male protégés.
Also schneiden weibliche Mentoren die Frauen unterstützen besonders schlecht ab, Männer hingegen werden weniger heruntergezogen.
Und noch aus der Diskussion:
While it has been shown that having female mentors increases the likelihood of female protégés staying in academia10 and provides them with better career outcomes39, such studies often compare protégés that have a female mentor to those who do not have a mentor at all, rather than to those who have a male mentor. Our study fills this gap, and suggests that female protégés who remain in academia reap more benefits when mentored by males rather than equally-impactful females. The specific drivers underlying this empirical fact could be multifold, such as female mentors serving on more committees, thereby reducing the time they are able to invest in their protégés47, or women taking on less recognized topics that their protégés emulate48,49,50, but these potential drivers are out of the scope of current study. 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. These conclusions are all deduced from careful comparisons between protégés who published their first mentored paper in the same discipline, in the same cohort, and at the very same institution. Having said that, it should be noted that there are societal aspects that are not captured by our observational data, and the specific mechanisms behind these findings are yet to be uncovered. One potential explanation could be that, historically, male scientists had enjoyed more privileges and access to resources than their female counterparts, and thus were able to provide more support to their protégés. Alternatively, these findings may be attributed to sorting mechanisms within programs based on the quality of protégés and the gender of mentors.
Our gender-related findings suggest that current diversity policies promoting female–female mentorships, as well-intended as they may be, could hinder the careers of women who remain in academia in unexpected ways. Female scientists, in fact, may benefit from opposite-gender mentorships in terms of their publication potential and impact throughout their post-mentorship careers. Policy makers should thus revisit first and second order consequences of diversity policies while focusing not only on retaining women in science, but also on maximizing their long-term scientific impact. More broadly, the goal of gender equity in science, regardless of the objective targeted, cannot, and should not be shouldered by senior female scientists alone, rather, it should be embraced by the scientific community as a whole.
Es brach angesichts dieses Umstandes, dass Männer evtl Frauen besser fördern und auch selbst dann noch besser abschneiden bzw das männliche Jungwissenschaftler besser für einen Mentor sind eine Protestwelle los, die schon zu diesem Zusatz bei der Studie führte:
19 November 2020 Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that this paper is subject to criticisms that are being considered by the editors. Those criticisms were targeted to the authors’ interpretation of their data that gender plays a role in the success of mentoring relationships between junior and senior researchers, in a way that undermines the role of female mentors and mentees. We are investigating the concerns raised and an editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.
Erwähnt werden soll noch, dass die Autorin der Studie eine Frau ist:
Aus dem „Shitstorm“ und den Erwiderungen von Twitter:
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