Another conventional wisdom of science that is designed to keep women out of science

Science Professor muses on Stay or Go?, the well known conventional wisdom that any serious scientist will inhabit different Universities for undergraduate, postgraduate, postdoctoral and professorial career stages. If you stay at one location for two consecutive stages then you must be a crappy scientist.

The true reality is that geographical limits in a training history are imperfect predictors of scientific quality. There are negative factors to remaining in the same environment, mostly having to do with being steeped in one narrow scientific perspective. Variously defined, you realize.

The appearance, however, does not always reflect reality. I know of many people who trained in disparate locations as grad students and postdocs…but the labs were near clones of each other. I also know of a rare few who stayed at one University across *multiple* transitions yet received greater diversity of perspective than the prior examples.

In short, it depends.

Given this, and given that anyone with a brain more advanced than a carrot realizes this, we must ask ourselves why such a seemingly hard and fast career rule persists.

I submit to you that women in science are disproportionately, for better or for worse, likely to be geographically anchored. Deployment of the “rule”, in lieu of considering individual merits/limitations, therefore contributes to the persisting sex disparity in science career success.

Is there any useful purpose for the “rule” that I am missing, Dear Reader?

SFN11: The unbearable fear of scoopage

Interesting post up at the haydenlab blog:

In the post-SFN hangover phase, many neuroscientists are in a slightly more anxious state about the possibility that they are about to be scooped. Surely with all those posters, you must have seen someone who has the same brilliant idea in their head as you, right?

With a few exceptions, these fears turn out to be silly. Why?

The author then goes on to list a number of reasons why getting scooped* is not as bad as is usually imagined. I tend to agree** with the points being made. One that is obscured is that in most areas of real science, the paper that does the best job is going to rack up the the respect and citations. Even if it appeared after the very first report of the general phenomenon.

So I tend to think scientists should remember they are playing the long game. And not get too concerned about the possibility that they are about to get scooped.

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*someone else manages to publish an experimental finding that you are working on before you get your paper published.

**the pursuit of GlamourMag science prioritizes the first publication of something over many other factors, including scientific quality and genuine impact, for example.