Bias at work

A piece in Vox summarizes a study from Nextions showing that lawyers are more critical of a brief written by an African-American. 

I immediately thought of scientific manuscript review and the not-unusual request to have a revision “thoroughly edited by a native English speaker”. My confirmation bias suggests that this is way more common when the first author has an apparently Asian surname.

It would be interesting to see a similar balanced test for scientific writing and review, wouldn’t it?

My second thought was…. Ginther. Is this not another one of the thousand cuts contributing to African-American PIs’ lower success rates and need to revise the proposal extra times? Seems as though it might be.