Recommended reads #178
A landmark paper about gender inequities in academic advancement and funding by Rissler et al. just came out in Bioscience. I bet it’s going to become a classic. In this paper, the pool of potential applicants for NSF funding is estimated, and the rates of application and funding are evaluated. The tweet features Figure 1, showing the the frequency of (self-reported) men and women in tenure-track faculty positions by academic rank.
Fig 1 is indeed striking. https://t.co/XiB9j5w4uy pic.twitter.com/UlIpqOWDTH
— Leslie Rissler (@ljrissler) July 30, 2020
Just moments before Rissler et al. 2020 was published, Caroline Tucker published this blog post as an infuriating and heartbreaking illustration of the mechanisms at work. (You may recognize Dr. Tucker from her work blogging at EEB and Flow, as well as her research on biodiversity and trait-based ecology.) Just in case you wondered how bad the situation is and how much work is in front of us, please read the Bioscience paper and Dr. Tucker’s post.
A trio of important perspectives on Black scientists from Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution:
Recreating Wakanda by promoting Black excellence in ecology and evolution. The subheadings of this paper are a roadmap: 1. Root mentorship, training and research in anti-racism; 2. Decolonize and broaden evaluation metrics; 3. Recognize Black excellencies all its forms; 4. Sustained work is required.
Too many senior white academics still resist recognizing racism.
Hidden figures in ecology and evolution
A reality check on COVID vaccines.
Next week is the virtual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. I’m curious and a little excited to see what attending a virtual conference like this will be like. (If you’d like to catch my talk, here’s my meeting profile, it goes live on Monday. I’ll also upload the talk to a different place so that those who aren’t registered for the meeting after the meeting goes live.) I realize that the Animal Behavior Society was this week, any of y’all who “attended” this have thoughts about how it went and what makes virtual meetings good?
Best wishes for a peaceful weekend.