Astudy published in Nature Communications November 17 has caused an eruption of outrage among scientists. The study of 3 million mentor-protégé pairs in STEM found that women trainees who coauthored papers with senior women scientists received fewer citations after they became principal investigators than did women trainees who coauthored with senior men. That gendered pattern is consistent with previous research documenting citation biases in science. But what caused a firehose of criticism was the conclusion of the paper, in which the authors suggest that the solution to this disparity is that women should avoid female mentors, thus perpetuating an existing bias.
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