Bias & Beers Journal Club

Bias & Beers is a monthly journal club where we read and discuss scientific articles detailing the evidence of bias in science and engineering. Make sure to check out our events page - we would love to have you at our next journal club!

Here are some of the articles that we've read in the past:

• Journals Invite Too Few Women to Referee (Lerback & Hanson, Nature, 2017) and Diversifying the Reviewer Pool (Hanson & Lerback, Earth & Space Science News, 2017)
  This paper looks at the systematic gap in who is asked to review papers for publication, and the implications of reviewer diversity on what (and who) is ultimately published, especially in high-impact journals. The second article is for the popular press, explaining and expanding on the findings in the original paper.
   
• Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients (Green et al., Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2007)
  This article looks at the differential diagnoses offered to patients based on their race; and whether or not implicit bias training for physicians can impact the ultimate diagnosis and treatment offered to all patients.
   
• The Gender Gap in Science: How Long until Women are Equally Represented? (Holman, Stuart-Fox, and Hauser, PLoS Biology, 2018)
  This article takes a close and unapologetic look at the persistent gender gap in STEM fields, finding that this gap extends around the world and across generations and disciplines; from this paper it is clear that this gender gap can only be addressed when we understand the full extent of the problem.
   
• Diversity in Geoscience: Participation, Behaviour, and the Division of Scientific Labour at a Canadian Geoscience Conference (King et al., FACETS, 2018)
  This paper examines bias in action at one specific event: the joint Canadian Geophysical Union and Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology annual meeting. By focusing on this one event, different facets of bias in STEM can be uncovered and examined.
   

If you have any suggestions for future reading, please send an email to hgwiseguys@g.harvard.edu with a link to the paper and a brief description of it's findings - we're always looking for new papers to read and discuss!