Do Men Commit More Scientific Misconduct?
Dear friends of women in science,
In an interesting exchange of ideas, the issue of gender's possible role in scientific misconduct has been discussed in mBio twice already this year. The first article was Fang, FC, Bennett, JW, and Casadevall, A, "Males are overrepresented among life science researchers committing scientific misconduct," mBio volume 4, issue 1, pp 1-3, 2013. The authors analyzed reported misconduct in the records of the Office of Scientific Integrity and noted that 2/3 of the cases were misconduct by men, higher than the proportion of men among scientific practicioners.
Kaatz, A, Vogelman, P. and Carnes, M, "Are Men More Likely than Women to Commit Scientific Misconduct? Maybe, Maybe Not,"mBio, volume 4, issue 2, pp 1-2, comment that the results cannot be taken to show conclusively that men commit scientific misconduct at a higher rate than women, even though men have been shown to take risks in general at a higher rate. They note the data set used by Fang et al. was small. They also were concerned about the comparison with male:female ratios in STEM general populations. The authors state that most cases were from biology, which has a more equal distribution of males and females, but Kaatz et al, note that if several misconduct cases were from engineering, for example, then the male/female ratio among miscreants could be much closer to that in the total population of engineers.They also noted that there were problems with using the percent men among the whole scientific workforce as a denominator for comparisons of misconduct by faculty members. NIH funding might be a better measure of opportunity to commit scientific misconduct, and if so, then we should note that men are more likelty to have multiple simultaneous R01 awards, receive large grants given to centers, and obtain competitive renewals. It is even possible, as they note, that reviewers hold women to a higher standard of proof than men, thus opening the door to more misconduct by men. So, while the data from Fang et al. do suggest a difference, it must be regarded as preliminary and should be studied with more data and different comparisons.
What do you think about this issue?
cheers,
Laura
I find the first article to be correct. Perhaps it is skewed for the life sciences where it is easier to cheat. Reagents must be shared for duplication to take place, and the money at stake is much larger so the incentives go up. Plus I think men don't see it as cheating as much as risk taking.
So what if they publish something early that can't be reproduced? They approach it as a gamble that most of the time, they will win. Women just don't do that easily. It holds us back professionally in some ways, but in this context...it keeps us ethical!
Helen
Laura--
I am convinced by the second article's critique that we can't say yet, but my gut tells me the first article is correct. In my experience, men are quicker to cheat in most ways, including in science. They don't seem to ever imagine they might get caught. Women don't much want to cheat, and if they think about it, they imagine they will get caught and are deterred. That's just personal experience, though.
KRB
