A recent study reports a striking pattern: research articles with female first authors are retracted less often than those led by men. Women are not only underrepresented among first authors overall — they are even more underrepresented among retracted first-author papers.
One might reasonably ask whether parity should be the goal here. Perhaps women are more honest. Perhaps they take fewer risks, make fewer errors, or are less likely to engage in misconduct.
But, retractions are not simply moral verdicts. They are administrative outcomes embedded in a system shaped by hierarchy, prestige and power. To understand what gender differences in retractions really reflect, we need to look beyond individual traits and consider how research projects are organised, how authorship is allocated, and how scrutiny is applied.
Read the rest of this piece at the LSE Impact Blog
Share
No Comments
Republish
I encourage you to republish this article online and in print, under the following conditions.
- You have to credit the author.
- If you’re republishing online, you must use our page view counter and link to its appearance here (included in the bottom of the HTML code), and include links from the story. In short, this means you should grab the html code below the post and use all of it.
- Unless otherwise noted, all my pieces here have a Creative Commons Attribution licence -- CC BY 4.0 -- and you must follow the (extremely minimal) conditions of that license.
- Keeping all this in mind, please take this work and spread it wherever it suits you to do so!
Discuss