This week we look at team dynamics amongst academic scientists and working with people who are different from yourself.

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Research Roundup

There's no "I" in "team"...but there's definitely one in "tenure review"

We humans prefer simple explanations, where one thing directly and entirely causes another. This is very, very dumb but even scientists do it.

Teams are smarter than individuals but as teams in science have grown larger to tackle bigger problems “junior academic scientists became less likely to secure research funding or obtain tenure and were more likely to leave academia”. Teams are necessary to explore large-scale problems, but tenure review committees tend to assign to only the most prominent authors.

And if those authors are women? Women on research teams are “significantly less likely to be credited with authorship [or] named on any given article or patent produced by their team relative to their peers”. This bias is “found across almost all scientific fields and career stages”. If we’re looking for simple explanations, such one brilliant author deserves all of the credit, then  existing biases about women  

Looking for simple causes that explain away other possibilities, such as teams being more than the most prominent member.

Better Together

Both boys and girls perform worse in school as gender inequality increases across countries, and the effect is not small, having a larger impact on “academic achievement than…economic inequality”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, lack of access to reproductive health, such as postpartum depression treatment and simple menstrual products, “may contribute substantially” to this loss of human potential—something we are trying to end at The Human Trust.

There are moments in history, however, that show inequality is not inevitable. During WW1, the US civil service hired women to fill their depleted ranks. Of the men who worked with women, their daughters were “are more likely to work later in life, command higher income, and have fewer children” than men who worked only with other men. Cities with larger proportions of female civil servants had bigger effects that persisted not only in government but in the private sector as well.

Inequality harms everyone, but we can rescue ourselves with something as simple as working together with people that violate our stereotypes.

Weekly Indulgence

I’m a #Trailblazer… or so says the 13th Annual @StartOut Awards—the LGBTQ+ entrepreneurial event of the year!🏆

StartOut has been a champion for queer founders and #startup leaders since the days of my first company. On Oct 10 in #NYC, they will host their annual gala. Please come celebrate with my Trailblazer Award with me in person.

“Creating a pathway to true equality begins with economic empowerment. Entrepreneurship paves the way to lived equality through economic opportunity for individual founders and, at scale, economic justice for the community at large.”

I'm thrilled to accept my award alongside the astonishing people also being recognized at the 2024 StartOut Awards: Fearless Fund (Advocate Award), Perrin Quarshie (Next Generation Award), and Tristan Schukraft (Leadership Award)!

🎟 Purchase tickets to attend at https://bit.ly/4cRr2C5

👉Learn more at startout.org/events/startout-awards

#StartOutAwards #StartOutAwards2024 #LGBTQ #entrepreneurship #founders #queercelebration

And...

Grab Your Ticket for a new Mad Science Solves on Tuesday, Sept 24 @ 11am PST!

Stage & Screen

• September 17, NYC: Dionysus and The Human Trust are holding doing something amazing at the UN. Stay tuned to be apart of it.
• September 26, Wyoming: Tetons Leadership Counsel

See my full schedule and if your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I like weird stuff. I don’t only like weird stuff, but if it violates expectations in wonderful ways—The Invisibles, the 1st season of Lost, Doom Patrol—it makes happiness. On my recent trip to Athens, I found the 2nd season of Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency available on Netflix and watched it on the long flight home. It made happiness.

p.s. Now that I’ve finished The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, I’m seconding my recommendation. It’s swerved away from my initial take in ways that made it all the more engaging.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming