Commentary
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a modern ideologist, every difference looks like the result of prejudice.
This ideology reminds me of the tiny ants that have gotten into my kitchen in my house in the French countryside. They get everywhere, including—this morning—into my computer. Modern ideology is like that: it gets everywhere and leaves nothing alone. Like the ants, it’s very annoying.
An article on the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association, published on July 2, examined the rate at which scientific articles published between 2015 and 2018 in five of the world’s most important medical journals—the Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA Internal Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine—were cited by other workers, according to whether the first or senior authors of the articles were men or women.
The authors examined 5,554 articles and found that those with men as first or senior authors were cited about half as many times again as those with women as first or senior authors. They concluded—surprise, surprise—that “these differences may have important consequences for the professional success of women and achieving gender equity in academic medicine.”
Note the weaselly language in which the conclusion is couched. What the authors of the article call in their title the “gender disparity in citations.” The word disparity already connotes anomaly or injustice by comparison with the word difference. But they don’t go so far as to claim that the difference actually causes a difference in the career trajectories of men and women in academic medicine.
Equity
Much more important is the misuse of the word equity, by which the authors obviously mean equality of outcome. Equity, by contrast, means fairness or justice. This is surely an elementary, but highly motivated, mistake.To illustrate the difference, let us suppose that instead of looking at sex differences, the authors had looked at the IQs of the authors of articles in these journals. They would have discovered—shock, horror!—that the distribution was grossly skewed in favor of those with high intelligence, who form, at most, 5 percent of the population.
How undemocratic! Equity, in the sense that these authors use it, would demand that the journals publish more articles by people of low intelligence, the lack of such publication hampering people of low intelligence from becoming neurosurgeons.
The use of the word equity by the authors rests on the assumption that, if all were fair as it should be, all things desirable and desired—and presumably all things undesirable and undesired also—would be distributed equally between groups.
This is as ludicrous as Rosencrantz’s answer to Hamlet’s request for the latest news: “None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.” These days, he would reply, “None, my lord, but that the world’s grown equitable”—to which Hamlet’s reply would be the same: “Then is doomsday near.”
It isn’t the job of the editors of JAMA to suppress opinion, but it’s surely part of their job to correct gross misuse of language: a misuse that reminds one of Soviet propaganda at its height.
Now it’s possible that the differences that the authors found in the numbers of citations of articles by men and women authors are the result of prejudice, but it strikes me as very unlikely. As it happens, I wrote a book a couple of years ago that was a chronicle of the errors, the political correctness, and the medical advances—as I saw them all—that I found in 52 issues of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In not a single instance did it occur to me to select the articles for my commentary according to whether they were written by men or by women. This was simply a criterion that didn’t occur to me as relevant.
I’ve also in my career had a side-line in reviewing books: I have probably reviewed about 500 in my time. Again, it has never occurred to me to tailor my review to the sex of the author of the book under review. Nor, when I read the book reviews of others, do I consider the sex of the reviewer, only the content of the review.
Unconscious Bias
It’s probable, however, that the authors of the article—and those who think like them—would claim that the mere fact that I didn’t consciously select the articles for commentary in my book on the basis of the sex of the authors only goes to show the depth of my unconscious bias. Of course, that’s assuming that I chose disproportionately more male authors, which is possible: I’ve made no study of the question.This resort to unconscious bias as an explanation of my choice would be deeply sinister and totalitarian both in inspiration and consequences. Those who suffer from unconscious bias must be reeducated, and the stronger their resistance to such reeducation, the greater their need for it.
I’m reminded of the notices that used to appear in grocery stores in poor areas, asking customers not to ask for credit, because “refusal often offends.” One can’t refuse the beliefs of modern ideologists: refusal not merely often offends, it always does.
The authors of the article were honest enough to admit that their work had limitations. One of those admitted limitations made me smile.
“We focused on dichotomized gender categories and were unable to assess citation differences among authors with nondichotomous gender affiliations.”
Of course, the fact that I laughed just goes to show how badly I am in need of reeducation. Laughter is itself a sign of an inequitable world and must be suppressed.
