Thread: New Crisis: Lack of Women Covid Researchers Threatens Diversity

ATLANTIC: Women and BIPOC Scientists Fail to Contribute Their Share During Covid Fight Story by Ed Yong

"In the fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries …

But the COVID‑19 pivot has also revealed the all-too-human frailties of the scientific enterprise. … Racial and gender inequalities in the scientific field widened. …


Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,” says Molly M. King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University. Women’s research hours fell by nine percentage points more than did men’s because of the pressures of COVID‑19. And when COVID‑19 created new opportunities, men grabbed them more quickly. In the spring, the proportion of papers with women as first authors fell almost 44 percent in the preprint repository medRxiv, relative to 2019. And published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic . . . "
https://vdare.com/posts/atlantic-wom...ng-covid-fight

Damn that COVID pandemic for ruining the goal for feminist diversity in science! /s/

Results don't matter; the process does.

If Patton had thought that way, we would've lost World War Two. If Russia had thought that way, Hitler would've built a low-lying Eagle's' Nest on the banks of the Volga, now open to the public, as long as you pay your Deutchmarks and bow before the statue of the Jew-hater before you enter.

But, men or women (if we're even drawing a distinction any more)... it doesn't matter much. The results of any honest research on the China Virus will get blocked by America's New Nazi Left Party -- aka the Democrats -- since the primary goal isn't public health, but rather political control, and damn the cost in human lives. (For the dullards and the awareness-challenged, that would be "Nursing homes," i.e. death camps for the old and no-longer-useful; and masks; and isolation; and 2020's Oxymoron Du Jour, "distance learning.")

If women -- biological or self-identifying -- want to get in on that sleaze, then I say more power to them. Me, I'd never want to work on a project whose results would be silenced. "We know where you live, and your parents, too." Oh yeah, we know how that goes.

There is a cycle to this.

Feminism ramped up through the economic good times of the 90s, women became obnoxious, but with a slower spread back then because the modern internet did not exist. Then 9/11 happened, and they came running back to men. I remember 2002 as the year of beautiful, horny young women throwing themselves at me for reasons I did not fully understand at the time. The oil price spikes and economic crash of the late 2000s kept them with their men.

Then during the next 10 years of economic good times from 2009-2019, feminism made a great comeback. Now the pandemic is likely to kill it again, because when the going gets tough, women turn to men to deal with it. It is now up to men to educate other men and prevent the rise of feminism again once this is over.