All Things Being Equal
12th May 2023
It goes without saying that there should, for reasons of social justice, be full representation of all demographic groups in all human endeavors: for example, in scientific fraud. There is, apparently, a lamentable underrepresentation of women in biomedical research papers subsequently retracted because they are fraudulent in some way, such as in the manufacture of data or in the falsification of pictures.
Having a semiprofessional, semi-prurient interest in fraud and forgery, I follow—admittedly in somewhat desultory fashion—an excellent website called Retraction Watch. It is there that I read a paper that analyzed the proportion of what was once called the fair sex among the authors of retracted papers. Overall, women were only slightly underrepresented in the biomedical sphere, but slight injustice is still injustice.