Our final seminar of fall quarter will be from 9 – 11am on Thursday November 30. Schedule changes due to this are noted in your Replacement Reading Schedule.

The readings for the seminar (from the peer-reviewed scientific literature) focus on overt and subtle issues of bias related to gender and race in STEM environments:

• Quality of Evidence Revealing Subtle Gender Biases. Link to online version where Supporting Information (SI) can be accessed.
• Double Jeopardy in Astronomy and Planetary Science. Skim article, but pay particular attention to Table 3, Table 6, Section 2.5, and Section 4.4.

We will hand out paper copies of these articles in class Monday so that you can mark those with your annotations and questions, and have them available during Seminar (without people using electronic devices during the discussion).

Pre-Seminar Writing Assignment. Beyond reading the Quality of Evidence paper and skimming the Double Jeopardy paper, we would like for you to respond in writing to the following prompts.

• Please type up your responses and bring them with you, along with the articles, to Seminar.
• Your typed responses will serve as your Seminar Entrance Ticket.
• Faculty will collect these at the end of Seminar and check for evidence of attempting to complete.

The readings for the last seminar of the quarter may be some students’ first introduction to looking at a scientific paper. We do not expect students to be able to read a peer-reviewed article in its entirety and completely understand it after one (or even five) readings. Even experienced scientists skim papers for necessary information and, for the most part, this is what we are asking you to do.

The articles in question we have given you were both published in highly regarded journals. The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) is a journal that publishes high-quality research across many areas of science, while the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) is one of the most highly respected journals in the geosciences.

Before you read for content, first scan the heading titles of the subsections of the two papers to get an overview of what goes where. The order of the sections in the JGR paper (Double Jeopardy) should look familiar to those taking chemistry. The PNAS paper (Quality of Evidence) has a slightly different order and the introductory section does not have a heading title.

The PNAS (Quality of Evidence) is shorter. (Many papers published in broad-interest journals such as PNAS, Science, and Nature move a lot of the nitty-gritty details to “Supplemental Information”/SI sections that you can access online; link above.) The questions in the writing assignment below refer to the PNAS paper unless otherwise noted.

1. The first part of the PNAS article is an abstract (summary) printed in bold face. Following this is an unlabeled introduction section that discusses the importance of the topic and summarizes the scientific literature on which the current research was built.  Figure out how many papers (or other references) are cited in this section and record this number. Then go to the end of the paper, locate the citations for these references, and, based on the names of the journals, make a list of the fields of study being drawn together in this section. 
2. Based on the “Current Research” and “Materials and Methods” sections of the PNAS paper, write a one- or two-sentence summary of your understanding of each of the three experiments reported in this paper.
3. The “Results” section of the PNAS paper is chock full of statistics! If you don’t have a background in statistics, use the guideline that anything with a P-value less than 0.05 represents a significant statistical correlation. Right now the results section is a hard-to understand jumble of numbers. Take your best shot at creating a table that summarizes the results of the three experiments. If you’re not sure how to do this, examine the JGR paper, particularly Table 3 and/or Table 6.
4. Skim the “Limitations and Future Directions” section for limitations of the PNAS study and compare to section 2.5 of the JGR paper. What sorts of limitations seem to be inherent in this sort of study? What limitations might be avoided with better experimental design?
5. Compare the “Discussion” section of the PNAS paper with section 4.4 of the JGR paper. Both sections discuss actions that might be taken to counter bias in STEM fields. Pick one action from either paper that you think might be effective, and one action that you think might be hard to implement.