someone once told me the real action was in the footnotes

February 12, 2019 10:06 AM

Illuminating Women’s Hidden Contribution to Historical Theoretical Population Genetics [preprint bioRxiv], Samantha Kristin Dung, Andrea López, Ezequiel Lopez Barragan, Rochelle-Jan Reyes, Ricky Thu, Edgar Castellanos, Francisca Catalan, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez and Rori V. Rohlfs, GENETICS February 1, 2019 vol. 211 no. 2 363-366; https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.118.301277

While productivity in academia is measured through authorship, not all scientific contributors have been recognized as authors. We consider nonauthor “acknowledged programmers” (APs), who developed, ran, and sometimes analyzed the results of computer programs. We identified APs in Theoretical Population Biology articles published between 1970 and 1990, finding that APs were disproportionately women (P = 4.0 × 10−10). We note recurrent APs who contributed to several highly-cited manuscripts. The occurrence of APs decreased over time, corresponding to the masculinization of computer programming and the shift of programming responsibilities to individuals credited as authors. We conclude that, while previously overlooked, historically, women have made substantial contributions to computational biology.

The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes

Women’s hidden contributions to theoretical population genetics

posted by the man of twists and turns (1 comment total)

I think about this with regards to my grandmother. She was technician to a doctor who won a Nobel Prize. I wonder how much of the work she did.
posted by acrasis at 10:12 AM on February 12, 2019 [11 favorites]