They are always hunting the snark and never finding it

From The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.

Fit the First

            The Landing

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,

   As he landed his crew with care;

Supporting each man on the top of the tide

   By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

   That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

   What I tell you three times is true."

 Just the first two of the 141 stanza poem.

Always comes to mind when passionate advocates push for something to be true despite the empirical data not supporting their idée fixe.  

In this case, the researcher desperately wants to find that female scientists are discriminated against.  They are looking at peer review for their support.  Their operating assumption is that women must be discriminated in the peer review process.

From No Gender Bias in Peer Review: Study by Jef Akst.

Although more and more women have found careers in STEM in recent years, a gender gap remains, both in the proportion of female scientists in many fields and the numbers of manuscripts they publish. To understand if the peer-review process is at all to blame for the gender gap seen in scientific publishing, University of Milan sociologist Flaminio Squazzoni and colleagues teamed up with representatives from Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, and Springer Nature to collate data from nearly 350,000 papers across 145 journals that could shed light on this question. 

The results, published today (January 6) in Science Advances, suggest that at no point in the editorial process are women at a disadvantage. While female scientists publish fewer articles than their male counterparts across scientific disciplines, they also submit fewer manuscripts, and following submission, their articles were treated more favorably than men’s were. However, says Squazzoni, who spoke with The Scientist about the study, this doesn’t mean women don’t face discrimination in their careers.

Science the pursuit of evidence to support ideological beliefs.  Love that second paragraph.  "At no point in the editorial process are women at a disadvantage . . . their articles were treated more favorably than men’s were . . .  however . . . this doesn’t mean women don’t face discrimination in their careers."

They had a hypothesis, they did the research, the research did not support the hypothesis, but they are still convinced the hypothesis is true.  These aren't scientists, they are Snark hunters.

Kudos for diligence.  They had perhaps the largest, best and most representative data set I have ever seen reviewed.

The possibility to check for these confounders was possible because we had high-quality data on each submission, including those ones eventually rejected from journals. We also checked for the gender of reviewers. We found solid evidence of the fact that manuscripts with women as authors (sole or in teams of co-authors) were treated even more favourably by reviewers and editors. This was especially so in biomedicine and health journals, but in general, the positive treatment of women was confirmed across fields of research. 

The researchers confirmed that even though their hunt for the snark search for evidence of discrimination against women came up empty in terms of peer review, they are going to continue to the search for the snark discrimination more  broadly.  

Or they could just read the literature in the field.  A lot of research in recent years confirm that men and women similarly situated in academia (age, unmarried, no children) are similarly productive and rewarded (compensation, prizes, grants, etc.) women who do have young children suffer marked declines in publication.  There is virtually no evidence that there is biased discrimination and a lot of evidence that rewards and status follow productivity.  And that productivity is impaired by family responsibilities among female academics to a greater degree than male academics. 

Indeed there was a lengthy lament in The Atlantic eight years ago, Why Women Still Can't Have it All by Anne-Marie Slaughter.  Despite having enormous privilege, a husband who was a fellow academic who was fully committed to supporting her career, and being a full professor at Princeton University, it was a long complaint of just how hard it was to be a woman with children.  

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

I am still horrified by the tone-deaf privilege complaining about life trade-offs which everyone has to deal with, and usually under much more straightened circumstances and with fewer range of choices.

None-the-less, it was an important admission.  Life is a range of trade-off choices, usually leaving us with regrets about possibilities not pursued.  Nominally, the article is a refutation of the feminist position that women can have it all and criticism of feminists for advancing a nominally fatuous argument unsupported by logic or evidence.  Men can't have it all and do not.  Why would expect women to exempt from such reality.

But instead of exploring the fact that family structure and personal norms drive outcomes, Slaughter quickly veers toward the answer all frustrated utopians arrive at.  Society has to be restructured to deliver the dreams of the utopian.  

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

And always with that authoritarian coercive undertone.  Her personal experiences need to be widely acknowledged and America's economy and society have to be restructured.  

She may be a Democrat but she is no democrat and certainly not a classical liberal.  The world has to be shaped to suit her desires and not those of anyone else.

And as exasperated as I am with the authoritarian tone, the self-centeredness, I do have to acknowledge that she is willing to tell hard truths about herself.

I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).

 In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

In the first paragraph, she is describing the normal range of trade-offs of every executive, every lawyer at a top flight law firm, every partner in management consulting or accounting, every entrepreneur.  Reality, in that respect, is completely gender neutral.  

Eventually Slaughter comes right out and states the proposition baldly.  Because she can't have everything she wants, because she is constrained by the same trade-off decisions everyone else has to deal with, society must change.  Emphasis added.  

In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.

Well, good luck with that.  The track record of imposed societal change is at best spotty.  More accurately, it is tragically violent and impoverishing.  You can't imagine your way into a new social construct.  It has to emerge or imposed and imposed almost never works.   

No point in further criticism.  It is an embarrassing display of self-centeredness, authoritarianism, disregard for fellow citizens with different priorities and life goals, resonant of establishment privilege.