Letters: September 2020

Amid the debate about diversity in science, it is important not to let fundamental scientific principles slide. Philip Ball (Chemistry World, July 2020, p33) criticises Tomáš Hudlický’s assertion that diversity harms organic chemistry, while Ball and others have accused Alessandro Strumia of cherry-picking data to support his claim that encouraging more women into physics reduces the quality of research. However, your correspondent John Boulton comments that ‘Cherries … are there to be picked, and – who knows? – there may be a nugget of good sense in them’ (Chemistry World, August 2020, p4).

This is the very opposite of good science, and something that, as a co-author of Cochrane reviews of pain treatments, I have to guard against. I don’t believe Chemistry World readers need any lessons in this.

Let us recap. Hudlický states as a fact, without justification, that increased diversity means that the most meritorious candidates are discriminated against. He does not attempt to define ‘most meritorious’ but, even according to his arguments, it would be the not-quite-so meritorious who would lose out. According to Hudlický, the science produced under such circumstances would suffer. However, there is research which suggests the opposite (DOI: 10.1038/d415 86-018-05326-3).

Strumia presented himself as a victim of discrimination because a woman who he considered less meritorious got a job he applied for. He announced this publicly at a meeting attended by the woman in question. In support of his claim, he adduced his greater citation rate, despite this being a notoriously unreliable indicator of merit (one-third of his citations came from a single paper with nearly 3000 authors!). He produced an analysis purporting to show that men were discriminated against in physics. This has not been replicated. His arguments were refuted in an open letter from many high-energy physicists.

Hudlický and Strumia’s complaints beg the question of what constitutes merit, their assumptions pointing to a rather narrow definition. However, the paths to successful science are many and diverse.

mia’s complaints beg the question of what constitutes merit, their assumptions pointing to a rather narrow definition. However, the paths to successful science are many and diverse.