On Feb 10, 2008, at 1:24 AM, Barry Saunders wrote:
Considering that all you can provide to challenge academic studies are personal anecdotes, I don't really think I need to.
Uh, when did I challenge academic studies? I'm challenging the current system of peer review, which naturally leads to the stifling of different voices and the voices of folks outside of the editorial class in academia. Sure some of my challenges are anecdotal, but those in the editorial class or who are disciples of scholars in that class know these anecdotes are not isolated. Further, its hard to collect anything but anecdotes because journals don't keep numbers on things like the percentage of men and women who submit articles and they don't require authors and editors to identify their academic relationships to each other. And for good reason. Nevertheless, I have pointed to much more than personal anecdote. The case of gender bias I cited isn't a personal anecdote--it was a cause celebre and the victim authors eventually wrote up a journal article about the whole affair. In addition, the study I cited earlier, which shows a distinct correlation between prestige of author's institution and likelihood of positive review, was a variable analytic analysis. I also cited the writings of Bourdieu, Mulkay, Merton, etc. which are hardly filled with anecdote alone. C'mon, Aren't my detractors on this list capable of attacking anything more than a straw man bastardization of my arguments?