Category: Academics

I’ve talked before about trust as a limiting factor, and the steps to take to repair trust. But I haven’t actually spelled out an important first step to that, which is the apology. And, as you might know, today Nature apologized for a piece of correspondence published earlier this week that has people slightly irritated (see list, end of post).

While Nature’s apology is better than a nonpology, it’s not actually a full apology, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not being as well-received as the editors likely hoped. I detailed some of my issues with the apology on Twitter this morning, but I wanted to take the time to actually expand on what is necessary for a complete apology.

You can find quite a few different opinions on what constitutes an actual apology. I am fond of a four stage approach: Recognition, Responsibility, Remorse/Regret, Remedy. I think it’d be easiest to go through each of these and the Nature apology, to see where they succeed, and where they fail. Hopefully this will be illustrative not only to them now, but others in the future.

 

Recognition
The first part of an apology is being able to articulate that you understand what you are apologizing for in the first place. This is often where nonpologies fall down; they apologize for hurting your feelings, rather than recognizing that what they said is the issue. When you recognize your mistake, you need to be specific. This is what Nature said:

On re-examining the letter and the process, we consider that it adds no value to the discussion and unnecessarily inflames it, that it did not receive adequate editorial attention, and that we should not have published it.

This isn’t a bad start. Ultimately, there is recognition that the commentary was inflammatory and it shouldn’t have been published. That said, what would have made it a good example of recognition is acknowledgement that the commentary that was published was offensive, as well. It’s not about adding no value, or even being inflammatory–it’s that it’s a point of view that has been systematically deconstructed and debunked over years, to the point that people who hold it are actually advocating biased, if not complete misogynistic, positions.

Responsibility
This part of an apology is pretty simple: you accept your responsibility for what you said or did. You don’t blame culture or shift it over to other people, or distance yourself from what happened. Nature’s apology does a decent job here; they note there was not adequate editorial attention and that it should not have been published.

Remorse or Regret
Anyone who watches nonpologies knows that it’s surprisingly rare to hear an apology stop with “I am sorry.” Nonpologies often creep in, with “I am sorry you feel that way.” In here, Nature also does well, simply stating “we should not have published it, for which we apologize.”

Remedy
And this is where Nature’s apology completely fails. An important part of apologizing is noting how this mistake will not happen again. If you’re chronically late to meetings, simply saying “I’m sorry I’m late” isn’t going to cut it. Following it up with a statement on how you’re going to change things so you’re not late again (“I will start setting my watch 10 minutes ahead”) is necessary, so that the person receiving the apology knows what you intend to do to prevent having to apologize for the issue again.

This is completely missing from Nature’s apology. The closest they come is this:

Nature’s own positive views and engagement in the issues concerning women in science are represented by our special from 2013:
www.nature.com/women.

When you screw up, you don’t get to say “and look at what I did before I screwed up, that’s how you know I won’t screw up again!” It doesn’t work like that; when you screw up, you need to offer information on what you’re going to do in the future to avoid another screw up of the same kind; clearly the past wasn’t good enough, because here we are.

And Nature has some explaining to its readers. In particular, yesterday, Nature asserted that they published Koube’s commentary because it was representative of numerous comments they received. Many people immediately saw the flaw in this justification:

When you publish letters that are loaded with blatant bias (or otherwise use language fraught with social meaning), you are responsible for the ink and the publicity and the reputation hit, even if you didn’t mean it. It’s not enough for Nature to say “this doesn’t reflect the views of our organization” because they granted legitimacy simply by publishing the commentary and giving it a DOI. Nature needs to come back and address the questions raised by the justification of “but we got lots of the same comment.”

Nature needs to explain what the editorial failure was. Likewise, what are the editorial standards for commentaries, and do they differ from the rest of the publication? If so, how? And if not, how did a someone with no qualifications for commentary other than “being representative” get accepted for publication in the first place?

And most importantly, how will Nature insure that something like this doesn’t happen again? And why, in particular, were they unable to weed out the issue with Koube’s commentary, but seem to have no problem weeding out endless turtle arguments, anti-vaccers, climate deniers, mermaid fans, the Flat Earth Society, and endless other conspiracy and crackpot theories?

These aren’t idle questions, and they’re all raised by Nature’s choice of published commentary, online explanations of what happened, and subsequent apology. If Nature is taking the approach of promoting false balance in commentaries, letters, and other comments, this is something that readers should be aware of, so that adjustments of expectations can be made. If false balance isn’t the intent, then Nature needs to share how they’re going to do their best to prevent publishing non-scientific, deliberately antagonistic and inflammatory content in the future.

 

Final Thoughts
In any apology, the “remedy” stage seems to be the hardest part for anyone (person or publishing group) to do, in part because it often requires a transparency of process that is uncomfortable. But when you screw up, you don’t get to ask for faith, because what you’ve done in the process of causing hurt is lose trust. You can ask for it back all you want, but chances are you’re going to actually need to earn it. You start earning it though a strong apology, and you finish earning it by being transparent–and not repeating the mistake again.

 

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This is the current list of blog posts addressing Nature’s decision to publish, that I am aware of:

• And Now for a Completely Different Rant by Mathematigal;
• Why I Turned Down a Q-and-A in Nature Magazine by Hope Jahren;
• So How Many Papers Does Having a Baby Cost? by BabyAttachMode;
• and my own question on how many times we need to discuss not promoting misogyny.

Feel free to let me know if I’ve left someone off the list.

In December, Nature published an editorial reporting on the results of their effort to broaden diversity in their pagest to increase the number of women contributing to their content. Some of the news is good (an increase in female authors) and some isn’t (a decrease in referees). Overall, though, it seemed like a nice bit of accountability, showing the actual effort being made to move away from the Old Boys Club of science.

Which they then went and undid completely this month, by publishing the following letter (right) from Lukas Koube, titled Research: Publish on the Basis of Quality, Not Gender.

Where do you even start with something like this? Do you start with the blatant misogyny? The barely-veiled Men’s Rights Activist language? The false idea that women aren’t represented in the sciences because they have babies? Do you just pound your head against the desk until you feel better? Maybe you ask Nature WTF they were thinking. Unfortunately, you won’t like that answer, either:

Oh.

Well, I guess you could talk about “whatever his provenance”: a bit of quick sleuthing from Anna Goldstein yesterday found this wonderful anti-feminist, misogynistic screed from Koube; not exactly the sort of thing you’d think Nature would want to give any legitimacy to (and yet). We could talk about the ‘author’ (a term I use loosely) having just received his BA in political science, not exactly the sort of person you’d look to for authority on scientific research and publishing. We could continue having a conversation about what it means to confer authority on a letter, or blog, by publishing it under the auspices of a respected organization, regardless of the fact that correspondence is not supposed to reflect the views of anyone but the person writing it (at least in typical magazine disclaimer).

But all of that continues to dance around the single, central issue revealed in both Koube’s letter and Nature’s explanation/defense of publication: multiple people wrote in expressing misogynistic beliefs, and Nature chose one letter out of those many as representative and published it.

As Janet D. Stemwedel asked, “If they had a lot of Flat-Earth letters, would they feel compelled to publish one? If so, they might want to rethink their editorial judgement.”

Women know that there is misogyny in science, academia, humanities, the work space, the world. We face it every single day. Many of us can’t get out of the house without facing it, let alone get through a work day without being reminded that people think we are less than, not as smart, not as capable, all because our reproductive organs happen to be on the inside.

And we have the research that shows the bias against women is real. We have so much research on it, Nature took the steps mentioned in their December editorial to try to combat the under-representation of women in their pages. For well over four years, people have been discussing The Feminist Philosophers’ Gendered Conference Campaign and the idea of boycotting conferences that have all-male (or all white male) conference panels.

We get it.

Really, truly, and honestly, women know this.

I understand the dilemma of letters to the editor and correspondence pages—remember, I used to work for an academic bioethics journal! If you want to see letters, angry letters that can span the range of opinions of valid to “did we remember to lock all the doors?”, try reading those for a month.

But at the same time, I understand that at some point, you have to drop the idea that you are going to give fair airing to “all sides.” False balance is a plague upon publishing, and there needs to come a point where you—in this case, the editors of the correspondence section of Nature—draw a line in the sand and simply refuse to give ink to ideas that have been soundly refuted with science.

Not doing so doesn’t just reflect badly on the ‘author’ of the correspondence, but the organization doing the publishing. If you communicate about science, and you do so with authority, you have a responsibility for what you produce. Shirk that responsibility often enough, or continue to promote via publication ideas that are anathema and offensive to a section of your audience that you are trying to improve your outreach to, and you’re going to lose that audience permanently.

 

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Edited to add:
Nature apologized for publishing the commentary on Friday. My response to that apology is here.