Here is another example of why representative sampling MUST include women. For years and years, car crash test dummies for adults were all based upon the 50th percentile male. As such, even in vehicles with high safety ratings, women still have higher rates of certain injuries (head, neck, pelvis) than men. In fact, the article cites research that found that belted female car occupants in accidents have a 47% higher chance of suffering a serious injury and a 71% higher chance of suffering a moderate injury compared to men in a car. http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-insisted-on-male-crash-test-dummies I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only  male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans . And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing. How to use in class: -Inappropriate sampling i...

Tis the season for the end of semester teaching evaluations. And Ben Schmidt has created an interactive tool that demonstrates gender differences in these evaluations.  Enter in a word, and Schmidt's tool returns to you how frequently the word is used in Rate Your Professor  evaluations, divided up by gender and academic discipline. Spoiler alert: Men get higher ratings for most positive attributes! ...while women get higher ratings for negative attributes.  Out of class, you can use this example to feel sad, especially if you are a female professor and up for tenure. In class, this leads to obvious discussions about gender and perception and interpersonal judgments. You can also use it to discuss why the x- and y-axes were chosen. You can discuss the archival data analysis used to generate these charts. You can discuss data mining. You can discuss content analysis. You can also discuss between-group differences (gender) versus within-group differences (acade...

This news story demonstrates that research methods are both federally monitored and that best practices can change over time. For a long time, women were not used in large scale pharmaceutical trials. Why did they omit women? They didn't want to accidentally exposed pregnant women to new drugs and because of fears that fluctuations in females hormones over the course of a month would affect research results. Which always makes me think of this scene from Anchorman: But I digress. This has been corrected for and female participants are being included in clinical trials. But many of the animal trials that occur prior to human trials still use mostly male animals. And, again, policies have changed to correct for this. This NPR story details the whole history of this sex bias in research. Part of why this bias has been so detrimental to women is because women report more side effects to drugs than do men. So, by catching such gender differences earlier with animal models, the...