Truth in Variables

 

                 Truth in Variables

Here is part of a weird article from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, about the racial background and sexual behavior of medical journal editors, things you probably weren't thinking about. The concept must be important, though, because they wrote about it. Maybe height is the next variable.

"At 25 leading medical and scientific journals, our survey found nearly equal numbers of men and women editors, more than 75% White editors, about 15% Asian editors, very few Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin editors, and no editors that identified as American Indian or Native American. For the US-based journals, the percentage of editors who identified as Black (1.1%) can be compared with 3.6% of US medical school faculty, 5.0% of practicing physicians in the US,³ and 13.0% of US adults⁴ who are Black; the editors who identified as Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin (3.8%) can be compared with 5.5% of medical school faculty, 5.8% of practicing physicians,³ and 16.4% of adults⁴ with these ethnicities. Data about sexual orientation and gender minority individuals (ie, nonbinary, transgender) in comparable populations are limited. About 11% to 12% of US medical school students identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer⁵; this can be compared with approximately 9% of editors, although none identified as transgender.

Our findings, although limited to a sample of 25 journals, provide novel data on multiple aspects of editor diversity via self-report, not assumptions about an editor’s identity based on a name or photograph. We could not, however, determine if the 368 editors who responded have similar characteristics to the 286 (43.7%) who did not. "

There was one brave comment, supportive of what the writer felt was an important article. No one commented on the curious rate of homosexuality that is almost 10x the reported national average. And neither the article nor a commentator suggested what, if anything, made these demographics important.