Helen MacDonald

Hold on, you just got, you designated yourself some major role as, what did you say you were going to be the other day, like head of the NHS?

The government should give you all the money and you'll decide how to spend it.

This is a mind of mine.

I imagine you have some thoughts on that.

But couldn't you argue that it starts at the beginning of any of those?

Couldn't you say it starts at the beginning with the distorted evidence base?

Because if you didn't have that, then you wouldn't have the marketing of that distorted evidence base anymore.

You can make a New Year's resolution.

Free yourself.

Well, it's one of my sort of returning topics of strife.

There are a few things that get me really cross, and one of them is gender bias.

And last year in the Christmas issue, we heard about the unpleasant experiences that some female medics have returning to work after they've had children.

And this year...

We have some authors adding to my angst on these issues.

So they say that women remain underrepresented on faculties of medicine and in the life sciences, that women earn lower salaries, receive fewer research grants and receive fewer citations than their male colleagues.

And now to add to this list of woes in the Christmas issue, these authors tell us that men and women frame their research papers slightly differently in terms of the language that they use and that this difference is associated with fewer citations for female authored papers down the line.

So it basically means that either male-dominated papers are slightly oversold or that female-dominated ones are slightly undersold.

So this was a study where they... Can I come in there?

No, it's my rant.

Go quiet.