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A recent article by Yuhang Li et al. at Nanjing University, one of China's best universities, caused quite the controversy and was subsequentially "temporarily removed" from the journal publishers' website. In their article Li et al. set out to establish a causal relationship between the share of females at a university and the associated number of cats in the area, hence the controversial title "Where there are girls, there are cats" gaining the authors accusations of sexism. Their initial research interest, however, was the negative impact free-range cats have had on the local wild-life in China—a problem that is similarly severe in Australia where many native bird species are under the threat of extinction due to cats, killing more than a million birds per day.
Elsevier added a "Temporary Removal:" to the title a few days after publication and explained the retraction as follows:
The publisher regrets that this article has been temporarily removed. A replacement will appear as soon as possible in which the reason for the removal of the article will be specified, or the article will be reinstated.
This status has now lasted for almost a month with the authors' insistence that they haven't done anything wrong. So far, there hasn't been any official response, while the authors' last comment already dates three weeks. Let us analyse the potential reasons for retraction:
1. Sexism
Perhaps not the dominant factor, but at least the initial spark behind the Twitter backlash against the "Where there are girls, there are cats" paper was due to perceived sexism.
Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor for environmental studies at Rochester Institute of Technology wrote:
Hardly the point but referring to grown women as girls.. UMM IT'S A NO FROM ME
Another article on the paper noted that many took offence by the articles frequent usage of the word girl in the study. Yet, the article refers to women only twice as girls. Once in the title, and once when they state their intended purpose of the paper as:
Therefore, the relationship between cat and human sex ratio must be studied to verify if the claim “where there are girls, there are cats” is true. — Yuhang Li et al.
Throughout the rest of the paper, the authors use the neutral terms female and male students. This need not make it better, however. It seems then, that the term girls was deliberately used to create controversy or at least gain attention. The original submitted title of the paper was "Where are the girls, where are the cats", with the authors noting that perhaps the new title was more catchy. The idea of the paper is clear: it's about showing a correlation between the percentage of female students and the density of cats. While I do not see anything sexist about this idea, it is clear that the title would cause offence.
But as a user on Reddit pointed out, the authors may not have intended this controversy at all:
FWIW, referring to women as "girls" is a common mistake made by Mandarin speakers because Mandarin does not make the distinction between female, woman, and girl. Usually they're all referred to as 女生. The reviewers and the editor should have corrected it though.
If this is the case we should seek the blame indeed with the reviewers and editors who did not ask for a name change. As the authors themselves note, it is not easy to reach Twitter from China, and respond to the controversy. Nevertheless, they tried on PubPeer, with less than perfect English (supporting the hypothesis that the paper title is due to translation rather than sexism):
not easy for us to reach Twitter, we did not realize the topic is so sensitive, although at first we actually have tried our best to wirte the words... I firstly want to declare that I have not any sexism or even any thought of it, probably it is an English expression and culture difference that misleading readers since we are not native English speaker. For the title, may be catchier in our current version, it is like to say 'more girls, more cats?', just to catch readers that maybe cat density is related to sex ratio? In Chinese, it is very easy to understand and accept. I really don't understand why human sex cannot be discussed in a paper, as we discuss more in animals research, or it is a culture difference...Not sure... — Zhongqiu Li
As Li's response reveals, it seems that they did not catch up on the trickiness of the title. While some Twitter users had problems with the study question itself, I do not see a problem here with sexism per se. If anything, there should be a change of title. While their concluding sentence "h]uman sex ratio is an important factor that may affect the population of free-ranging cats" may be read as an advocation of a male-biased sex ratio in China this seems to directly conflict with their suggested policies, which are improved education and sterilization for cats. Let us, therefore, turn to the second complaint: that the study uses bad methods.
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References
Li, Y., Wan, Y., Zhang, Y., Gong, Z., & Li, Z. (2020). Where there are girls, there are cats. Biological Conservation, 108412.
