Nomination language note

This is a brief update to last week’s post on nominating for society prizes.  There has been some discussion on twitter about biased language in letters of recommendation, particularly for junior women. This was an issue I was vaguely aware of, but didn’t especially delve into deeply at the time.
Our basic approach was to mostly focus on the science, which of course doesn’t have a gender, and explain why the science she did was so exciting. You can see my citation in the previous post. I’m not posting anyone else’s letter on this blog, but I will put the combined word cloud here, along with a list of high frequency words:

 

Words used ten or more times:

53                                                                                      Jenner

33                                                                                      elements

28                                                                                      data

25                                                                                      paper

23                                                                                      magma

20                                                                                      Frances

19                                                                                      element

18                                                                                      trace

16                                                                                      analytical

16                                                                                      MORB

15                                                                                      O’Neill

15                                                                                      glasses

15                                                                                      work

15                                                                                      new

14                                                                                      analysis

14                                                                                      chalcophile

13                                                                                      quality

12                                                                                      geochemistry

12                                                                                      published

12                                                                                      volcanic

12                                                                                      Carnegie

11                                                                                      differentiation

11                                                                                      magmatic

10                                                                                      papers

10                                                                                      years

10                                                                                      young

10                                                                                      many