University ‘blocks’ academic from her own gender wars research over ‘dangerous’ data
City, University of London, insists it is committed to free and open-minded discussion
A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
The postdoctoral researcher was invited to move from Spain to City’s Department of Sociology to conduct the study, which received £18,000 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the equalities watchdog, and £10,000 from the British Academy. She produced a summary report on her findings for the EHRC that still has not been published.
Hundreds of documents
Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.
Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
A research participant who “did not like the findings” and academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
‘Locked the email account’
City found following an investigation that there was “no evidence” that the research breached any ethics criteria.
But City allegedly locked the email account Dr Favaro used to communicate with survey respondents, and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract. Dr Favaro also claims City rejected her offer to give a talk on her findings.
It means she cannot publish her survey or deposit it in the UK Data Archive, as she had hoped to, and feels her career is now in ruins.
Dr Favaro told The Telegraph: “Those with a responsibility to support me have frustrated my ability to progress with the research or denied expected support via actions as well as omissions to act. This includes being ignored, ostracised, bullied, harassed – ending with a dismissal and confiscation of my data.
“It feels like a never-ending nightmare, dystopian, so unjust. All I have been trying to do is my job as a sociologist. There was a social conflict, so I asked questions, collected data, reported on the findings, offered an analysis. That is my job.
“In contrast to all my expectations, I leave with poor employment prospects because I have been unable to publish findings or even attend interviews. My experience at City has left me exhausted, traumatised and with broken self-esteem.
“I want my research data back. I want to make the anonymised survey accessible to other researchers by depositing in the UK Data Archive as per my commitment to the funder and participants, and I want to publish findings. I owe this to myself, my family, my participants, and society.”
‘Significant and concerning’
Her solicitor Peter Daly, a partner at London law firm Doyle Clayton, said: “Dr Favaro’s treatment raises significant and concerning questions about the freedom of academics to properly pursue research.
“We are in the process of preparing an employment tribunal claim on her behalf, which we anticipate will succeed if litigated to a conclusion.”
A spokesman for City, University of London, said it was “unable to comment on employment matters relating to individual members of staff” but “we refute the allegations made against us and reject the context in which they are presented” and “take our obligations with respect to ethics and integrity very seriously”.
The spokesman added: “At City, we have a legal obligation to protect freedom of expression that we take very seriously. We uphold academic freedom of inquiry in our education and research and are committed to ensuring that free and open-minded discussion can take place.
“… As controller of any personal data processed in the course of any research it is also very important to City that personal data is processed in compliance with data protection legislation. City has a robust framework in place to support compliance.”
A spokesman for the EHRC said: “We agreed to publish the summary report provided to us by Dr Favaro once her final report was published, as this would enable us to link, as appropriate, to her wider findings. Due to legal proceedings it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
To the surprise of absolutely no-one. “Follow the science” loses its meaning when the so-called “scientific community” hounds out anyone who dare deviate from the groupthink.
So she claims it’s unbiased data but then claims she’s being discriminated against because of her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
Be interested to see the actual report and the questions asked to achieve the data she got. Because it sounds like she’s talking shite
>Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender
studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social
scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Hmm… Sounds like she’s trying to make a point rather than gathering actual data.
Its not entirely clear why Dr Favaro is being blocked here.
What is even her post-doc on? What is her research question, aims and objectives?
Without that its hard to tell whats going on here.
I am by no means defending her here, I just find the level of ‘journalism’ utterly disturbing. Oh its the torygraph… i see
This article doesn’t make any sense. I actually can’t quite believe it’s been published.
> Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
The way this is quoted is extremely confusing. Secret conversations about what? What are they all so afraid about? The quotes are so out of context as to be meaningless and because of that it makes me suspicious about the whole line of argument’s legitimacy. It reads not unlike movie reviews that quote reviewers saying the likes of “a terrible film that squanders a great cast and skilled director” as “great cast… skilled director”.
> her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
Well, these can’t be direct quotes, because her managers wouldn’t call the data “my”. So what are they, quotes from her? Why wouldn’t they say so then?
> Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London. But it has descended into chaos
God forbid a project that someone started in March 2020 would descend into chaos. It’s not like anything chaotic and disruptive happened in the world at that moment…
> academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
Well then the framing of this piece as being silenced because it contained uncomfortable truths about trans people that anti-trans people weren’t allowed to express makes zero sense. Once again just to reiterate, the law of the country explicitly gives trans people equality anyway, so anyone employed in a public-facing role that didn’t want to respect that in their workplace would already be in breach of equality laws. Which begs the question…
Why was there even in the first place “the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues” taking place? If it’s taxpayer funded then essentially trans taxpayers have funded an investigation into whether people feel they should be more able to discriminate against them, in breach of the law of the country. I’m not surprised that line of research has got into legal hot water given that context!
The correct solution to this would be to release the data and let peer review run its course.
It is not the place of a university to tell academics what data they can and cannot publish, based on any ideological view point, or perception of anyone else’s ideological views. Academics must be trusted to keep their ideological views from biasing their work until proven otherwise.
Also this idea that “dangerous data” exists and must be censored is in itself a dangerous idea.
I’ve yet to see a single case of an academic being “forced out” because of gender critical beliefs, it’s always either that they’ve done shit work (as is clearly the case here) or they weren’t actually told to leave at all and just claimed they were so they could do a tour or two on the right wing outrage circuit. Hardly surprising that a bunch of hate peddlers are so consistently also grifters.
Is this one of those things along the lines of:
Research regarding racism…. But you are not permitted to study effects of Racial discrimination against white people.
Or something like studying sexual discrimination against men.
Basically Mainstream Culture Topic Vs What Stereotypically is the “”problematic group” whether that means
(Pulled this out of my arse really thought I have seen similar mentions and problem before).
-Had a read through the article… It’s even funnier than that…
A researcher studying the effects of Culture gender wars on Researchers their work and whether said Researchers set some sort of discrimination and supression due to their research….
Gets stripped of her research for doing research on whether researchers and their work gets ostricised based on the topic the research.
I swear, she could not have gotten more conclusive data… Litteraly what she studies happened to her while studing it and about it.
Thanks to u/Bungle71 for the further link.
So, surprise surprise, this is how the academic in question describes herself in the opening paragraph:
> I’m an academic who has been researching the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics who raise questions about gender identity theory, including those that are ‘gender critical’ such as myself.
Okay, so that’s your starter. I already see a bit of a conflict of interest here if you are going to work at a university and have to follow university guidelines of treating trans students/colleagues with respect, yet want to focus on that as your research topic, including interviewing, as far as I can gather, your direct colleagues for your research. But anyway, let’s continue.
> In 2020 we moved to the UK so that I could join City, University of London as Postdoctoral Research Fellow to investigate the disputes around sex and gender that have escalated dramatically since the 2010s.
I’d be curious to know what Spain’s stance on trans equality is, as well as what course or which topic she moved to study in the UK, as she doesn’t actually detail it here. If, for example, Spain doesn’t have equality laws regarding trans people I can see why she might have got into hot water here. But it also begs the question of why an academic, presumably with a high level of education, wouldn’t research that in advance.
> I have collected large amounts of data on the ‘gender wars’ in academia. You can read about some of the findings in my Times Higher Education article called Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars.
(which is paywalled, but it doesn’t exactly strike as an unbiased headline based on a thorough analysis. Still, I’d be interested in reading the piece)
And then it continues beyond that point, so I’ll just summarise the rest.
To be honest, what she’s written about herself and her ‘struggles’ reads as a bit of an ‘AmITheAsshole’ post. She admits openly that her colleagues – who will be people of a similar level of education and professional expectation upon them – were made uncomfortable by the piece she published and felt it was an attack on trans people. The thing is, in this country, an attack on trans people is in breach of the law. She admits also in this piece that she doesn’t respect trans people and won’t address them as they prefer. Well then, maybe you shouldn’t be in a public-facing job in which your salary is paid by students who wish to be respected?
It really gives the impression of someone who started out with the concluding point that she didn’t want to respect trans people, and went out to write an article – or academic study, on what subject it’s never detailed – ‘academic’ as a term does a lot of heavy lifting, is she a sociologist? An anthropologist? Something else? – in which she cherrypicked evidence that fit her predetermined conclusion. All of which was already a topic that butts up against the existing law of the country, as well as seeming… questionable in the first place. What could the conclusion possibly be if in her favour? “Academics don’t want to respect trans students and colleagues – so universities will bar them from attending”? It seems unlikely. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if the funding was pulled after it was discovered what she was actually doing with it.
I think I’ll wait to hear what the Employment Tribunal has to say on this. Good chance the Telegraph is not going to be telling the whole story.
“Dangerous Data”
I wonder who has brought us to this place where data can now be considered dangerous. Hands up anyone here?
>Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists
Should we feminists take their approach to self-id, or…?
Culture Wars sounds like a shit Marvel film and such a phoney/made up dog whistling type bollocks to distract from other issues. Demonize 0.5% of the pop.
15 comments
Article that set this whole thing off is [here] (https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.timeshighereducation.com%2Fdepth%2Fresearchers-are-wounded-academias-gender-wars). Details of the employment tribunal case are [here](https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/academicfreedomforfeminists/)
Article text:
University ‘blocks’ academic from her own gender wars research over ‘dangerous’ data
City, University of London, insists it is committed to free and open-minded discussion
A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
The postdoctoral researcher was invited to move from Spain to City’s Department of Sociology to conduct the study, which received £18,000 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the equalities watchdog, and £10,000 from the British Academy. She produced a summary report on her findings for the EHRC that still has not been published.
Hundreds of documents
Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.
Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
A research participant who “did not like the findings” and academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
‘Locked the email account’
City found following an investigation that there was “no evidence” that the research breached any ethics criteria.
But City allegedly locked the email account Dr Favaro used to communicate with survey respondents, and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract. Dr Favaro also claims City rejected her offer to give a talk on her findings.
It means she cannot publish her survey or deposit it in the UK Data Archive, as she had hoped to, and feels her career is now in ruins.
Dr Favaro told The Telegraph: “Those with a responsibility to support me have frustrated my ability to progress with the research or denied expected support via actions as well as omissions to act. This includes being ignored, ostracised, bullied, harassed – ending with a dismissal and confiscation of my data.
“It feels like a never-ending nightmare, dystopian, so unjust. All I have been trying to do is my job as a sociologist. There was a social conflict, so I asked questions, collected data, reported on the findings, offered an analysis. That is my job.
“In contrast to all my expectations, I leave with poor employment prospects because I have been unable to publish findings or even attend interviews. My experience at City has left me exhausted, traumatised and with broken self-esteem.
“I want my research data back. I want to make the anonymised survey accessible to other researchers by depositing in the UK Data Archive as per my commitment to the funder and participants, and I want to publish findings. I owe this to myself, my family, my participants, and society.”
‘Significant and concerning’
Her solicitor Peter Daly, a partner at London law firm Doyle Clayton, said: “Dr Favaro’s treatment raises significant and concerning questions about the freedom of academics to properly pursue research.
“We are in the process of preparing an employment tribunal claim on her behalf, which we anticipate will succeed if litigated to a conclusion.”
A spokesman for City, University of London, said it was “unable to comment on employment matters relating to individual members of staff” but “we refute the allegations made against us and reject the context in which they are presented” and “take our obligations with respect to ethics and integrity very seriously”.
The spokesman added: “At City, we have a legal obligation to protect freedom of expression that we take very seriously. We uphold academic freedom of inquiry in our education and research and are committed to ensuring that free and open-minded discussion can take place.
“… As controller of any personal data processed in the course of any research it is also very important to City that personal data is processed in compliance with data protection legislation. City has a robust framework in place to support compliance.”
A spokesman for the EHRC said: “We agreed to publish the summary report provided to us by Dr Favaro once her final report was published, as this would enable us to link, as appropriate, to her wider findings. Due to legal proceedings it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
To the surprise of absolutely no-one. “Follow the science” loses its meaning when the so-called “scientific community” hounds out anyone who dare deviate from the groupthink.
So she claims it’s unbiased data but then claims she’s being discriminated against because of her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
Be interested to see the actual report and the questions asked to achieve the data she got. Because it sounds like she’s talking shite
>Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender
studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social
scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Hmm… Sounds like she’s trying to make a point rather than gathering actual data.
Cancelled simply for saying sex is real*
>*[which](https://transsafety.network/posts/ehrc-commissions-unethical-research/) involved reading out insulting comments (“including sexually violent things”) attacking [an interviewee] personally, from gender critical people hostile to [the interviewee’s] work.
Its not entirely clear why Dr Favaro is being blocked here.
What is even her post-doc on? What is her research question, aims and objectives?
Without that its hard to tell whats going on here.
I am by no means defending her here, I just find the level of ‘journalism’ utterly disturbing. Oh its the torygraph… i see
This article doesn’t make any sense. I actually can’t quite believe it’s been published.
> Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
The way this is quoted is extremely confusing. Secret conversations about what? What are they all so afraid about? The quotes are so out of context as to be meaningless and because of that it makes me suspicious about the whole line of argument’s legitimacy. It reads not unlike movie reviews that quote reviewers saying the likes of “a terrible film that squanders a great cast and skilled director” as “great cast… skilled director”.
> her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
Well, these can’t be direct quotes, because her managers wouldn’t call the data “my”. So what are they, quotes from her? Why wouldn’t they say so then?
> Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London. But it has descended into chaos
God forbid a project that someone started in March 2020 would descend into chaos. It’s not like anything chaotic and disruptive happened in the world at that moment…
> academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
Well then the framing of this piece as being silenced because it contained uncomfortable truths about trans people that anti-trans people weren’t allowed to express makes zero sense. Once again just to reiterate, the law of the country explicitly gives trans people equality anyway, so anyone employed in a public-facing role that didn’t want to respect that in their workplace would already be in breach of equality laws. Which begs the question…
Why was there even in the first place “the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues” taking place? If it’s taxpayer funded then essentially trans taxpayers have funded an investigation into whether people feel they should be more able to discriminate against them, in breach of the law of the country. I’m not surprised that line of research has got into legal hot water given that context!
The correct solution to this would be to release the data and let peer review run its course.
It is not the place of a university to tell academics what data they can and cannot publish, based on any ideological view point, or perception of anyone else’s ideological views. Academics must be trusted to keep their ideological views from biasing their work until proven otherwise.
Also this idea that “dangerous data” exists and must be censored is in itself a dangerous idea.
I’ve yet to see a single case of an academic being “forced out” because of gender critical beliefs, it’s always either that they’ve done shit work (as is clearly the case here) or they weren’t actually told to leave at all and just claimed they were so they could do a tour or two on the right wing outrage circuit. Hardly surprising that a bunch of hate peddlers are so consistently also grifters.
Is this one of those things along the lines of:
Research regarding racism…. But you are not permitted to study effects of Racial discrimination against white people.
Or something like studying sexual discrimination against men.
Basically Mainstream Culture Topic Vs What Stereotypically is the “”problematic group” whether that means
(Pulled this out of my arse really thought I have seen similar mentions and problem before).
-Had a read through the article… It’s even funnier than that…
A researcher studying the effects of Culture gender wars on Researchers their work and whether said Researchers set some sort of discrimination and supression due to their research….
Gets stripped of her research for doing research on whether researchers and their work gets ostricised based on the topic the research.
I swear, she could not have gotten more conclusive data… Litteraly what she studies happened to her while studing it and about it.
Thanks to u/Bungle71 for the further link.
So, surprise surprise, this is how the academic in question describes herself in the opening paragraph:
> I’m an academic who has been researching the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics who raise questions about gender identity theory, including those that are ‘gender critical’ such as myself.
Okay, so that’s your starter. I already see a bit of a conflict of interest here if you are going to work at a university and have to follow university guidelines of treating trans students/colleagues with respect, yet want to focus on that as your research topic, including interviewing, as far as I can gather, your direct colleagues for your research. But anyway, let’s continue.
> In 2020 we moved to the UK so that I could join City, University of London as Postdoctoral Research Fellow to investigate the disputes around sex and gender that have escalated dramatically since the 2010s.
I’d be curious to know what Spain’s stance on trans equality is, as well as what course or which topic she moved to study in the UK, as she doesn’t actually detail it here. If, for example, Spain doesn’t have equality laws regarding trans people I can see why she might have got into hot water here. But it also begs the question of why an academic, presumably with a high level of education, wouldn’t research that in advance.
> I have collected large amounts of data on the ‘gender wars’ in academia. You can read about some of the findings in my Times Higher Education article called Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars.
(which is paywalled, but it doesn’t exactly strike as an unbiased headline based on a thorough analysis. Still, I’d be interested in reading the piece)
And then it continues beyond that point, so I’ll just summarise the rest.
To be honest, what she’s written about herself and her ‘struggles’ reads as a bit of an ‘AmITheAsshole’ post. She admits openly that her colleagues – who will be people of a similar level of education and professional expectation upon them – were made uncomfortable by the piece she published and felt it was an attack on trans people. The thing is, in this country, an attack on trans people is in breach of the law. She admits also in this piece that she doesn’t respect trans people and won’t address them as they prefer. Well then, maybe you shouldn’t be in a public-facing job in which your salary is paid by students who wish to be respected?
It really gives the impression of someone who started out with the concluding point that she didn’t want to respect trans people, and went out to write an article – or academic study, on what subject it’s never detailed – ‘academic’ as a term does a lot of heavy lifting, is she a sociologist? An anthropologist? Something else? – in which she cherrypicked evidence that fit her predetermined conclusion. All of which was already a topic that butts up against the existing law of the country, as well as seeming… questionable in the first place. What could the conclusion possibly be if in her favour? “Academics don’t want to respect trans students and colleagues – so universities will bar them from attending”? It seems unlikely. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if the funding was pulled after it was discovered what she was actually doing with it.
I think I’ll wait to hear what the Employment Tribunal has to say on this. Good chance the Telegraph is not going to be telling the whole story.
“Dangerous Data”
I wonder who has brought us to this place where data can now be considered dangerous. Hands up anyone here?
>Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists
Should we feminists take their approach to self-id, or…?
Culture Wars sounds like a shit Marvel film and such a phoney/made up dog whistling type bollocks to distract from other issues. Demonize 0.5% of the pop.