Data Analysis of the Responses to Professor Abigail Thompson's Statement on Mandatory Diversity Statements

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the profiles and citation records of signatories to open letters responding to Professor Abigail Thompson's statement on diversity, revealing significant differences among R1 math professors validated by permutation tests.

Contribution

It provides a novel statistical analysis of the professional and citation profiles of signatories to open letters on a specific academic issue.

Findings

Citation means differ significantly among groups

R1 math professors show ordered citation metrics

Permutation tests validate the significance of differences

Abstract

An opinion piece by Abigail Thompson in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society has engendered a lot of discussion, including three open letters with over 1400 signatures. We analyze the professional profiles of signatories of these three letters, and, in particular, their citation records. We find that when restricting to R1 math professors, the means of their citations and citations per year are ordered $\mu(A) < \mu(B) < \mu(C)$. The significance of these findings are validated using a one-sided permutation test.