Survivorship bias

What is survivor bias?

According to Wikipedia, Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. In the context of this book, the point is that the supervisors and academic leadership is a biased sample of the audience which they are leading.

Survivor bias in academia

• How many equally-qualified people didn’t make it, so that you could?

• How many jobs are gotten by “waiting around until you get it”?

• Are group leaders representative of junior researchers?

• Not everyone can afford to wait around for something to come up. This biases who can even think about getting a job.

• Do you need to think more about how others are experiencing in their careers?

Reducing survivor bias

• I probably can’t say much here - others probably comment on things much better than I could.

• Be aware that it exists. Make sure that there are other role models and you put in extra effort to understanding experiences that are different than yours.

• The next chapter, Diversity of future careers, discusses this more.