A lot of commentators on my recent posts on “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” have claimed that the hoax was simply drawing attention to how worthless Gender Studies is, citing as their “source” the Twitter feed  “Real Peer Review”.

Here’s a very nice (informal, and slightly sweary) podcast by Serious Podcast that actually looks at the papers cited by “Real Peer Review” as nonsense. As background, Serious Podcast had interviewed James Lindsay on the hoax, and he’d made the same claim as the commentators: That his hoax was drawing attention to a systematic problem in Gender Studies. So, Serious Podcast asked him to back up his claims, and Lindsay sent them an email with his evidence. Serious Podcast then actually read the abstracts of the papers in the links Lindsay sent (not just the titles), read the papers if they were available, looked at their citation counts, and draw some interesting conclusions. This is well worth listening to.

The relevant section of the Podcast occurs just before 49.00, after the interview with Lindsay:

SIO45: James Lindsay, Co-Author of the ‘Conceptual Penis’ Hoax Paper