Time series of mean (± 2 standard errors of the mean; grey dashed lines) decadal gender ratio (proportion female co-authors) for all 544 proposed articles. Numbers above the graph indicate sample size (number of articles) used to calculate decadal means (‘←1’ indicates one article from 1858) (Darwin and Wallace 1858). For comparison, the proportion of female authorships in articles published from 1990–2011 in ecology and evolution (22.76% of 279012 total authorships; lower black horizontal dashed line) (West et al. 2013) are shown. Also shown are the 95% confidence limits of the proportion of female co-authors of the 100 top-ranked articles assessed by female (green shaded area: 0.029 to 0.093; Fig. 1b) and male voters (orange-shaded area: 0.001 to 0.029; Fig. 1b).