Corresponding author: Corey J. A. Bradshaw ( corey.bradshaw@flinders.edu.au ) Academic editor: Marie-Caroline Lefort
© 2018 Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Franck Courchamp.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Bradshaw CJA, Courchamp F (2018) Gender bias when assessing recommended ecology articles. Rethinking Ecology 3: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.3.24333
|
Gender bias is still unfortunately rife in the sciences, and men co-author most articles (> 70%) in ecology. Whether ecologists subconsciously rate the quality of their peers’ work more favourably when they are the same gender (homophily) is still unclear. To test this hypothesis, we examined how ecologist editors ranked important ecology articles based on a previously compiled list where they had first each proposed some articles and then voted on all proposed articles. The proportion of female co-authors on the articles proposed by men were lower (0.06 to 0.09) than those proposed by women (0.13 to 0.27), although the data were highly skewed and most proposed articles (77%) had no female co-authors. For the 100 top-ranked articles voted by women or men only, the gender difference remained: female voters ranked articles in the top 100 that had more female co-authors (0.029 to 0.093 proportion women) than did those voted by men (0.001 to 0.029). Female voters tended to rank articles more highly as the number of male co-authors increased, and the relationship between article rank and proportion of male co-authors was even stronger when only men voted. This effect disappeared after testing only articles that editors declared they had actually read. This could indicate a persistent, subconscious tendency toward homophily when assessing the perceived quality of articles that ecologists have not actually read.
gender, ecology, evolution, scientific publishing, homophily, disparity
Despite a general reduction in gender disparities in academia (
In ecology, despite approximate gender parity among undergraduates and young researchers (
Due to the availability of more men in senior positions, scientific journals also tend to appoint more men than women on their editorial boards, and editors tend to select reviewers of the same gender as themselves (a preference known as homophily) (
Despite the evidence that female authors tend to receive fewer citations than men in some academic disciplines (
Examining the publication output of 187 individual editorial board members of seven ecology and evolution journals, women had a lower mean h-index than did men (after controlling for scientific ‘age’) (
Gender differences in publication frequency can occur for many reasons, including possibly having less time to do research (
The full details of how we generated the list of recommended ecology articles and how they were ranked are given in our previous study (
We successfully elicited propositions from 113 respondents of the 665 we contacted, who in total nominated 544 different articles to include in the primary list. We then asked these same 665 editors to vote on each of the papers to obtain a ranking, assigning each article to one of four categories: Top 10, Between 11–25, Between 26–100 or Not in the top “100”. We gave one (1) point for each selection of the Top 10 category, two points for the Between 11–25, three points for the Between 26–100, and four points for the Not in the top “100”. As we described in
Here, to test for evidence of homophily, we manually classified the gender of all proposers, voters, and article co-authors by searching the internet, requesting confirmation from colleagues, or from personal knowledge. We searched meticulously and are confident that we have a correct gender assignment for all people included in the analysis. The Ethics Committee of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, employer of FC) deemed that no ethics approval was necessary for the voluntary and anonymous survey that generated the ranked list of articles.
We took those articles proposed by either women only, or men only, to examine trends between the proposer genders (74% of all proposed papers were proposed only once) from our previous study (
To test for correlations between rankings and gender, we used the proportion of female co-authors for each article as the response variable in all analyses. We also used the same resampling approach from our previous study (
All code and data for the analysis are available online at https://github.com/cjabradshaw/HIPE/gender/.
More men responded and proposed more articles – among the 665 editors we contacted to propose articles, 22.1% (141) were women; 12 women (8.5% of the women contacted) and 101 men (19.3% of the men contacted) proposed articles. The proportion of female co-authors on the articles proposed by men were lower (0.06 to 0.09) than those proposed by women (0.13 to 0.27), although the data were highly skewed and most proposed articles (77%) had no female co-authors (Fig.
a Mean (dashed horizontal lines) and 95% confidence interval (error bars) of the proportion of female co-authors for the proposed articles relative to the gender of the proposer (articles proposed by 68 women only, and 418 proposed by men only). The values (proportion female co-authors) are ‘scattered’ to show their distribution within each proposer gender; note that 55.9% and 80.1% of the articles proposed by women only and men only, respectively, had no female co-authors (i.e., zero values) b Mean (dashed horizontal lines) and 95% confidence interval (error bars) of the proportion of female co-authors of the 100 top-ranked articles relative to the gender of the voter (62 women and 292 men voted in total). The values (proportion female co-authors) are ‘scattered’ to show their distribution within each voter gender; note that 83% and 94% of the articles proposed by women and men, respectively had no female co-authors (i.e., zero values). c) Proportion of female co-authors on articles relative to their mean rank (score; where lower scores indicate a higher ranking) when voters were restricted to women. There was a weak (β = 0.03), but non-random (pran = 0.011) correlation between article gender ratio and score, such that the lower the proportion of female co-authors, the higher they were ranked by women d Proportion of female co-authors on articles relative to their mean rank when voters were restricted to men. There was a stronger (β = 0.11) and non-random (pran < 0.0001) correlation between article gender ratio and score, such that the lower the proportion of female co-authors, the higher they were ranked by men. Also shown in both panels is the inverse-score-weighted mean proportion of female co-authors (Σwi/si = 0.0277 for i female voters, or 0.0251 for i male voters, where s = score from 1 to 4, and w = proportion of female co-authors) e As in c, but when the scored articles were only those actually read by the voters (
These relationships could arise because older articles were more highly ranked, and gender biases in authorship are generally stronger in older articles according to our previous research (
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) (
In the analysis of the genders of the lead authors only, a man was the lead author in 510 of the 544 proposed papers (93.8%). For the 100 top-ranked papers (read or not), 98 were led by a man; when men alone voted, 99 of the 100 top-ranked papers were led by a man, and when women alone voted, 96 were. The difference between female and male voters disappeared in the read-only list of the 100 top-ranked papers (93 were led by a man when women voted; 92 were when men voted).
At least for the ecologist editors we contacted, both men and women tend to propose and rank articles more highly when they were co-authored by the same gender, indicating a degree of homophily for both men and women when assessing article importance. However, this effect disappeared after testing read-only articles. These results endure despite little evidence that male biologists view themselves as having higher self-perceived expertise than women (
While these results could potentially be interpreted as a lingering, subconscious gender bias among ecologists, the dominance of male co-authors in the overall pool of proposed papers (especially for older articles) restricts inference. Once voters claimed to have read an article, the relationship between article rank and gender ratio disappeared. This read-only group of younger articles (by 14 years, on average) (
We concede that our study was not specifically designed to test for the phenomenon of homophily, for it is plausible that the gender of some authors of papers both proposed and voted were unknown to some of the editors (especially those co-authors listed between the lead and terminal authors). Ideally, a follow-up questionnaire could be designed to ask the contributing editors to identify the gender of random subsets of authors to estimate the error probability in the attribution of author gender, but this was beyond the scope of our current assessment. Restricting the temporal window allowed for proposing articles toward more recent decades could also potentially provide a better evaluation of the modern tendency toward homophily, although this approach would not have allowed older articles to be proposed and assessed as potential classics in ecology.
Published evidence shows that gender bias in ecology is not strong, and in most cases is explained by a higher availability of established male ecologists due to the historical imbalance of gender in our discipline. However, even if that imbalance is slowly waning, there remains unconscious, gender-related biases. Our results suggest that (i) ecologists of both genders subconsciously commit homophily regarding their opinions of article importance, and (ii) the degree of homophily is higher in men than women. Potential solutions to reducing the incidence of homophily include increasing gender discussions in university teaching (
CJAB and FC collected the data, developed the concept, and designed the manuscript; CJAB did the analysis.
Authors | Contribution | ACI |
---|---|---|
CJAB | 0.60 | 1.50 |
FC | 0.40 | 0.67 |
We thank the many participating editorial members, as well as C Albert and GM Luque for help with the survey and article management. We are particularly grateful to the two reviewers for their objective, constructive, and high-quality reviews. FC was supported by BNP-Paribas and ANR grants, and CJAB was supported by BNP-Paribas and Australian Research Council grants.