Gender bias in scholarly peer review.
Peer review is the cornerstone of scholarly publishing and it is essential that peer reviewers are appointed on the basis of their expertise alone. However, it is difficult to check for any bias in the peer-review process because the identity of peer reviewers generally remains confidential. Here, using public information about the identities of 9000 editors and 43000 reviewers from the Frontiers series of journals, we show that women are underrepresented in the peer-review process, that editors of both genders operate with substantial same-gender preference (homophily), and that the mechanisms of this homophily are gender-dependent. We also show that homophily will persist even if numerical parity between genders is reached, highlighting the need for increased efforts to combat subtler forms of gender bias in scholarly publishing.
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany.|Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany.|Yale University, New Haven, United States.
Markus
0000-0001-9680-0595
M
Helmer
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany.|Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany.
Manuel
0000-0002-5468-4255
M
Schottdorf
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany.|Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany.
Andreas
A
Neef
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, Germany.|Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.
Demian
0000-0003-2021-7920
D
Battaglia
D006801:Humans; D010380:Peer Review; D011643:Publishing; D063507:Sexism
gender bias; large-scale data analysis; peer review