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Gender bias: track revisions and appeals

Nature volume 543, page 40 (2017)Cite this article

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I suggest that journals should collect data at each stage of the peer-review process to help identify the barriers to publication that women face (see also J. Lerback and B. Hanson Nature 541, 455–457; 2017). Author gender needs to be incorporated into data on the numbers of manuscripts sent out for review, resubmitted after revision, and appealed against, successfully or unsuccessfully, by rejected authors.

I conducted a literature survey of my field (HIV) and found that, in 2015–16, less than 10% of papers in Nature (4/17; 24%) and Science (0/24; 0%) together had a woman as the senior corresponding author. Although this sample is small and taken over a short period, the result is surprising, given the large number of women who served as organizer or chair at every major meeting in this field during that time and who represented roughly half of all US National Institutes of Health HIV study-section chairs. There is evidently a significant pool of strong women scientists in the field.

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  1. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Julie Overbaugh

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  1. Julie Overbaugh
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Correspondence to Julie Overbaugh.

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Overbaugh, J. Gender bias: track revisions and appeals. Nature 543, 40 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/543040a

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  1. David Gurwitz

    "Author gender needs to be incorporated into data on the numbers of manus cripts sent out for review, resubmitted after revision, and appealed against, successfully or unsuccessfully, by rejected authors."

    Why stop at gender? What about authors age? Ethnicity? Religion? Nationality?

    Is gender the main aspect where journals demonstrate bias toward certain authors?

    I don't think so. Well why not ask them to keep track of and disclose statistics about all these other factors.

  2. David Gurwitz

    "Author gender needs to be incorporated into data on the numbers of manus cripts sent out for review, resubmitted after revision, and appealed against, successfully or unsuccessfully, by rejected authors."

    Why stop at gender? What about authors age? Ethnicity? Religion? Nationality?

    Is gender the main aspect where journals demonstrate bias toward certain authors?

    I don't think so. Well why not ask them to keep track of and disclose statistics about all these other factors.

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