A textbook case of gender bias in science?
Work with men to get published, academic reviewer tells females
A paper on gender bias in academia was recently rejected by an academic journal, whose reviewer told the two female authors to “find one or two male biologists to work with” if they wanted to get their work published.
That work, by the way, was a scientific survey of how and why men in academia tend to publish more papers, and in more prestigious academic journals, than women.
Fiona Ingleby, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, and Megan Head, an evolutionary biologist at Australian National University in Acton, surveyed a number of male and female academics to find out how many articles they’d published as PhD candidates, how many jobs they’d applied for, and how quickly they’d found post-doc positions.
The men, it turns out, fared much better than the women — although to what extent Ingleby can’t currently say because the paper is under review. She and Head submitted their findings to a journal within the U.K.’s Public Library of Science (PLOS) network.
The PLOS journal rejected their paper with a single, anonymous review. In addition to suggesting they get a man’s name on the paper, the review concluded that “as unappealing as this may be to consider, another possible explanation would be that … first-authored papers of men are published in better journals than those of women … because the papers are indeed of better quality.”
Then the reviewer concluded men work harder than women because they’re healthier and have more stamina. “Male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster than female doctoral students,” the anonymous review concluded.
“I really couldn’t tell you what they meant by that,” says Ingleby, “I suppose men run faster than women on average, but that’s irrelevant to how many papers an academic writes.”
She and Head appealed to the journal, and when they didn’t get a response, decided to go public.
PLOS apologized for the “tone, spirit and content of this particular review” and promised to reconsider the work. The women have already published 40 academic papers between them.
“The amazing thing here is that the reviewer actually said, ‘You should get a male co-author,’ says Joan Williams, founding director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. “We know that sort of bias exists, but usually people deny it.”
Ingleby and Head’s experience is a rare real-life example of what study after study has concluded: Women in academia face more scrutiny, and sometimes outright discrimination, than their male peers.
Those studies include one from 2012, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), in which research scientists consistently rated a fictional laboratory assistant’s resumé higher in everything from competence to hireability when it appeared to come from a man rather than a woman. They also offered the man a 13 per cent higher salary. Last year, a similar study found that people of both genders were twice as likely to hire a man for a math- intensive job than they were a woman.
This is a problem for female scientists and academics — but it’s also a problem for the companies, laboratories, and research institutions that could benefit from their work.