Analysis of author gender in TPB, 1991–2018

Abstract

With increasing awareness that women in science have often been underrecognized for their research, a variety of efforts have sought to recover and highlight past contributions of female scientists, including in TPB-related fields (e.g. Wellenreuther & Otto 2016;Bronstein & Bolnick 2018). A recent commentary turns the focus of one such effort specifically to Theoretical Population Biology, providing important recognition to the role of female programmers in TPB papers from 1970 to 1990(Dung et al. 2019.Writing in Genetics, Dung et al. observed that authors of early papers in TPB frequently acknowledged computer programmers for assistance. Among the programmers for whom they were able to assign a gender, they found that 43.2% were female, a substantially larger fraction than the 7.4% of gender-identifiable TPB authors in the same period who were female.Based on the text acknowledging the programmers, Dung et al. commented that many of the tasks performed by programmers involved significant contributions, including development of statistical algorithms, programming of simulations, and sophisticated numerical analyses -roles that would likely result in authorship under current practice. Several of the programmers appear in acknowledgments of multiple papers, having contributed to a body of work in TPB reported over a period of several years.