Overcoming the gender bias in ecology and evolution: is the double-anonymized peer review an effective pathway over time?

Cássia‐Silva, Cibele; Rocha, Barbbara da Silva; Liévano‐Latorre, Luisa Fernanda; Sobreiro, Mariane B.; Diele‐Viegas, Luisa Maria

doi:10.7717/peerj.15186

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 69 publications

(124 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We suggest that the best solution is to make the entire review process blind to reviewers, editors, and authors: a triple-blind process (e.g. Cássia-Silva et al, 2023;Conklin & Singh, 2022). Although triple-blind review is used by a few academic journals, it has not yet been implemented by any ecology and evolution journals (Smith et al, 2023).…”

Section: Potential Reasons and Solutions For Editor Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Editors are biased too: An extension of Fox et al. (2023)'s analysis makes the case for triple‐blind review

Srivastava,

Bernardino,

Marques

et al. 2024

Functional Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Functional Ecology conducted a randomised trial comparing single‐ and double‐blind peer review; a recent analysis of this data found substantial evidence for bias by reviewers. We show that this dataset can also be analysed for editor bias, after controlling for both reviewer bias and paper quality. Our analysis shows that editors tend to be more likely to invite high‐scoring manuscripts for revision or resubmission when the first author is a man from a country with a very high Human Development Index (HDI); first authors who were women or not from very high HDI countries were more likely to be rejected at this stage. We propose that journals consider a triple‐blind review process where neither editors nor reviewers know the identity of authors, and authors do not know the identity of reviewers nor editors. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

show abstract

Section: Potential Reasons and Solutions For Editor Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Editors are biased too: An extension of Fox et al. (2023)'s analysis makes the case for triple‐blind review

Srivastava,

Bernardino,

Marques

et al. 2024

Functional Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Editorial: Women in biogeography and macroecology 2022

Hof,

Filipe,

Rodríguez-Castañeda

et al. 2024

Front. Ecol. Evol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Long-standing biases and gender stereotypes have for generations been discouraging girls and women away from science-related fields, the so-called STEM research (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics) (Holman et al., 2018). This situation is no different in the field of Biogeography based on a recent list of top-100 researchers (Renner and Skov, 2023). This list included 70 nominees for an International Biogeography Society awardnote that there is a known significant bias towards men receiving scientific awards (Van Miegroet and Glass, 2020)plus 30 additions to "more evenly cover researchers from different geographical origins and gender." Although authors tried to balance gender, still 76% of the listed researchers were likely to be men, based on the first names and pictures.Gender equality is essential to ensure sustainable development (Donders and Tararas, 2021). However, to achieve this goal, traditional mindsets must be changed, gender stereotypes must be defeated, and girls and women must be encouraged to pursue STEM careers. The long-standing gender bias affects not only access and representation in science but also the publishing process (Bancroft et al., 2022). Considerable and specific language barriers prevent non-native-English speaker female scientists from publishing (Maŕquez and Porras, 2020;Amano et al., 2023). Furthermore, unpredictable circumstances may disproportionally affect the productivity of women, which was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic (Staniscuaski et al., 2021;Heo et al., 2022). Additional to such difficulties, womenfirst authors or people from low and middle-HDI countries are more likely to be rejected at the revision or resubmission publication step (Srivastava et al., 2024). Although this may not be the case for all journals, it stresses the need to reconsider the current approaches to promote equity in the publication process (Cassia-Silva et al., 2023).

show abstract

Overcoming the gender bias in ecology and evolution: is the double-anonymized peer review an effective pathway over time?

Cited by 2 publications

References 69 publications

Editors are biased too: An extension of Fox et al. (2023)'s analysis makes the case for triple‐blind review

Editors are biased too: An extension of Fox et al. (2023)'s analysis makes the case for triple‐blind review

Editorial: Women in biogeography and macroecology 2022

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About