© xkcd.com
I normally don’t do this, but this is an extra-ordinary circumstance.
As many of you are already aware, Franck Courchamp and I published a paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution on Monday that ranked high-profile ecology papers. I won’t go into any details about the list here, because you can read the paper and the associated blog posts themselves.
The publication caused a bit of a stir among ecologists, evidenced by the rather high and rising Altmetrics score for the paper (driven mainly by a Boaty McBoatface-load of tweets). I haven’t done any social-media analysis, but it appears that most of the tweets were positive, a few were negative, and a non-trivial proportion of them were highly critical of the obvious male-biased nature of the list (in terms of article authors).
On that last point, we couldn’t agree more.
Which is why we have a follow-up analysis specifically addressing this gender bias, but that’s currently in review in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
In the meantime, however, and at the suggestion of possibly one of the coolest, nicest, and most logical editors in the world, Dr Patrick Goymer (Editor-in-Chief of Nature Ecology and Evolution), I’ve just posted a pre-print of our paper entitled “Gender-biased perceptions of important ecology articles” on bioRxiv.
First, we have to re-iterate that the list was proposed and voted by editors at some of the top ecology journals (i.e., we didn’t just make up the list on a whim), and we know that there is a strong gender skew among editors.
In fact, of the 665 editors we initially contacted, only 22% were women, and of these, only 14 women (10%) and 137 men (26%) responded.
As for the ranking itself, both men and women tended to rank male author-dominated articles higher, although this bias was more pronounced among men. When we considered the ‘read only’ list, these relationships disappeared (although men still tended to vote for more men-dominated papers).
The main reason the relationships disappeared is because older papers tended to have fewer women co-authors; indeed, the top-rated papers of the last decade tended to approach the expected proportion of women in our discipline of 23-27%, based on the broad gender ratio of publishing ecologists worldwide.
That both men and women ecologists rated articles that they had not actually read higher when they were more men-dominated is of course disconcerting, yet once they did personally evaluate (read) them, this bias disappeared. We think that this indicates that ecologists had the a priori assumption that men-dominated papers would somehow be better. This assumption was stronger in men than women, but it seems that women ecologists are still subject to a persistent form of auto-sexism, perhaps kept flourishing by a remaining academic culture of valuing women’s contributions less than men’s.
There are more components to and implications of this analysis than I can succinctly summarise here, so I encourage you to read the paper in its entirety. Of course, if the article is accepted for publication, I’ll certainly let you know.
It suffices to say that while we’re improving toward gender equality, we ecologists still have a lot of work to do.
