Chapter 1. Chapter 1 Graphic Content

The green portion represents the proportion of all papers published in the journal Behavioral Ecology that had a female first author. The blue portion represents the proportion of all papers published in Behavioral Ecology that had a male first author. Together, the green and blue portions represent all papers published in Behavioral Ecology (that is, 100%).

The pie chart on the left presents the proportion of all papers published in Behavioral Ecology that had a female first author (and, in blue, the proportion that had a male first author) during the years 1997–2001, when the journal had a “single-blind” review process in which reviewers knew the authors’ identities (and, presumably, their sex). The pie chart on the right presents the same information, but for the years 2002–2005, when the journal had a “double-blind” review policy in which reviewers did not know the authors’ identities or sex.

When the journal changed its review policy so that reviewers did not know the sex of the authors, the proportion of accepted papers that had female first authors increased from 23.7% to 31.6%. This suggests that when reviewers knew the sex of the authors, they were less likely to accept a paper with a female first author. This would seem to indicate that the reviewers for Behavioral Ecology at that time were biased against female authors.

It could be that, beginning in 2002, there was an increase in the proportion of papers submitted to Behavioral Ecology that had a female first author. This explanation seems unlikely, however, given the information in the text that a similar journal that did not change its review policy had no change in the proportion of published papers with a female first author. Another possible explanation is that the proportion of women in the field of behavioral ecology increased in the early 1990s, so that, during the second period measured, 2002–2005, there were more women at a more advanced stage in their careers, so the quality of the papers they submitted increased over time.

The increase in proportion of published papers with female first authors was 31.6% – 23.7%, or 7.9 percentage points. It could also be described as a 7.9%/23.7% = 33% increase (if you take one-third of 23.7% and add it to 23.7%, you get 31.6%).

The information given in the figure tells us what percentage of the papers published had a female first author. We cannot tell from this information whether 50% of the papers submitted had female first authors. If that were true, it would be reasonable to be concerned why the proportion published wasn’t also 50%. But what if only 10% of the people working as behavioral ecologists are women? If that were the case, we might expect that only 10% of the papers published in the journal would have female first authors, and we might be concerned that with such a small proportion of female behavioral ecologists, more than one-quarter of the papers published in this journal had female first authors.

The graphs do not prove a general bias against female scientists. Because the data are drawn from just one journal in one field of science, we cannot be certain that they reflect a similar bias across all journals in biology, or in chemistry, physics, or other scientific fields. Nonetheless, the findings do suggest such a bias may exist. It would be valuable to collect additional data on this topic across all of the sciences.