Do manuscripts by female evolutionary biologists spend longer under review?

Abstract

Women are underrepresented in academia and in STEM careers, especially at senior positions and top institutions. This may be, at least in part, due to the many obstacles that they experience along the academic pipeline. There has been substantial debate as to whether women are treated unfairly during the peer review process. An analysis of over 9000 research articles published in top Economics journals has recently shown that female-authored articles tend to spend 3-6 months longer under review (period from submission to acceptance), and to have more readable abstracts, than male-authored articles, suggesting that female-authored articles are held to higher standards. We set out to determine whether these trends were also present among 49,031 papers published in 11 Evolutionary Biology journals. We found that female representation among article authors substantially increased over the decades. The percentage of women is lower among corresponding authors than among all authors, especially of recent articles. In addition, female first authors were less likely to be corresponding authors than male first authors, and the gender of the first author correlated with the gender of the corresponding author. In some of the journals, female-authored articles spent significantly longer under review; however, most of the observed differences vanish after controlling for the date of publication and the number of authors. In addition, female-authored abstracts are not more readable. Our results suggest that the peer review process in the field of Evolutionary Biology is generally not biased against women.