Why documenting every gender bias counts: A short commentary

At the time of writing this article, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, its toll on women is becoming increasingly evident. Women face severe limitations in their access to reproductive healthcare and rights (in Poland, through the recent Supreme Court decision), and domestic violence has increased, as has inequality in household duties (Burki, 2020; Cousins, 2020; United Nations Women, 2020). These outcomes do not develop out of the blue. Recently, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2020) released a report stating that 90% of the global population shows at least some bias against gender equality. Therefore, the pandemic situation seems only to amplify and uncover tendencies that have already been present. With this global perspective in mind, I would like to zoom in on the scientific community and even more narrowly on the community of social scientists. Why? The aforementioned ubiquity of gender bias shows that it is deep-rooted in society, and every social stratum has its own way of mirroring global trends and enacting these tendencies. In this short commentary accompanying a publication regarding yet another subtle gender bias in academia (Fleischmann & Van Berkel, 2021, this issue), I would like to emphasize why documenting every bias counts and that the change in global trends in gender equality will not happen without transforming our own (or every) field. Short Communication