10 from 133

Posted by Cheng Soon Ong on June 17, 2008

There was a paper at the beginning of this year by Budden et. al. A who looked at double blind reviews, and claimed that double blind reviews increases the proportion of accepted papers with female first authors. Soon after, Webb et. al. responded that actually the trend is true for other (non double blind) journals too. Recently, Budden et. al. B reanalysed the data, and rebutted the rebuttal.

The blog article at Sandwalk looks at this issue in more detail.

But, here at mloss, we have no review process (yet), and there is no bias against women. Or is there? Out of the 133 author names listed on mloss.org my guess is there are 10 women. Mind you, my ability to judge whether a name is from a guy or a girl is not 100% correct, but I think the estimate is pretty good. Where are all the women who write mloss? The fact remains that less than 10% of the authors of projects that appear on mloss are women. What do you think? Why is this the case?

References

• Budden, A., Tregenza, T., Aarssen, L., Koricheva, J., Leimu, R. and Lortie, C. (2008A) Women, Science and Writing. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(1), 4-6.
• Budden, A.E., Lortie, C.J., Tregenza, T., Aarssen, L., Koricheva, J., and Leimu, R. (2008B) Response to Webb et al.: Double-blind review: accept with minor revisions. Trends in Ecology and Evolution
• Webb, T. J., O'Hara, B. and Freckleton, R. P. (2008) Does double-blind review benefit female authors? Trends in Ecology and Evolution