Gender differences in submission behavior exacerbate publication disparities in elite journals
Curation statements for this article:-
Curated by eLife
eLife assessment
This convincing study, which is based on a survey of researchers, finds that women are less likely than men to submit articles to elite journals. It also finds that there is no relation between gender and reported desk rejection. The study is an important contribution to work on gender bias in the scientific literature.
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Abstract
Women are particularly underrepresented in journals of the highest scientific impact, with substantial consequences for their careers. While a large body of research has focused on the outcome and the process of peer review, fewer articles have explicitly focused on gendered submission behavior and the explanations for these differences. In our study of nearly five thousand active authors, we find that women are less likely to report having submitted papers and, when they have, to submit fewer manuscripts, on average, than men. Women were more likely to indicate that they did not submit their papers (in general and their subsequently most cited papers) to Science, Nature , or PNAS because they were advised not to. In the aggregate, no statistically significant difference was observed between men and women in how they rated the quality of their work. Nevertheless, regardless of discipline, women were more likely than men to indicate that their “ work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel” as a rationale for not submitting to one of the listed prestigious journals. Men were more likely than women to indicate that the “ work would fit better in a more specialized journal .” We discuss the implications of these findings and interventions that can serve to mitigate the disparities caused by gendered differences in submission behavior.Publishing in high-impact scholarly journals has a significant effect on researchers’ careers. Our findings identify factors that affect submission to Science, Nature , and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ( PNAS ) and explore whether there is a relationship between gender and desk rejections or submission rates. We found no relationship between gender and reported desk rejection and a relationship between gender and reported submissions. Women were more likely than men to indicate that their “ work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel ” for the listed prestigious journals and that they were advised against submitting to these venues. Men were more likely to indicate that the “ work would fit better in a more specialized journal .”
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eLife assessment
This convincing study, which is based on a survey of researchers, finds that women are less likely than men to submit articles to elite journals. It also finds that there is no relation between gender and reported desk rejection. The study is an important contribution to work on gender bias in the scientific literature.
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Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary
This paper summarises responses from a survey completed by around 5,000 academics on their manuscript submission behaviours. The authors find several interesting stylised facts, including (but not limited to):
- Women are less likely to submit their papers to highly influential journals (*e.g.*, Nature, Science and PNAS).
- Women are more likely to cite the demands of co-authors as a reason why they didn't submit to highly influential journals.
- Women are also more likely to say that they were advised not to submit to highly influential journals.Recommendation
This paper highlights an important point, namely that the submissions' behaviours of men and women scientists may not be the same (either due to preferences that vary by gender, selection effects that arise earlier in scientists' careers or …
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary
This paper summarises responses from a survey completed by around 5,000 academics on their manuscript submission behaviours. The authors find several interesting stylised facts, including (but not limited to):
- Women are less likely to submit their papers to highly influential journals (*e.g.*, Nature, Science and PNAS).
- Women are more likely to cite the demands of co-authors as a reason why they didn't submit to highly influential journals.
- Women are also more likely to say that they were advised not to submit to highly influential journals.Recommendation
This paper highlights an important point, namely that the submissions' behaviours of men and women scientists may not be the same (either due to preferences that vary by gender, selection effects that arise earlier in scientists' careers or social factors that affect men and women differently and also influence submission patterns). As a result, simply observing gender differences in acceptance rates---or a lack thereof---should not be automatically interpreted as as evidence of for or against discrimination (broadly defined) in the peer review process. I do, however, make a few suggestions below that the authors may (or may not) wish to address.
Major comments
## What do you mean by bias?
In the second paragraph of the introduction, it is claimed that "if no biases were present in the case of peer review, then 'we should expect the rate with which members of less powerful social groups enjoy successful peer review outcomes to be proportionate to their representation in submission rates." There are a couple of issues with this statement.
- First, the authors are implicitly making a normative assumption that manuscript submission and acceptance rates *should* be equalised across groups. This may very well be the case, but there can also be important reasons why not -- e.g., if men are more likely to submit their less ground-breaking work, then one might reasonably expect that they experience higher rejection rates compared to women, conditional on submission.
- Second, I assume by "bias", the authors are taking a broad definition, i.e., they are not only including factors that specifically relate to gender but also factors that are themselves independent of gender but nevertheless disproportionately are associated with one gender or another (e.g., perhaps women are more likely to write on certain topics and those topics are rated more poorly by (more prevalent) male referees; alternatively, referees may be more likely to accept articles by authors they've met before, most referees are men and men are more likely to have met a given author if he's male instead of female). If that is the case, I would define more clearly what you mean by bias. (And if that isn't the case, then I would encourage the authors to consider a broader definition of "bias"!)## Identifying policy interventions is not a major contribution of this paper
In my opinion, the survey evidence reported here isn't really strong enough to support definitive policy interventions to address the issue and, indeed, providing policy advice is not a major -- or even minor -- contribution of your paper, so I would not mention policy interventions in the abstract. (Basically, I would hope that someone interested in policy interventions would consult another paper that much more thoughtfully and comprehensively discusses the costs and benefits of various interventions!)
Minor comments
- What is the rationale for conditioning on academic rank and does this have explanatory power on its own---i.e., does it at least superficially potentially explain part of the gender gap in intention to submit?
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Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Summary:
In this manuscript, Basson et al. study the representation of women in "high-impact" journals through the lens of gendered submission behavior. This work is clear and thorough, and it provides new insights into gender disparities in submissions, such as that women were more likely to avoid submitting to one of these journals based on advice from a colleague/mentor. The results have broad implications for all academic communities and may help toward reducing gender disparities in "high-impact" journal submissions. I enjoyed reading this article, and I have several recommendations regarding the methodology/reporting details that could help to enhance this work.Strengths:
This is an important area of investigation that is often overlooked in the study of gender bias in publishing. Several strengths of …Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Summary:
In this manuscript, Basson et al. study the representation of women in "high-impact" journals through the lens of gendered submission behavior. This work is clear and thorough, and it provides new insights into gender disparities in submissions, such as that women were more likely to avoid submitting to one of these journals based on advice from a colleague/mentor. The results have broad implications for all academic communities and may help toward reducing gender disparities in "high-impact" journal submissions. I enjoyed reading this article, and I have several recommendations regarding the methodology/reporting details that could help to enhance this work.Strengths:
This is an important area of investigation that is often overlooked in the study of gender bias in publishing. Several strengths of the paper include:- A comprehensive survey of thousands of academics. It is admirable that the authors retroactively reached out to other researchers and collected an extensive amount of data.
- Overall, the modeling procedures appear thorough, and many different questions are modeled.
- There are interesting new results, as well as a thoughtful discussion. This work will likely spark further investigation into gender bias in submission behavior, particularly regarding the possible gendered effect of mentorship on article submission.
Weaknesses:
- The GitHub page should be further clarified. A detailed description of how to run the analysis and the location of the data would be helpful. For example, although the paper says that "Aggregated and de-identified data by gender, discipline, and rank for analyses are available on GitHub," I was unable to find such data.
- Why is desk rejection rate defined as "the number of manuscripts that did not go out for peer review divided by the number of manuscripts rejected for each survey respondent"? For example, in your Grossman 2020 reference, it appears that manuscripts are categorized as "reviewed" or "desk-rejected" (Grossman Figure 2). If there are gender differences in the denominator, then this could affect the results.
- Have you considered correcting for multiple comparisons? Alternatively, you could consider reporting P-values and effect sizes in the main text. Otherwise, sometimes the conclusions can be misleading. For example, in Figure 3 (and Table S28), the effect is described as significant in Social Sciences (p=0.04) but not in Medical Sciences (p=0.07).
- More detail about the models could be included. It may be helpful to include this in each table caption so that it is clear what all the terms of the model were. For instance, I was wondering if journal or discipline are included in the models.
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Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
Summary:
This is a strong manuscript by Basson and colleagues which contributes to our understanding of gender disparities in scientific publishing. The authors examine attitudes and behaviors related to manuscript submission in influential journals (specifically, Science, Nature and PNAS). The authors rightly note that much attention has been paid to gender disparities in work that is already published, but this fails to capture the unseen hurdles that occur prior to publication (which include decisions about where to publish, desk rejections, revisions and resubmissions, etc.). They conducted a survey study to address some of these components and their results are interesting:They find that women are less likely to submit their manuscript to Science, Nature or PNAS. While both men and women feel their …
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
Summary:
This is a strong manuscript by Basson and colleagues which contributes to our understanding of gender disparities in scientific publishing. The authors examine attitudes and behaviors related to manuscript submission in influential journals (specifically, Science, Nature and PNAS). The authors rightly note that much attention has been paid to gender disparities in work that is already published, but this fails to capture the unseen hurdles that occur prior to publication (which include decisions about where to publish, desk rejections, revisions and resubmissions, etc.). They conducted a survey study to address some of these components and their results are interesting:They find that women are less likely to submit their manuscript to Science, Nature or PNAS. While both men and women feel their work would be better suited for more specialized journals, women were more likely to think their work was 'less novel or groundbreaking.'
A smaller proportion of respondents indicated that they were actively discouraged from submitting their manuscripts to these journals. In this instance, women were more likely to receive this advice than men.
Lastly, the authors also looked at self-reported acceptance and rejection rates and found that there were no gender differences in acceptance or rejection rates.
These data are helpful in developing strategies to mitigate gender disparities in influential journals.
Comments:
The methods the authors used are appropriate for this study. The low response rate is common for this type of recruitment strategy. The authors provide a thoughtful interpretation of their data in the Discussion. -
Reviewer #4 (Public Review):
This manuscript covers an important topic of gender biases in the authorship of scientific publications. Specifically, it investigates potential mechanisms behind these biases, using a solid approach, based on a survey of researchers.
Main strengths
The topic of the MS is very relevant given that across sciences/academia representation of genders is uneven, and identified as concerning. To change this, we need to have evidence on what mechanisms cause this pattern. Given that promotion and merit in academia are still largely based on the number of publications and impact factor, one part of the gap likely originates from differences in publication rates of women compared to men.
Women are underrepresented compared to men in journals with high impact factor. While previous work has detected this gap, as well …
Reviewer #4 (Public Review):
This manuscript covers an important topic of gender biases in the authorship of scientific publications. Specifically, it investigates potential mechanisms behind these biases, using a solid approach, based on a survey of researchers.
Main strengths
The topic of the MS is very relevant given that across sciences/academia representation of genders is uneven, and identified as concerning. To change this, we need to have evidence on what mechanisms cause this pattern. Given that promotion and merit in academia are still largely based on the number of publications and impact factor, one part of the gap likely originates from differences in publication rates of women compared to men.
Women are underrepresented compared to men in journals with high impact factor. While previous work has detected this gap, as well as some potential mechanisms, the current MS provides strong evidence, based on a survey of close to 5000 authors, that this gap might be due to lower submission rates of women compared to men, rather than the rejection rates. The data analysis is appropriate to address the main research aims. The results interestingly show that there is no gender bias in rejection rates (desk rejection or overall) in three high-impact journals (Science, Nature, PNAS). However, submission rates are lower for women compared to men, indicating that gender biases might act through this pathway. The survey also showed that women are more likely to rate their work as not groundbreaking, and be advised not to submit to prestigious journals
With these results, the MS has the potential to inform actions to reduce gender bias in publishing, and actions to include other forms of measuring scientific impact and merit.
Main weakness and suggestions for improvement
The main message/further actions: I feel that the MS fails to sufficiently emphasise the need for a different evaluation system for researchers (and their research). While we might act to support women to submit more to high-impact journals, we could also (and several initiatives do this) consider a broader spectrum of merits (e.g. see https://coara.eu/ ). Thus, I suggest more space to discuss this route in the Discussion. Also, I would suggest changing the terms that imply that prestigious journals have a better quality of research or the highest scientific impact (line 40: journals of the highest scientific impact) with terms that actually state what we definitely know (i.e. that they have the highest impact factor). And think this could broaden the impact of the MS
Methods: while methods are all sound, in places it is difficult to understand what has been done or measured. For example, only quite late (as far as I can find, it's in the supplement) we learn the type of authorship considered in the MS is the corresponding authorship. This information should be clear from the very start (including the Abstract).
Second, I am unclear about the question on the perceived quality of research work. Was this quality defined for researchers, as quality can mean different things (e.g. how robust their set-up was, how important their research question was)? If researchers have different definitions of what quality means, this can cause additional heterogeneity in responses. Given that the survey cannot be repeated now, maybe this can be discussed as a limitation.
I was surprised to see that discipline was considered as a moderator for some of the analyses but not for the main analysis on the acceptance and rejection rates.
I was also suppressed not to see publication charges as one of the reasons asked for not submitting to selected journals. Low and middle-income countries often have more women in science but are also less likely to support high publication charges.
Finally, academic rank was asked of respondents but was not taken as a moderator.
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