How Gender Bias Worsened the Academic Peer Review Crisis

Chronicle of Higher Ed, How Gender Bias Worsened the Peer Review Crisis

Mounting evidence suggests the peer-review crisis in academic publishing was worsened, in part, by a system that favors male scholars and discourages women.

A new study of nearly 50 journals in the British Medical Journals Publishing Group found that women accounted for less than one in three peer reviewers — scholars who are experts in their field and are critical to vetting new research before it’s published in academic journals. The proportion of female peer reviewers grew by only 2.9 percentage points between 2009 and 2020. ***

At a time when journal editors across fields and publishing houses say finding peer reviewers is harder than ever, why aren’t more tapping into the pool of female professors and researchers?

Ana-Catarina Pinho-Gomes, an academic clinical lecturer at the University College London who researches biases against women in medical research, said the gap can be traced back to how editors select reviewers.

In the early days of peer review, journal editors, who were predominantly white men, would mine their own professional networks — also comprised of mostly white men — to find reviewers. Today, most journals use search engines, like PubMed or Google Scholar, and internal databases to identify, track, and make requests of reviewers. In theory, this system would cut down on individual editor bias. But in practice, Pinho-Gomes said, it carries forward biases from earlier in the pipeline of academic research.

Scholars with more published work are more likely to come up in databases and search engines as potential reviewers, Pinho-Gomes said. For decades, research has shown that women have published less frequently than men in part because women still take on the lion’s share of child and elder care for their families, leaving less time for career advancement and research pursuits. Thus, more-published scholars tend to be men