Gender-biased perceptions of important ecology articles

Abstract

Gender bias is still unfortunately rife in the sciences, and men co-author most articles (> 70%) in ecology. Whether ecologists subconsciously rate the quality of their peers work more favourably if men are the dominant co-authors is still unclear. To test this hypothesis, we examined how expert ecologists ranked important ecology articles based on a previously compiled list. Women proposed articles with a higher average proportion of women co-authors (0.18) than did men proposers (0.07). For the 100 top-ranked articles, women voters placed more emphasis on articles co-authored by women (0.06) than did men (0.02). However, women voters were still biased because they ranked men-dominated articles more highly, albeit not by as much as men did. This effect disappeared after testing read-only articles. This indicates a persistent, subconscious bias that men-dominated articles are considered to be of higher quality before actual assessment. We add that ecologists need to examine their own subconscious biases when appointing students, hiring staff, and choosing colleagues with whom to publish.