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Sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior have been in the news quite a bit lately. The theme is similar, whether the field is news media, politics, or the arts, and whether the profession is film directing, choreography, or symphony conducting. Should we be worrying that a similar tornado of allegations about scientists is about to hit the news? It’s possible, but I wonder whether science actually has a different problem; one which may also lie at the bottom of the big-news harassment scandals. I’m talking about representation. Traditionally, the proportion of women and minorities in science has been low, just as it has in the highest echelons of law firms and governments. In many parts of the world, things are gradually looking up as normative and legislative barriers to women in the work force have been removed, but the progress toward equal representation of women in demanding fields has been slow.
One of the Biophysical Journal editors, Jason Kahn, wondered about the representation of women in his own choice of experts to review the articles he was assigned. He discovered that only one in five of his assigned reviewers were female (some non-European names were difficult to classify). Is this evidence of an unconscious gender bias in the BJ review process? I set out to investigate this first by reproducing his calculation with a larger sample of our reviewers. In total, I examined 1258 unique reviewed papers handled by 24 editorial board members between January 2013 and January 2018. For each paper, I tabulated all of the invited reviewers, including those who eventually submitted a review, those who declined to review, and those who did not respond to the invitation. The latter categories were included because the decision to invite a reviewer (whether the invitation is accepted or not) is an indication that the journal regards the invited reviewer as sufficiently expert. In total, 7180 reviewers were invited for the papers I examined. Of these, 1161 could be identified as female either through name inspection or by internet search, giving a percentage of female reviewers of 16.2%, which is even lower than Jason’s figure. Yet it must be admitted that in a number of subspecialties of biophysics, if not in the entire field, men outnumber women. To quantitate the penetrance of women in the field, I examined the corresponding authors of the 1258 papers in my study, reasoning that the population of corresponding authors should be the same as the expert pool from which the reviewers are selected. Female corresponding authors were named for 216 of these papers, for a percentage of 17.2%. The similarity of the two percentages argues that the selection of reviewers by our editorial board reflects the make-up of the expert population in our field, and thus the review process at BJ should not be considered gender-biased.
These figures are somewhat depressing, but I do believe that things are slowly improving. For example, of the 116 members of the BJ editorial board, 31 are women for a percentage of 26.7%. Among the Associate Editors, the proportion is 50%, and as of last year the Editor-in-Chief is a woman, too. One of the potential problems is that when we are talking about volunteer work, such as reviewing and serving on editorial boards and grant study sections, the proportion of women may actually be higher than their representation in the expert population. We need to make sure that, in our pursuit of “gender equity,” we do not over-task the female members of the field.
The Biophysical Society as a whole is highly attuned to diversity issues in our field, with standing committees for advancing professional opportunities for women (CPOW) and for promoting inclusion and diversity (CID). The Publications Committee of the Biophysical Society keeps close watch on the diversity of our editorial board, encouraging the recruitment of editors from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. In addition, the journal has a policy of gender- and geographic-blindness in the reviewing process, by removing all author information except surnames from the title pages of submitted manuscripts. We at the Journal and the Society are constantly striving to maximize inclusion and eliminate bias, and we’re always open to suggestions.