© BRYAN SATALINO
Although more and more women have found careers in STEM in recent years, a gender gap remains, both in the proportion of female scientists in many fields and the numbers of manuscripts they publish. To understand if the peer-review process is at all to blame for the gender gap seen in scientific publishing, University of Milan sociologist Flaminio Squazzoni and colleagues teamed up with representatives from Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, and Springer Nature to collate data from nearly 350,000 papers across 145 journals that could shed light on this question.
The results, published today (January 6) in Science Advances, suggest that at no point in the editorial process are women at a disadvantage. While female scientists publish fewer articles than their male counterparts across scientific disciplines, they also submit fewer manuscripts, and following submission, their articles were treated more favorably than men’s were. However, says Squazzoni, ...
