{"id":68,"date":"2008-05-03T07:57:20","date_gmt":"2008-05-03T05:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2008\/05\/03\/gender_differences_got_more_data\/"},"modified":"2008-05-03T07:57:20","modified_gmt":"2008-05-03T05:57:20","slug":"gender_differences_got_more_data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2008\/05\/03\/gender_differences_got_more_data\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender Differences: Got More Data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I ended up at Nature Networks thanks to a <a href=\"http:\/\/deepthoughtsandsilliness.blogspot.com\/2008\/01\/gender-differences-need-more-data.html\">post on my previous blog<\/a> about a paper in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elsevier.com\/wps\/find\/journaldescription.cws_home\/30339\/description?navopenmenu=1\">TREE<\/a> which claimed that the proportion of female authors was increased by double-blond peer review<sup><a href=\"#fn422331272502413012d8a1\">1<\/a><\/sup>.  In a nutshell, I argued that there wasn&#8217;t enough data to show this.  Well, things have progressed a bit since then, and now we have more data.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThe whole analysis was based on one journal, <a href=\"http:\/\/beheco.oxfordjournals.org\/\">Behavioral Ecology<\/a> switching to double-blind reviewing, and claiming that the increase in proportion of female authors was due to the change in review system.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shef.ac.uk\/aps\/staff\/acadstaff\/webb.html\">Tom Webb<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shef.ac.uk\/aps\/staff\/acadstaff\/freckleton.html\">Rob Freckleton<\/a> went back through the journal and looked at the data in a bit more detail<sup><a href=\"#fn9543095425024130517cbf\">2<\/a><\/sup> (yes, I&#8217;m involved too, but my role was just to tidy up the analysis &#8211; the credit is theirs).  They simply plotting the proportion of female authors against time.  If double-blinding has an effect, there should be a visible change in the proportion of female authors just after the shift.  Well, this is what they got:<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2370\/2461246150_00d82df5bc.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"386\" height=\"318\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-size: 80%\">Figure 1. The proportion of papers with a female first author in BE, volumes 1 (1990) to 18 (2007), with the years used by Budden and colleagues shown in blue. The vertical line is when double-blinding was implemented in the journal.  <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/j.tree.2008.03.003\">Link<\/a><br \/>\nWhen I first saw that, I laughed.  Who needs any complicated statistics?  Visually, it&#8217;s clear that there is no change, just a constant upward trend.<br \/>\nFor me this is pretty conclusive, that double-blinding didn&#8217;t have any effect (the same thing has been found in economics<sup><a href=\"#fn17717364785024130579b3c\">3<\/a><\/sup>), but of course that doesn&#8217;t mean it doesn&#8217;t have effects elsewhere, or that there might be <a href=\"http:\/\/deepthoughtsandsilliness.blogspot.com\/2008\/02\/fame-journals-and-blinding.html\">other effects of double-blinding[4]<\/a>.<br \/>\nBut I think the graph shows something more important: female representation in science is increasing, which I&#8217;m happy to declare is good for science.  I wonder, though, how even this is &#8211; is it just in whole-organism biology, or does it spread across the sciences?<\/p>\n<p class=\"footnote\"><sup>1<\/sup> I decided to leave the typo in.  Do with it as you wish.<\/p>\n<p class=\"footnote\"><sup>2<\/sup> T.J. Webb, B. O&#8217;Hara, R.P. Freckleton, 2008.  Does double-blind review benefit female authors? <em>Trends in Ecology &amp; Evolution<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/j.tree.2008.03.003\">online already<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"footnote\"><sup>3<\/sup> Blank, R.M. (1991) The effects of double-blind versus single-blind reviewing: experimental-evidence from The American Economic Review. <em>Am. Econ. Rev.<\/em> <strong>81<\/strong>, 1041\u20131067. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/pss\/2006906\">JSTOR<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"footnote\"><sup>4<\/sup> Footnote 3 gives evidence that agrees with the results of the model, which quite frankly is a surprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I ended up at Nature Networks thanks to a post on my previous blog about a paper in TREE which claimed that the proportion of female authors was increased by double-blond peer review1. In a nutshell, I argued that there &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2008\/05\/03\/gender_differences_got_more_data\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}