Stills from Madame Curie (1943).
Since the birth of academic journals as a form of academic exchange, male authors have been the dominant force. Recently, the editorial board of Cell published an article expressing concern about the uneven sex ratio of journal authors. Alongside Nature and Science, Cell is one of the world's most authoritative academic journals, publishing the latest discoveries in the life sciences.
The Cell editorial board said in the article that the Cell journal has historically been dominated by men. Since the late 1990s, the proportion of women in science has been on the rise. Still, as of 2016, women make up less than 30 percent of the world's researchers. But the National Science Foundation (NSF) report and national institutes of health grant data estimate that there may be 35 to 38 percent of potential senior authors for female researchers. While the past and present gender imbalance can be explained by the demographics of the research community, there seems to be a considerable disconnect between the author and the reader.
Cell February 3, 2022 cover.
The Cell editorial board wanted the journal's layout to reflect the sex ratio of the research community. To that end, the editorial board collected a dataset of nearly 13,000 major research articles, including all articles submitted between 2017 and 2020, who studied and reported on the journal's gender balance in terms of authors.
The results showed that only 17% of all manuscripts submitted between 2017 and 2020 came from authors identified as women. 5.6% of authors chose not to answer the question, and 0.6% of authors were non-binary genders. Men submitted almost 77% of all papers submitted in the dataset. It is worth noting that from 2017 to 2020, the number of submissions from women gradually increased, from 14.9% to 17.8%. The percentage of male authors submitting manuscripts dropped from 79.2% per year to 76.1% per year.
The demographics of the authors submitted in each stage of The Cell from 2017 to 2020 are from the cell website.
Although the proportion of female authors submitting articles has a trend upward, it is still far lower than the proportion of male authors. Only 17 percent of the papers published by Cell in 2021 were submitted by women, and the apparent gap in gender ratios that persists worries editorial boards.
In addition, the Editorial Board of Cell also counts articles that enter the peer review process. From 2017 to 2020, the percentage of papers submitted by women to peer review was 5.2%, 4.2%, 8.2%, and 4.5%, respectively, than men, but 1.7% lower than men in 2021. The editorial board speculates that the reason for the lower 2021 may be that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has made women take on more home care jobs. After peer review, the editorial board eventually published 11.1 percent of papers submitted by men, 12.1 percent of papers submitted by women, and 11.4 percent of papers submitted by non-"binary gender" authors, and the proportion of manuscripts submitted by men and women ended up being published was very close.
Stills from Hidden Figures (2016).
The article concludes by saying that women and other minorities face many challenges and obstacles in the field of science, including not being heard, being robbed of results by others, and balancing family responsibilities... The cell journal wants to be a vehicle for change and is committed to making great strides in increasing the diversity of journal authors.
Resources:
Assessing gender disparity among Cell authors,
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00141-6?dgcid=raven_jbs_aip_email#relatedArticles
(2) "CellPress Cell Science" public name, "Cell Editorial: Assessing Gender Differences Between Cell Authors, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ddR3PwBjoTxk6v43UJoKWg."
Author | Li Yongbo
Edit | Rodong
Proofreading | Li Ming