Authorship and Gender in ESA Journals (2019)

In 1988 I hoped that there would be no further need to discuss the contributions of women ecologists because we would be recognized just as ecologists. Although women have become increasingly prominent as ecologists, it still seems timely and useful to consider the progress women ecologists have made in overcoming both personal and societal obstacles, particularly with regard to research contributions.(Langenheim 1996) Alas, apparent disparities between male and female scientists persist to this day (Pollack 2013). Although the disparity is not as stark in the life sciences as in other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, or even in the other environmental sciences (Bonham and Stefan 2017), a considerable gender imbalance persists in the biological sciences as well (Trafton 2014). Reasons for gender imbalance can be complex, and bias can exist in multiple areas. To try to examine the possibility of bias in journal publishing, various journals have gone public with data to show how well women are represented as authors for various journals (Gilbert et al. 1994, Larivière et al. 2013, West et al. 2013, Fox et al. 2016a, 2016b, Fox and Paine 2019). ESA has a long-term commitment to diversity (available online).1 Transparency in examining the record of ESA journals regarding diversity is one part of following through on this commitment. In this study, the five peer-reviewed journals published by the ESA were evaluated to compare rates of submission and rates of acceptance between female and male authors. These journals are Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Ecological Applications, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and Ecosphere. The study covers manuscripts submitted to ESA journals from 1 January 2004 to 31 December 2016. Data for Ecosphere only include eight years, since it was first published in 2010. The data were drawn from our online peer-review systems, which were AllenTrack (known as EcoTrack, and based on EJournals Press) for 2004 to 2015 and ScholarOne for the year 2016. It was not possible to analyze the data for manuscripts prior to 2004, since the DOS-based program ESA was using prior to 2004 did not feature electronic output. A copy of the ESA membership database was obtained in September 2018 and includes current members as well as individuals whose memberships had expired up to eleven years previous. All are considered members for the gender and age data in this study. The option to identify one's gender as “non-binary” was only offered starting in fall 2018, so no members had yet self-identified as non-binary. The database was analyzed for gender and age distribution based on those members who volunteered their gender and either a birth date or the date of the highest degree received. For those who volunteered a degree date but not a birth date, an approximate age estimate was made using the assumption that they graduated at age 25. Additional efforts to identify genders with common first and middle names did not change the results of the relative number of males and females in any category. The membership database of the Ecological Society was used to assign genders to those authors who had volunteered their gender in their membership profile. Other names were assigned genders based on titles (Mr., Ms., Mrs., Miss), which were sometimes volunteered in the profiles in the EcoTrack and ScholarOne databases (the non-gendered title Mx. was not available prior to 2018). Even though many of these titles had been updated (either by the author or by the staff) to the non-gendered “Dr.” in the later ScholarOne database, many older records still retained the pre-PhD salutation in the EcoTrack database. Remaining names were assigned likely genders with the assistance of various online tools (Kantrowitz 1997, Bridge 2008, Social Security 2017). Some names were found to be mis-identified by these tools; for example, Jan is a common female name in the United States, but in Europe, it is typically a male name. Corrections for many of these were made by hand based on the author's country of origin. Following efforts to assign gender using these methods, remaining authors with ambiguous or uncommon names, who held a significant author role (1st, 2nd, last, sole, and corresponding author) and were authors on four or more submissions, were further investigated individually. Ultimately, 93% of the original author-paper data points were assigned a gender. Each data point represents an author/manuscript combination. The analyses were done only on the data points that were assigned a gender, using chi-squared tests and binomial GLMs with P-values based on Type II sums of squares. There are 131,116 data points, which includes 34,746 manuscripts/corresponding authors (Appendix S1: Table S2). Data on Early Career and Senior Ecologists were based on a demographic breakdown provided by ESA membership staff in October 2017. Over the 13-year course of the study, across all five journals, 29% of all authors were female (Fig. 1a; Appendix S1: Table S1). Other journals (Larivière et al. 2013), including ecology journals (Fox et al. 2016a), have shown similar rates of submissions by women, around one-third of the total. The overall submission rates ranged from 27% female for Ecological Monographs to 32% for Ecosphere and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (Fig. 1a; Appendix S1: Table S1). The rate rose from 25% female for all journals in 2004 to 32% in 2016 (Appendix S1: Table S2). Looking at corresponding authors only, the submission rate went from 24% female in 2004 to 37% female in 2016, for an overall female corresponding author submission rate of 32% (Appendix S1: Table S2). Fig. 2 shows the percent of female submissions based on corresponding author role for each of the five ESA journals for each year of the study period. There is a gradual increase in female authorship over the years for all journals. While submission rates were similar overall, Ecosphere had the highest rate of female corresponding author submissions at 38%, and Ecological Monographs had the lowest rate at 27% (Fig. 1b); however, Ecosphere only began publishing in 2010. If all journals for the years 2010 to 2016 only are compared, then the rate for Ecological Monographs is still the lowest among journals, but rises to 30%. Each manuscript has one corresponding author to simplify journal-related communications during peer review and also post-publication. It is entirely up to the authors to decide on which author will be corresponding author. For ESA journals during the study period, first authors were also designated as corresponding authors for 82% of manuscripts. This held relatively constant over the 13 years. Eight percent designated the last author as corresponding author. Seven percent of manuscripts had only one author. Although conventions regarding author roles and positions in the author order vary based on discipline and country and other factors, the predominant convention for ecology journals seems to be that the first author has done most of the work and the writing, and the last author is the “senior” author, faculty advisor, project principal investigator, or laboratory head (available online).2 Female authors were found to be overrepresented as first authors, at 36% across all journals, though their overall authorship was only 29% (Fig. 1a, b). Women were slightly overrepresented as corresponding authors at 32%, compared to their overall numbers. But female first authors took the corresponding author role 86% of the time that they were first authors, whereas male first authors were also corresponding author 90% of the time. On the other hand, women were underrepresented as last or senior authors at 22% (compared to their overall representation at 29%), and they made up only 21% of sole authors (Fig. 1a, b). This result is consistent with the expectation that men predominate in the senior levels of science. Similar rates of overrepresentation of female authors as first and corresponding authors, and overrepresentation of male authors as last authors, are found at other journals (Fox et al. 2016a, 2018) and in a smaller study conducted on Ecology in 2011 (Martin 2012). Acceptance rates for each gender were calculated by dividing the number of submissions for each gender by the number of accepts for that gender. Fig. 3 shows the acceptance rates for male and female corresponding authors for each journal over the 13 years. The overall acceptance rates for male and female corresponding authors were markedly similar: 26.61% for males and 26.64% for females (Appendix S1: Table S2). Acceptance rates are depressed for both male and female authors when the first author does not also serve as corresponding author (22% for males and 21% for females, Appendix S1: Table S4). None of the individual journals showed a significant difference between acceptance rates for men and women either as first authors or as corresponding authors (Appendix S1: Table S3), except Ecological Monographs where the acceptance rate for male corresponding authors was 5.8% greater than for females (P = 0.018). Ecological Monographs receives fewer than 150 manuscript submissions per year and has greater variance in acceptance rates. The average acceptance rate for all male authors over the years was 24.2% compared to 18.4% for females, although female authors had higher acceptance rates in 5 of the 13 years (Appendix S1: Table S3). Of all the ESA journals, Ecological Monographs is arguably the most competitive. It has the lowest acceptance rate overall and publishes the fewest articles each year. It has the second-highest impact factor of the five journals (Frontiers has the highest) and was ranked fifth among ecology journals by ISI in 2017. Ecological Monographs’ papers are not just longer than those at other journals, but also tell more complex stories, integrating multiple components to make significant empirical and theoretical advances. Though data on the age or career level of authors beyond the limited membership data are lacking, it seems likely that authors of the type of manuscripts accepted at Ecological Monographs tend to be at later career stages, in order to have the time to have accumulated the necessary research to delve deeply into a subject area. Female authors submit at a lower rate to Ecological Monographs than to the other journals (Fig. 1). The fact that the female acceptance rate (for all author roles) relative to their submissions is 4% lower than for males (Appendix S1: Table S3) could indicate bias, but that seems unlikely given the lack of bias found for the other journals. Ecological Monographs shares the Editorial Boards of Ecology and Ecological Applications, using those same editors as Subject Matter Editors for virtually all submissions. Ecological Monographs also shares many of the same reviewers as the other journals, and the same review process is conducted by the same staff. Only Ecosphere and Frontiers have different staff conducting the review process, though the processes are similar. A more likely explanation for the lower female acceptance rate at Ecological Monographs is that a greater percentage of female authors submitting to Ecological Monographs are at earlier stages in their careers relative to male authors, and women authors have less of the experience and years of research necessary for a successful submission of a complex and multidimensional study. Twenty-nine percent of published authors were female across the five journals, which is the same as the 29% rate of submissions from female authors. Although female submission rates and rates of published authors have risen over the years from about 25% to 32%, the ratio of authors who are female is considerably lower than the estimated 46% of ESA members, current and recent, who are female. When ESA members are broken down by age, women comprise 55% of the under-40 contingent and only 31% of the over-40 group. Further, women comprise only 25% of all ESA members who self-identified as over 50. The Early Career Ecologist Section is 63% female, and those who have applied for and acquired certification as Senior Ecologists are overwhelmingly male at 73%. For all journals, males occupied the last author position, commonly taken by the senior author, at 78%, though only 70% of all authors on submissions were male. For Ecological Monographs, 81% of last authors were male, further highlighting the pattern of more male authors at senior levels than females. The gender make-up of ESA's editorial boards reflects the general scarcity of women at higher levels in the field. Although three out of five of ESA's current Editors-in-Chief are women, the percent of women on the editorial boards for Ecological Applications, Ecology, Ecosphere, and Frontiers in 2016 were only 28%, 18%, 21%, and 23%, respectively. Ecosphere has been most successful in recruiting women editors, attaining a level of 39% female editors in 2018. The other ESA journals have further to go to achieve gender parity on editorial boards. In 2018, the proportion of female editors for Ecology increased to 26%. The proportions for the Ecological Applications and Frontiers stayed about the same at 27% and 25%, respectively. Although women were 56% of graduate students in ecology in 2016 (NSF 2019a) and found to be 59% of newly hired tenure-track ecology faculty in 2017–2018 (available online),3 the numbers of women still drop at successively higher levels (Adamo 2013, Trafton 2014). Women held only 28% of tenure-track positions in the biological sciences in 2017 (NSF 2019a2019b). There are many theories as to why women drop out of academia at higher levels, such as lack of maternity leave, difficulties returning to work after parental leave, sexual discrimination (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012, Gibney 2014), and sexual harassment (Clancy et al. 2014, Koren 2017). The shortage of jobs and research support in biological research may also aggravate the challenges faced by women and further account for their attrition (Adamo 2013). It is a sign of hope that female authorship in ESA journals has increased from 25% in 2004 to 32% in 2016, but the levels of female authorship are still ~14% lower than their representation in ESA membership, reflecting multiple issues women ecologists face in science and society at large. Once papers are submitted, however, there is no observed bias in acceptance, with a possible small anomaly for one journal, Ecological Monographs. This anomaly likely reflects the gender disparity that is greatest at the senior levels of science. While unconscious and conscious bias, structural discrimination, and overt discrimination continue to affect women in ecology affecting hiring, promotion, and recognition, ESA journals seem to be largely free from quantitative bias against women authors in peer review. Although increasing rates of female authorship would involve multi-faceted approaches at societal and institutional levels, increasing the numbers of females on editorial boards is a concrete step that ESA journals could likely achieve. Thanks to Brian Inouye and Colleen Carey for assistance on the statistical analyses. Thanks to Aimée Classen for comments and stimulating questions, and to Persephone Doliner for editing assistance. Portions of this research were carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 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