Thank you to our diverse (but not diverse enough) reviewers
Authors: Zoë Mullan
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2018)

A recent Twitter poll by the organisers of Peer Review Week (Sept 10–15), whose theme this year is diversity in peer review, indicated that 44% of respondents thought that there was "a major problem around diversity and inclusion in peer review". Indeed, as Jacob Steinberg and colleagues1Steinberg JJ Skae C Sampson B Gender gap, disparity, and inequality in peer review.Lancet. 2018; 391: 2602-2603Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (21) Google Scholar revealed earlier this year in their analysis of 10 years' worth of peer reviewers for selected medical journals, only about 13% were women at the New England Journal of Medicine and only 10% were so at The Lancet. Nature has admitted to similarly lamentable figures.2EditorialGender imbalance in science journals is still pervasive.Nature. 2017; 541: 435-436Crossref Scopus (19) Google Scholar How does The Lancet Global Health compare? As part of this year's annual thanks and public recognition of all those who have reviewed for us over the past 12 months (appendix), we attempted to analyse the gender of all 624 reviewers between August 2017 and August 2018. We successfully identified the gender of all but three, and found that 225 (36%) were women and 396 (64%) men. So our gender balance is better than some, but is it good enough? We don't think so. Taking the self-punishment a little further, we also analysed reviewer diversity by country (figure). The results show that, although 64 countries were represented, nearly a third of reviewers came from the USA alone, with 15% from the UK. The next highest representations were Canada, Australia, Switzerland, India, South Africa, France, Brazil, and Italy (appendix). The Lancet Global Health generally sources four reviewers per original research article. One of them must be a statistician and there must be a health economist or modeller in the mix if there is an element of either type of analysis in the paper. If the paper is about a particular country, then we make all reasonable effort to include at least one reviewer from that country. Sometimes this is easy; sometimes it is hard. We also aim to have a spread of geographical representation when a paper pertains to multiple regions. We will continue to pursue and monitor this approach and welcome further suggestions from readers and contributors. Regarding gender, however, we can do more. We will aim to invite 50% women on every paper over the next year, with the goal of achieving an overall ratio that is much closer to parity than it currently is. Our task will be made difficult by the fact that, of our much smaller pool of regular statistical advisers, only about 25% are currently women. We therefore welcome applications, by email to the address below, from qualified female statisticians to join our pool. We offer a modest honorarium for each review. Thank you to all those (male and female) who reviewed for us over the past year (appendix). I thank Louisa Iselin for data analysis and heatmap production. I declare no competing interests. Download .pdf (.13 MB) Help with pdf files Supplementary appendix