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The lost voices of women in research
A new study reveals just how bad the problem is
A recent study has published (more) dismal statistics on the gender gap in published scientific literature.
Centuries on and the old boys club lives on. Male journal editors merrily insert their own research work into the publications they manage and wave through papers presented by their fellow male researchers.
86% of scientific journal editors are male. 92% of editors-in-chief are male.
“Although we expected women to be under-represented, we certainly didn’t expect the percentage of women on editorial boards to be as low as 14% for editors and 8% for editors-in-chief,” said New York University’s Bedoor AlShebli, the data scientist who published the findings in Nature Human Behavior.
AlShebli gathered 50 years worth of gender data from over 80,000 editors of 1,100 journals across 15 scientific fields.
There was indisputable evidence of systemic and persistent inequality and clear biases among editorial boards across a multitude of research disciplines.
The STEM chicken and egg
Women have been notoriously underrepresented in some fields such as science and technology, one of the many disciplines where you “publish or perish”. It’s a chicken…
