Gender differences in authorships are not associated with publication bias in an evolutionary journal

A lower number of published papers and the accompanying reduced visibility of female within research fields compared to male scientists contributes to the loss of talented women from senior academic positions. The reasons for these authorship gender-differences is unclear, but one reason is a bias in the editorial and review process of scientific journals. In this study, we investigated whether there was publication bias according to gender in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. We found female first-authors were six times less likely to be named as the corresponding author than male first-authors, and female first-authors were more likely to be displaced as corresponding authors by female co-authors than were male first-authors. We found an under-representation of female first- and last-authors compared to baseline populations of members of ESEB and of Evolutionary Biology faculty at the world top-10 universities for the Life Sciences. Our results show gender differences in patterns of authorship, but suggest that the peer review process at JEB is predominately gender-and location-neutral and not a contributing factor to differences in authorship.<br>