Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors

Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer are identified, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. Most journals in the field of ecology practice single-blind reviews in which the reviewer but not the author identity is concealed. In 2001, however, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. A database of all papers published in BE between 1997 and 2005 (n=867) was generated (the year 2001 was omitted to accomodate the change in editorial policy). For each paper, gender was assignmed to the first author using first names. Gender was classified as "unknown" if the author provided only initials, if the name was gender neutral or if the name could not be assigned to either gender. The same data was gathered from an out-group set of primary research journals listed by ISI as being in the category of "Ecology" or "Evolutionary Biology" with a 2004 impact factor of 2.0-2.5 (similar to that of BE). This provided an additional five journals: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (BES; n=1040), Animal Behavior (AB; n=2178), Journal of Biogeography (JB; n=1040), Biological Conservation (BC; n=1719), and Landscape Ecology (LE; n=419). Missing data from complete issues omitted from the table of contents were inserted using ISI (JB and LE; four issues). This study showed that following the policy change to double-blind peer reviews, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers.