Nature reports on its own progress promoting women in science
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8020
With an editorial and an invited commentary , the 12 December issue of Nature presents a reservedly hopeful update on increasing women’s representation in science.
In August 2012, a letter to the editor in Nature charged that women scientists are too seldom invited to contribute articles in that weekly’s high-visibility “News and Views” section. Weeks later, Jo Handelsman of Yale and others published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that began, “Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science.”
In November 2012, a Nature editorial cited those sources and declared, “The editors of this publication need to improve how we reflect women’s contributions to science.” The editorial reported results of a general survey of women’s participation at Nature, then concluded,
We therefore believe that there is a need for every editor to work through a conscious loop before proceeding with commissioning: to ask themselves, “Who are the five women I could ask?”
Under no circumstances will this “gender loop” involve a requirement to fulfill a quota or to select anyone whom we do not know to be fully appropriate for the job, although we will set ourselves internal targets to help us to focus on the task. It is not yet clear just what difference this workflow loop will make. But it seems to us to be a step towards appropriately reflecting in our pages the contributions of women to science.
Now a 12 December editorial updates progress, reporting that “despite some success, the proportions of women in Nature‘s pages and as referees are still too low.” Nature has “produced just a scratch on the surface” of the challenge of “the low proportion of women contributing to our own content.”
The editorial quantifies progress in several categories. Women authors are up 7% in “News and Views” and in a combination of “World View” and “Comment” articles. Profile articles on women have increased from 18% in 2011 to 40%.
Recruitment of women referees, however, has been disappointingly hard to increase, the editors say. They mention an article in the same issue, a commentary examining worldwide bibliometric evidence bearing on women’s participation in science. That article begins in a tone of caution: “Despite many good intentions and initiatives, gender inequality is still rife in science. Although there are more female than male undergraduate and graduate students in many countries, there are relatively few female full professors, and gender inequalities in hiring, earnings, funding, satisfaction and patenting persist.”
The five authors explain that they are presenting “a global and cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis of: first, the relationship between gender and research output (for which our proxy was authorship on published papers); second, the extent of collaboration (for which our proxy was co-authorships); and third, scientific impact of all articles published between 2008 and 2012 and indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science databases (for which our proxy was citations).” They analyzed almost 5.5 million research papers and review articles with more than 27 million authorships.
Their study, they say—much as Nature might say of its own study—"lends solid quantitative support to what is intuitively known: barriers to women in science remain widespread worldwide, despite more than a decade of policies aimed at levelling the playing field.” Like Nature, they call for further efforts. At the end, they remind readers: “No country can afford to neglect the intellectual contributions of half its population.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.