I'm glad that darwin didn't crawl into a hole: A comment on meredith's "a journal of one's own"

Abstract

Meredith (2013) provides data suggesting that the work cited by evolutionary psychologists may be disproportionately male-biased-a fact that has important implications for gender equity in the field. In a response letter to Meredith, Schmitt (2015) examined Meredith's data carefully relative to other data on the issue of gender equity in the behavioral sciences, showing that, in fact, the same level of gender bias in evolutionary psychology seems to be found in generalist psychology work and even in science in general. The current letter examines additional data (provided by Hinshaw, Reinbold, Geher, and Geher, 2014) which show that the proportion of females presenting at psychology conferences seems to be increasing-particularly for regional and generalist conferences. This said, the current work critically examines issues connected with gender in science, making the case that efforts to increase gender equity should not be conflated with examinations of quality of content of scholarly products. Evolutionary psychology will benefit in the future by both (a) increases in gender equity in terms of scholarship and (b) clear efforts to not discriminate against the work of individual scholars as a function of the demographic characteristics that they possess.