Biomedical and life science articles by female researchers spend longer under review

Abstract

Women are underrepresented in academia—especially in STEMM fields, at top institutions, and in senior positions. This is due, at least in part, to the many obstacles that they face compared to their male counterparts. There has been substantial debate as to whether the peer review system is biased against women. Some studies—mostly based on analyses of thousands of Economics research articles—have shown that manuscripts authored by women experience longer peer review times (defined as the time intervened from submission to acceptance) than comparable manuscripts authored by men. Other studies, however, have found no effect of author’s gender on acceptance delays, raising questions about whether the gender gap is specific to certain fields. Biomedical and life scientists produce 36% of the research articles published annually worldwide; therefore, a comprehensive understanding of how women are treated by the peer review system requires a thorough examination of biomedicine and the life sciences. By analyzing all articles indexed in the PubMed database (>36.5 million articles published in >36,000 biomedical and life sciences journals), we show that the median amount of time spent under review is 7.4%–14.6% longer for female-authored articles than for male-authored articles, and that differences remain significant after controlling for several factors. The gender gap is pervasive, affecting most disciplines, regardless of how well women are represented in each discipline; however, the gap is absent or even reversed in some disciplines. We also show that authors based in low-income countries tend to experience longer review times. Our findings contribute to explaining the gender gap in publication rates and representation.