Are readers biased against female-authored research?

Kay Steiger writes about the results of a new study on reader perception bias in scientific research: The researchers took abstracts in male-typed, female-typed, and gender neutral subject areas, then they randomly generated names from the Social Security Administration database of popular names and affixed them to each abstract in a rather complicated way that may be ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Kay Steiger writes about the results of a new study on reader perception bias in scientific research:

Kay Steiger writes about the results of a new study on reader perception bias in scientific research:

The researchers took abstracts in male-typed, female-typed, and gender neutral subject areas, then they randomly generated names from the Social Security Administration database of popular names and affixed them to each abstract in a rather complicated way that may be best just to allow them to explain it:

Respondents were presented with 2 neutral-typed abstracts (1 with two female authors, 1 with two male authors), 2 female- typed abstracts (1 with two female authors, 1 with two male authors), and 2 male-typed abstracts (1 with two female authors, 1 with two male authors). To vary the target abstracts and base participants’ ratings on a larger stimuli set, 6 abstracts were drawn for each individual participant from the 12 abstracts listed as female-typed, male-typed, or gender-neutral in Table 1, based on a rotation across participants. However, across the sample, all 12 abstracts were utilized, though in different combinations of 6 each for indi- vidual participants. The remaining 9 abstracts from the set of 15 were dis- played as distracters. Six of them featured a female and a male author, with author sequence and research areas counterbalanced. In addition, 2 distracter abstracts from gender-neutral research areas and 1 from a male-typed area were presented as single-authored by a male or with four authors (two females and two males, with genders alternating in the author sequence), in contrast to all abstracts being presented with two authors. The abstract with four authors was always presented last and served as basis for a question on recall of the author information.

Unsurprisingly, male authors in male-typed research came out on top of the measure of “scientific quality.”

The paper exploers the so-called "Matilda effect" in natural sciences, but I would be interested to see if it held true for "male-typed" social science research in topics like economics, national security, and international relations. According to research by Micah Zenko, for instance, as of 2011 women consituted only 21 percent of policy-related positions in think tanks with a significant foreign policy focus, and only 23 percent of International Relations professors.

Those numbers are probably shifting — and some recent high-profile leadership appointments will hopefully move things along faster –but these fields also have a "male-typed" problem that probably warrants more examination.

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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