Women in evolution - highlighting the changing face of evolutionary biology

Sticky steps and the gender gap: how thoughtful practices could help keep caregivers in science

Many fewer women than men hold senior academic positions, a widely recognized and increasing problem. Our goal is to identify effective and feasible solutions. We begin by providing an in-depth assessment of the drivers of this gender inequity. In our synthesis of existing data, we provide many lines of evidence highlighting caregiving as a primary main factor. This is not a ‘new’ insight per se, but a point worth repeating that we back up by a strong and synthetic body of recent data. We also believe that our analysis provides a step forward in tackling a complex issue. We then develop a more detailed understanding of the challenges academic caregivers face and discuss whether and why it is important to keep caregivers in science. We find that the attrition due to caregiving should not be seen as a factor but rather as a process with multiple ‘sticky steps’ that eventually drive caregivers out of science—which, as we argue, is partly also good news. Indeed, it is here that we believe actions could be taken that would have a real impact: for example, one could effectively increase and expand upon current funding practices that focus on caregiver career advancement.

Trends in gender of first and senior authors of articles published in JMIRO

INTRODUCTION

Despite progress of women in science and medicine, women remain underrepresented in academic publication. The aim of this study was to evaluate potential gender differences in women authorship in the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology (JMIRO).

METHODS

Gender of the first and senior author of all articles published in JMIRO between 2012 and 2021 were examined. Changes over time and differences among groups were compared using the chi-square test.

RESULTS

In total, 1,138 articles were assessed. Women were first and senior authors on 34% and 25% of all articles respectively. The proportion of women as first author was 30%, 41% and 36% for medical imaging (MI), radiation oncology (RO) and combined MI/RO articles respectively. Similarly, the proportion of women as senior author was lower than men at 22%, 32% and 23% for MI, RO and MI/RO articles respectively. Women first authorship over the study period remained stable from 2014 (36%) to 2020 (38%); however, it decreased dramatically in 2021 to 28%. There was a trend of increasing women senior authorship from 2013 (15%) to 2017 (35%) but decreased to 23% in 2021.

CONCLUSION

Over the past 10 years of publications, one in three first authors were women and only one in four senior authors were women. The acknowledgement of this imbalance is the first step to pave the way towards addressing underlying systemic issues related to academic publication and disparities in gender and other inequities.

The problem of interaction

As we look to the next 75 years, I recount how the sociopolitical milieu in which the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and the journal Evolution were formed in 1947 was a "problem of interaction."

Efficient ancestry and mutation simulation with msprime 1.0

Stochastic simulation is a key tool in population genetics, since the models involved are often analytically intractable and simulation is usually the only way of obtaining ground-truth data to evaluate inferences. Because of this, a large number of specialized simulation programs have been developed, each filling a particular niche, but with largely overlapping functionality and a substantial duplication of effort. Here, we introduce msprime version 1.0, which efficiently implements ancestry and mutation simulations based on the succinct tree sequence data structure and the tskit library. We summarize msprime’s many features, and show that its performance is excellent, often many times faster and more memory efficient than specialized alternatives. These high-performance features have been thoroughly tested and validated, and built using a collaborative, open source development model, which reduces duplication of effort and promotes software quality via community engagement.

Women must be equal partners in science: gender-balance lessons from biology

Access to scientific careers for women has never been easy, but as biases and barriers slowly begin to diminish, women are becoming more and more involved in science, especially Biological Sciences. Some of the reasons why women do not have the same opportunities to achieve career pathways equal to those of men are discussed. We conclude that there is an ongoing need to design and apply new policies to effect a gender balance throughout the career path. This is seen not simply as an equitable outcome – it is a moral imperative.

Gender diversity of editorial boards and gender differences in the peer review process at six journals of ecology and evolution

Despite substantial progress for women in science, women remain underrepresented in many aspects of the scholarly publication process. We examined how the gender diversity of editors and reviewers changed over time for six journals in ecology and evolution (2003–2015 for four journals, 2007–2015 or 2009–2015 for the other two), and how several aspects of the peer review process differed between female and male editors and reviewers. We found that for five of the six journals, women were either absent or very poorly represented as handling editors at the beginning of our dataset. The representation of women increased gradually and consistently, with women making up 29% of the handling editors (averaged across journals) in 2015, similar to the representation of women as last authors on ecology papers (23% in 2015) but lower than the proportion of women among all authors (31%) and among members of the societies that own the journals (37%–40%). The proportion of women among reviewers has also gradually but consistently increased over time, reaching 27% by 2015. Female editors invited more female reviewers than did male editors, and this difference increased with age of the editor. Men and women who were invited to review did not differ in whether they responded to the review invitation, but, of those that responded, women were slightly more likely to agree to review. In contrast, women were less likely than men to accept invitations to serve on journal editorial boards. Our analyses indicate that there has been progress in the representation of women as reviewers and editors in ecology and evolutionary biology, but women are still underrepresented among the gatekeepers of scholarly publishing relative to their representation among researchers.

Gender and language use in scientific grant writing

Women in science, technology, engineering, and math are not equally represented across tenure-track career stages, and this extends to grant funding, where women applicants often have lower success rates compared with men. While gender bias in reviewers has been documented, it is currently unknown whether written language in grant applications varies predictably with gender to elicit bias against women. Here we analyse the text of ∼2000 public research summaries from the 2016 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) individual Discovery Grant (DG) program. We explore the relationship between language variables, inferred gender and career stage, and funding levels. We also analyse aggregated data from the 2012–2018 NSERC DG competitions to determine whether gender impacted the probability of receiving a grant for early-career researchers. We document a marginally significant gender difference in funding levels for successful grants, with women receiving $1756 less than men, and a large and significant difference in rejection rates among early-career applicants (women: 40.4% rejection; men: 33.0% rejection rate). Language variables had little ability to predict gender or funding level using predictive modelling. Our results indicate that NSERC funding levels and success rates differ between men and women, but we find no evidence that gendered language use affected funding outcomes.

Illuminating Women's Hidden Contribution to Historical Theoretical Population Genetics

Through careful review of one eminent journal over the 1970s and 80s, Dung et al. found a surprisingly high proportion of the computational work was carried out by women. Consistent with authorship norms of the time...

While productivity in academia is measured through authorship, not all scientific contributors have been recognized as authors. We consider nonauthor “acknowledged programmers” (APs), who developed, ran, and sometimes analyzed the results of computer programs. We identified APs in Theoretical Population Biology articles published between 1970 and 1990, finding that APs were disproportionately women (P = 4.0 × 10⁻¹⁰). We note recurrent APs who contributed to several highly-cited manuscripts. The occurrence of APs decreased over time, corresponding to the masculinization of computer programming and the shift of programming responsibilities to individuals credited as authors. We conclude that, while previously overlooked, historically, women have made substantial contributions to computational biology. For a video of this abstract, see: https://vimeo.com/313424402.

Recent advances in conservation and population genomics data analysis

New computational methods and next‐generation sequencing (NGS) approaches have enabled the use of thousands or hundreds of thousands of genetic markers to address previously intractable questions. The methods and massive marker sets present both new data analysis challenges and opportunities to visualize, understand, and apply population and conservation genomic data in novel ways. The large scale and complexity of NGS data also increases the expertise and effort required to thoroughly and thoughtfully analyze and interpret data. To aid in this endeavor, a recent workshop entitled “Population Genomic Data Analysis,” also known as “ConGen 2017,” was held at the University of Montana. The ConGen workshop brought 15 instructors together with knowledge in a wide range of topics including NGS data filtering, genome assembly, genomic monitoring of effective population size, migration modeling, detecting adaptive genomic variation, genomewide association analysis, inbreeding depression, and landscape genomics. Here, we summarize the major themes of the workshop and the important take‐home points that were offered to students throughout. We emphasize increasing participation by women in population and conservation genomics as a vital step for the advancement of science. Some important themes that emerged during the workshop included the need for data visualization and its importance in finding problematic data, the effects of data filtering choices on downstream population genomic analyses, the increasing availability of whole‐genome sequencing, and the new challenges it presents. Our goal here is to help motivate and educate a worldwide audience to improve population genomic data analysis and interpretation, and thereby advance the contribution of genomics to molecular ecology, evolutionary biology, and especially to the conservation of biodiversity.

Gender equity at scientific events

Although the proportion of women in science, and in evolutionary biology in particular, has substantially increased over the last century, women remain underrepresented in academia, especially at senior levels. In addition, their scientific achievements do not always receive the same level of recognition as do men's, which can be reflected in a lower relative representation of women among invited speakers at conferences or specialized courses. Using announcements sent to the EvolDir mailing list between April 2016 and September 2017, and the symposium programs of three large evolutionary biology congresses held in summer 2017, we quantified the representation of women announced as invited speakers in conferences, congress symposia, and specialized courses. We compared the proportion of invited women to a baseline estimated using membership data of the associated scientific societies, and surveyed organizers to investigate their influence and that of potential gender-ratio guidelines on the proportion of invited women. We find that the average proportion of invited women is comparable (conferences), significantly lower (specialized courses), or significantly higher (congress symposia) than the current baseline (32% women). It is positively correlated to the proportion of women among the organizers, and it is on average higher for events whose organizers considered gender when choosing speakers than for those whose organizers did not. To investigate the impact of Equal Opportunity guidelines, we then collected longitudinal data on the proportion of invited women at two series of congresses, covering the 2001-2017 period. The proportion of invited women is higher when Equal Opportunity guidelines are announced. Encouraging women to sit on organizing committees of scientific events, and the establishment of visible Equal Opportunity guidelines, thus could be ways to ensure higher number of invited female speakers in the future. Our results suggest that change, if desired, requires deliberate actions.

Authors and editors assort on gender and geography in high-rank ecological publications

Peer-reviewed publication volume and caliber are widely-recognized proxies for academic merit, and a strong publication record is essential for academic success and advancement. However, recent work suggests that publication productivity for particular author groups may also be determined in part by implicit biases lurking in the publication pipeline. Here, we explore patterns of gender, geography, and institutional rank among authors, editorial board members, and handling editors in high-impact ecological publications during 2015 and 2016. A higher proportion of lead authors had female first names (33.9%) than editorial board members (28.9%), and the proportion of female first names among handling editors was even lower (21.1%). Female editors disproportionately edited publications with female lead authors (40.3% of publications with female lead authors were handled by female editors, though female editors handled only 34.4% of all studied publications). Additionally, ecological authors and editors were overwhelmingly from countries in the G8, and high-ranking academic institutions accounted for a large portion of both the published work, and its editorship. Editors and lead authors with female names were typically affiliated with higher-ranking institutions than their male peers. This description of author and editor features provides a baseline for benchmarking future trends in the ecological publishing culture.