Suppose you need to hire a lab manager. As CVs tumble in, you receive two identical CVs, one from a candidate named "John" and another from a candidate named "Jennifer." Which do you hire? How much do you pay them? Who do you think is more competent?

In essence, these are questions that a 2012 study in PNAS sought to answer, and the results startled the scientific community. This study found that biology, chemistry, and physics professors rated the female candidate as less hirable and less competent—and offered her a 13% lower salary. These results held true for both male and female faculty, suggesting they were the result of implicit, or unconscious, gender bias.

Implicit bias remains a large problem within the scientific community, in part because it persists even after successful efforts to remove conscious bias. Despite many years of having a healthy pipeline of female scientist trainees, women still fail to have equitable representation at the upper (or even mid!) echelons of scientific achievement. This suggests there are layers of bias not yet peeled away, which we have previously discussed several times at The Female Scientist.

Many of these layers appear to be unconscious or implicit; that is, they are attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Such attitudes are, unfortunately, very widespread. If you think yourself immune, try taking a 10 minute Implicit Association Test to see if that is true. For example, 70% of test takers show at least some association between males and science and between females and liberal arts.

What can we do about implicit bias? While there have been many discussions about what the scientific community as a whole can do, today I want to make this discussion personal: what can I, as the editor of a prominent reviews journal, Trends in Biochemical Sciences (TiBS), do to combat my own implicit biases so I can promote gender equity in the scientific community? As Joanne Kamens, Association of Women in Science Massachusetts Chapter (MASS-AWIS) founder (and Addgene executive director) advised us in her talk about implicit bias at our LabLinks "The Gender of Science and the Science of Gender" last year, awareness is a good start.



In her talk, Joanne lays out four actionable strategies to increase awareness of unconscious bias and combat it: collect data, evaluate subtle messages, structure processes for success, and hold everyone accountable. Taking these strategies one by one, I will discuss what I am doing as an editor to execute these strategies (and identify places where perhaps I could improve). In particular, I'll look at how I can apply these strategies around a few of my major duties as editor where my decisions could be influenced by gender bias and could also affect the prevalence of bias in the scientific community: my selection and recruitment of authors for the material my journal publishes ("commissioning"), my evaluation of and decision making on presubmission inquiries, my selection and invitation of peer reviewers, and my selection and invitation (or retirement) of Advisory Editorial Board members.

1. Collect data

I examined the gender distribution (inferring gender based on photos, text references, and names) for TiBS senior authors (that is, the people who were invited to write for TiBS), reviewers, invited reviewers, and author-suggested reviewers in 2016 and found that 26.3% of the commissioned authors were women. This was a little better than the reviewer pool: 20.5% of the reviewers were women. This number was similar to both the percentage of women invited to review (21.4%) and the percentage of female reviewers suggested by authors (21.8%). Dishearteningly, just 13% of presubmission inquiries came from women; of the presubmission inquiries that did result in an invitation to write, 13% were also women (suggesting no effect of gender on the selection of the proposal). To put this into context, Nature recently revisited their progress in balancing gender representation in their authors and peer reviewers and found that peer reviewers were 23% and 22% female in 2014 and 2015, respectively, up from 14%, 12%, and 13% in 2011, 2012, and 2013; female authors in the magazine section generally grew (but did not exceed 25% in any section). Science also recently published an Editorial acknowledging that just 17% of senior authors from their 2015 publications were women.

However, one difficulty in judging progress is in knowing the true gender representation of the "pool" of potential authors and reviewers. A recent, excellent commentary in Nature examined gender bias in the peer review process. This commentary stood out because the authors were able to directly compare the gender representation of peer reviewers in the American Geophysical Union society journals with the gender distribution in the membership and authorship of the society-associated journals. The authors found that women were underrepresented as reviewers because of bias in both author and editor reviewer suggestions (although a slightly higher decline rate from women also contributed).

For my purposes, some reasonable approximations can be made from data from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM). Given that almost all of the TiBS-invited authors are tenured or tenure-track academic faculty in the life and biological sciences, the NSF and CWSEM tables suggest that my author and reviewer pool comprises between 30% and 39% women, respectively. Without even getting into whether I should be aspirational when balancing gender in TiBS authors and reviewers (an interesting discussion for another time), I still have a ways to go to simply reflect the community.

2. Evaluate subtle messages

What subtle messages might TiBS be sending? Representation of women in imagery associated with the journal (covers, website images) is one way a scientific journal might exhibit implicit bias. Also, the use of gendered language in articles, particularly the use of "man" versus "human," and the use of masculine language in articles (especially their titles) is relevant.

Although it's harder to assess our previous performance in this matter, I'm trying to be conscious of these messages since hearing Joanne's talk. For example, when designing covers and creating promotional images on the TiBS website, I actively try to represent women more frequently (see our October and August covers last year). In addition, our house style has dictated the use of "human" instead of "man" for some time. But what about presubmission inquiries, where the percentage of proposals put forward by women is so low? Although we have not yet done so, a careful examination of how we might alter our language to encourage female authors is warranted. We welcome suggestions from the community on implicit messages TiBS may be sending.

3. Structure processes for success

To avoid implicit bias, how might I structure the processes through which I make decisions for TiBS? One of Joanne's suggestions is to make committees aspirationally diverse; in other words, compose a committee that reflects the heterogeneity you would like to see in your institution. For TiBS, this most easily applies to the Advisory Editorial Board. Currently, 4 of 15 AEB members are female (~27%). This is one area where we have not made progress over the past year, and we hope to get this number closer to 50% in the near future.

4. Hold everyone accountable

In part, I have written this blog post to hold myself, and TiBS, accountable. By being transparent about the biases at TiBS, I freely open up the journal to criticism from the community. My hope, though, is that by doing this I can initiate an open conversation about what scientific editors and publishers should be doing to combat implicit—and explicit—bias in the scientific community. Do publishers have a moral obligation to be "aspirationally representative" in the diversity of their authors and reviewers? Or should we merely be expected to represent the gender distribution of the current research community? Specific suggestions of what actions we should take are welcome.

Returning to Joanne Kamens's talk, I must ask myself: am I aware of my own implicit gender biases? Looking at author and reviewer representation in TiBS certainly revealed some of my biases. But are others still hidden? Of those I am now aware of, how do I go about changing them—and how far should I go? Is gender equality the same as gender equitability in this case?

These are still open questions that, to my mind, do not have clear answers. I welcome your thoughts.