Equity for women in science: the role of gatekeepers

ABSTRACT

Sugimoto and Larivière's unique scientometric approach gained recognition within medicine when they coauthored a bibliometric analysis on gender and authorship in The Lancet's 2019 theme issue on advancing women in science, medicine, and global health. [...]despite women being more than half of all medical and science undergraduates for many years, Sugimoto and Larivière estimate that very slow growth in women's representation among scientists in clinical medicine means gender parity in authorship will not be reached in that field before 2049. By contrast, women science leaders typically advance early career researchers, share credit, and lead gender diverse teams, which have higher scientific impact. An acknowledged limitation is the use of one aspect of social identity, gender, in the binary assignment available in current classification systems and they were unable in most cases to include race or ethnicity indicators except where national census data allowed. The simple recognition of the editorial process being a social one—involving judgement, priority setting, negotiation, inevitable bias, and all the other aspects that define human behaviour—gives rise to seeing how decisions about what to publish and which messages to showcase are the product of a social process in which diverse sets of individuals applying high standards of editorial quality and scientific excellence nevertheless deploy agency, make choices, and exercise privilege.