Womens contributions to the leading journal Nature

Nature’s sexism

The top journal Nature recently featured an article discussing the contribution of women to the publication, and the focus on female scientists within its pages. On their editorial board they have a respectable 54% women, but the number of female scientists appearing in other sections of the journal and its production is much lower. 

Only 19% of the Comment and World View articles have a female author and of the scientists profiled by journalists, only 18% are women. Even more disappointingly,  the number of women requested to act as referees is a paltry 14%.

As the article points out, this is in part due to the lack of female scientists in top positions. Unfortunately, changing the gender composition of the highest rungs of academia is a challenge too large for one journal to take on alone. However, the editors of Nature have, encouragingly, used the article to pledge that they will do their very best to introduce a "gender loop" into their thinking: taking the time to check which women could be commissioned to contribute to any particular article or task. If the team at Nature successfully manage to do this, they could well have a very positive impact on the coverage talented female ecologists get in one of the most important publications in their field. 

Read this article (and the interesting things it links to!) here.