Bias Against Women?

 
GrrlScientist claims that women scientists publish fewer papers than men. She then goes on to offer an explanation [Women, Science and Writing].

The fact is that female scientists do not publish as often as male scientists. Why? Some people have told me that women do not produce scientific results that are of the same high quality as those produced by men (nor do they write life science blogs as well as men, apparently) and that male reviewers can readily recognize when a woman is the lead (or sole) author of an article because "women do science differently from men." Basically, science is still a very sexist community where its female practitioners publish less frequently than men at least partially because of the peer-review system that is in place. I think the commonly used single-blind peer review process is biased against papers whose lead (or sole) author is female, just as the field of science is biased against women in general.

She discusses a scientific study that supports the claim that reviewers are biased against women.

This does not sound right to me. There may be all kinds of reasons why women don't publish as much as men (if it's true) but I doubt very much that reviewers are more likely to reject a paper by a women scientist. For one thing, lots of reviewers are women. For another, why in the world would a male reviewer reject a paper just because the work is done by a female scientist? Do you think this is common practice among the scientists you know? Do you really think that in 2008 there are significant numbers of male scientists who are that biased against women? I don't.

UPDATE: Skepchick joins in with [Are women discriminated against in science?]. Let's not forget that this is the important question. There's no denying that some scientists are sexist, just as there's no denying that some are racist and homophobic. Some of them are even (gasp!) Christians! Does that justify saying that science is racist or science is religious? Of course not. What we should be trying to do is decide whether sexism is rampant among scientists or not. If it is, then we can justify saying that women are discriminated against in science even though we might hesitate to say that gays are discriminated against in science in spite of the fact that some scientists are homophobic.

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