Peer reviewer says female researchers should get a male co-author to “check” study

Yiiiikes.

A peer reviewer’s suggestion that two female researchers find “one or two male biologists” to co-author and help them strengthen a manuscript they had written and submitted to a journal has unleashed an avalanche of disbelief and disgust on Twitter today—and prompted an apology from the publisher of the journal, which media reports have identified as PLOS ONE.

Evolutionary geneticist Fiona Ingleby was shocked when she read the review accompanying the rejection for her latest manuscript, which investigates gender differences in the Ph.D.-to-postdoc transition, so she took the issue to Twitter.

Earlier today, Ingleby, a postdoc at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, posted two excerpts of the anonymous review. “It would probably … be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors)” to prevent the manuscript from “drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the reviewer wrote in one portion.

“Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” added the reviewer (whose gender is not known).

To recap: A reviewer who thinks it’s not surprising that the study found male students authored more papers than female students on the basis that men, on average, can run faster thinks that it’s the paper’s authors who would might be unduly influenced by “ideologically biased assumptions.” The reviewer also suggested that perhaps the male students tended to get published in better journals than their female counterparts “simply because men, perhaps, on average work more hours per week than women, due to marginally better health or stamina.”

I mean, when you’re reaching to supposed physical differences between men and women to explain away gender disparities in academia, you might want to question how your ideological bias against seeing sexism at all costs might be blinding you to the empirical evidence.