While living in an English speaking country, people have almost systematically assumed from my first name that I was a woman. Not only that, they also assumed that I could not spell my own name! During the 10 years I spent in New Zealand, I received countless emails where I was called Stephanie instead of Stephane. Even after exchanging multiple messages, each duly signed with the correct spelling of my first name, my correspondents kept adding an “i” where there was not supposed to be one. At first I politely corrected them, then I tried changing the spelling of my signature for Stephan, instead of Stephane, to clearly signal that it was a man’s first name. This made little difference, my correspondents would simply add “ie” at the end. So at some point I gave up. I thought that it did not have any consequences and was not worth the trouble really. It turns out I may have been wrong.
The latest study published in Rethinking Ecology (Gender bias when assessing recommended ecology articles) shows that ecologists tend to rate higher the work of their peers when they happened to be of the same gender. What’s more, the degree of homophily was found to be higher in men than in women. With a majority of ecologists being men, such distortion would obviously be detrimental to women (and possibly to men with “feminised” first names).
So is it possible that my work had been unfairly judged by men because they thought I was a woman? Probably not. Luckily, the study shows that the homophily effect was only significant when people had not read the actual work in details but only gave a general opinion about the top-100 must-read papers in Ecology. So peer review is probably (hopefully) not affected, as long as reviewers and editors actually read manuscripts in details. Nonetheless, homophily like other forms of gender bias is not tolerable when assessing the quality of scientific work and a number of solutions can be put in place to avoid such biases wether they are conscious or unconscious. According to the authors, these include ensuring mixed-gender interview panels, encouraging double-blind reviews, advocating alternative metrics of publication and citation performance etc.
Now that I am back in France, everybody around me knows that Stephane is a man’s name, and actually I often find myself signing my emails with the simple and genderless letter S. Another potential way to address homophily and other gender biases.
S.
Bradshaw, C. J., & Courchamp, F. (2018). Gender bias when assessing recommended ecology articles. Rethinking Ecology, 3, 1.