A study published this week in PLoS Biology found that research articles authored by women spend 7.4 to 14.6 percent longer under review than articles authored by their male peers. The study, led by David Alvarez-Ponce in the Department of Biology, analyzed millions of biomedical and life science articles published in thousands of journals.

After filtering articles for missing data, Alvarez-Ponce and his coauthors, two undergraduate students in his lab, examined over 7.75 million articles. The researchers conducted statistical analyses, and the findings show that articles with a female first author spent longer under review than articles with a male first author. The trend is also observed in articles with female corresponding authors, articles with female first authors and female corresponding authors, and articles authored by all-female teams. The findings were all significant and remained consistent when factoring in publication date, article length, readability, number of coauthors, field of study, country or territory of residence, or even all of those factors combined.

In some cases, the trend was reversed, including for fields of women’s health and biology, the study found.

“Female-authored articles spend longer under review in most, but not all, biomedical and life sciences disciplines,” Alvarez-Ponce, who studies bioinformatics and genome evolution, said. “This gives us hope that the gender gap in review times can be reduced in the future. We can learn from those fields in which female researchers don’t experience longer review times and try to export the good aspects of their academic culture to other fields.”

Alvarez-Ponce and his coauthors suggest that the discrepancy between the review times experienced by male and female authors could be due to several factors. Bias from editors and referees against female researchers is a plausible cause based on studies of bias in these contexts and could be mitigated by requiring double-blind peer review. The other factors, however, cannot be easily remedied. The first is that female researchers may take longer to revise and resubmit their manuscripts. Alvarez-Ponce and his coauthors note that may be due to intrinsic or extrinsic factors, including having more duties at home or higher teaching or service responsibilities alongside their research, when compared to their male counterparts, which has been studied in prior work. The other factor could be that female authors are, on average, less experienced than their male counterparts, due at least in part to the increase in representation of female scientists over time and female researchers being more likely to leave academia than male researchers.

“Women are underrepresented in academia, especially in STEM fields and senior positions, which seems to be due to women having to face more obstacles than their male peers throughout their careers,” Alvarez-Ponce said. “Our analyses contribute to documenting one of these obstacles.”

Publications are a key factor for academic faculty members applying for jobs, funding, tenure and promotion. The longer review times can help explain why, on average, female academics publish fewer articles per year than their male counterparts. Alvarez-Ponce hopes that the new study results, considered in the context of the adage “publish or perish,” will effect changes that can decrease the gender gap in academia.