Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) 2020 report on gender balance among corresponding authors and reviewers: before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Analysis of peer reviewers’ response to invitations by gender and geographical region: cohort study of manuscripts reviewed at 21 biomedical journals before and during covid-19 pandemic

“…Our dataset enabled us to look at both invitations and responses to these same invitations, and we found that women were not only less frequently invited to review but also agreed less often than men, compounding this gender inequality. Although some gender inequality in peer review activity has been reported in the early pandemic period,23 other studies found no difference in overall patterns of review activity and women’s peer review activity 153233. To the best of our knowledge, our study was the first to look at invitations and responses to invitations by gender in the later stages of the pandemic compared with pre-pandemic.…”

“…This is the first study to explore gender and geographical diversity in invitations to review and responses to these invitations and to consider factors associated with this agreement at several levels (journals, manuscripts, reviewers, and editors). We included all review invitations at multiple journals, whereas other studies have been limited to online peer review reports of published manuscripts, focused on a single journal, or used aggregated metadata 1415161718192023323335. We explored geographical diversity by using multivariable analyses with both geographical affiliation and the income level of the country, which increases the understanding of the identified associations.…”

“…Bro et al and Perlis et al compared peer review invitations and agreement patterns in single journals with no focus on gender or geographical inequalities and reported no significant differences in reviewer activity during the pandemic 1532. Hupalo et al found no effect on women’s peer review activity during the pandemic compared with previous years,33 but this was explored in a single journal. However, a large study across 2329 Elsevier health and medicine journals found that women were less involved in peer review, with an agreement rate lower than that of men in the very early phase of the pandemic compared with two previous years; they did not report any differences by geographical areas 23…”

Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Advice on YouTube: Unveiling Gaps, Emphasizing Inclusivity, and Striving for Comprehensive Guidance

“…Gender representation among the content creators was determined using the Gender Application Programming Interface (API) (https://gender-api.com/), a leading gender inference service. Leveraging a large database of names, social media insights, and sociolinguistics, Gender API predicts sex based on a person's name—a methodology that has been tested, validated, and commonly used in representation studies across various fields 8,9 . However, it is important to note that this tool is restricted to binary gender classification and lacks the capability to accurately infer nonbinary genders.…”