Nature, Data, and Power: How Hegemonies Shaped This Special Section

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student-who was randomly assigned either a male or female name-for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants' preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Significance Scientific peer review has been a cornerstone of the scientific method since the 1600s. Debate continues regarding the merits of single-blind review, in which anonymous reviewers know the authors of a paper and their affiliations, compared with double-blind review, in which this information is hidden. We present an experimental study of this question. In computer science, research often appears first or exclusively in peer-reviewed conferences rather than journals. Our study considers full-length submissions to the highly selective 2017 Web Search and Data Mining conference (15.6% acceptance rate). Each submission is simultaneously scored by two single-blind and two double-blind reviewers. Our analysis shows that single-blind reviewing confers a significant advantage to papers with famous authors and authors from high-prestige institutions.