Starting in 2018, BiasWatchNeuro will be monitoring author diversity in key journals in the field, on a monthly basis. Below is our first such entry.

Methods:

We have separated authors into three types: first authors, last (and sole) authors and middle authors.

We separated names out and classified them using Python, Beautiful Soup and the genderize.io API. When the inferred gender from the API was either below 60% probability or had less than 5 examples, we searched for the author’s gender manually. When we were not able to easily find a gender in these cases we excluded the author and noted the number and the type of author.

Suggestions and other comments are appreciated.

Base rates:

Based on numbers from the 2017 Society for Neuroscience Meeting, 49% of graduate students and postdocs in neuroscience are women and 32% of faculty in neuroscience are women. Combined, neuroscience has an overall base rate of 43%.

These numbers are now documented on our general neuroscience base rate page.

Journal of Neuroscience
Volume 38, Issues 1 through 5
Excluding: Section “This Week in The Journal”
First author gender ratio: 42 women : 50 men (46%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 28 women : 74 men (27%)
Middle author gender ratio: 169 women : 214 men (44%)
All author gender ratio: 239 women : 338 men (41%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 5 first authors and 27 middle authors. 32 in total.

Neuron
Volume 97, Issue 1 and Issue 2
Excluding: Corrections
First author gender ratio: 11 women : 28 men (28%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 10 women : 31 men (24%)
Middle author gender ratio: 52 women : 94 men (36%)
All author gender ratio: 73 women : 153 men (32%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 1 first author and 5 middle authors. 6 in total.

Nature Neuroscience
Volume 21, Issue 1
First author gender ratio: 11 women : 7 men (61%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 2 women : 19 men (10%)
Middle author gender ratio: 51 women : 70 men (42%)
All author gender ratio: 64 women : 96 men (40%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 0 first authors and 1 middle author. 1 in total.