Journal review and gender equality: a critical comment on Budden et al.

In a recent article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution [1], Budden et al. claim that double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors. Their evidence took the form of analyses of the number of papers appearing in six ecology and evolutionary biology journals in two periods, before (T1, 1997–2000) and after (T2, 2002–2005) one of the journals, Behavioral Ecology (BE), changed from single- to double-blind review. Budden et al. find an increase between T1 and T2 in the representation of female first authors in BE, whereas Journal of Biogeography (JB), one of the five journals that continued to practise single-blind review, appeared to be alone in featuring an increased proportion of male-authored papers (I say ‘appeared’ because the number of authors of unknown gender was large enough to cast some doubt on this trend).