Evidently Women and Men Can Write Equally Atrocious Papers

The blogger at Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship links to an item from Nature about whether women are less successful than men in the peer review process. Researchers Herbert Marsh and Luz Bornmann describe work reconciling two conflicting studies -- one that found gender bias in peer review, and one that didn't. The new study, which incorporated data from both prior works, finds "no effect of the applicant’s gender on the peer review of their grant proposals," according to the authors, and holds true "across country, year of publication of the studies included in the meta-analysis, and disciplines ranging from physical sciences to the humanities." The MWEG blogger notes that the researchers on this study were male, and seems interested in hearing from female scientists on the subject.