Women less likely to submit to top-tier journals, study finds
Women researchers are significantly less likely than men to submit their work to the world’s highest-impact journals, according to a new study published in eLife, highlighting persistent gendered patterns in academic publishing behaviour.
Surveying nearly 5,000 active authors, the researchers found that women were less likely to report having submitted manuscripts to prestigious titles such as Science, Nature, or PNAS. When they did submit, women reported sending fewer manuscripts on average than their male counterparts.
Notably, women were more likely to say they had been advised not to submit their work to high-impact journals – both generally and in the case of their most-cited papers. While there was no statistically significant gender difference in how respondents rated the overall quality of their work, women were more likely to cite concerns that their research was “not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel” as a reason for not targeting elite journals. Men, by contrast, were more likely to suggest their work was better suited to a more specialised publication.
The authors argue that these gendered differences in submission behaviour may contribute to women’s underrepresentation as leading authors in top-tier journals, with implications for career progression. They call for targeted interventions to help address disparities that arise before the peer review process even begins.