Michael Eisen on Civil Rights

Study gender bias in scientific publications

• The number of female authors falls off as you go down the list of authors of a paper, with fewer than 30% of senior authors female.
• Contrary to my expectation, there doesn't seem to be a bias to put the male author first when there are male-female co-first author pairs.
• There are, however, far fewer male-female co-first author pairs than there should be based on the number of male and female first and second authors.
• The same thing holds true more generally for first-second author pairs. There is a deficit of cross gender pairs and a surplus of same gender pairs.