key: cord-0842420-yx4bl8jd
authors: McCormick, Cheryl M.
title: Disparities in the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on publishing: Evidence from submissions to Hormones and Behavior
date: 2020-07-10
journal: Horm Behav
DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104814
sha: 2754a6bb4a65799ab9256160c4e90af30be720fd
doc_id: 842420
cord_uid: yx4bl8jd

nan

Sometime in late March, when research labs were shut down in many countries and researchers began working from home, we became increasingly aware that the COVID-19 pandemic would affect some researchers more so than others. Much concern was expressed over the careers of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and early career researchers. The difficulties of working from home when one has young children was affecting parents' productivity, and particularly that of women based on their increased time spent in child care responsibilities relative to men. Very soon there were reports that women were submitting fewer papers for submission to journals. One of the earliest mentions on Twitter, and then in an article in the Guardian in April (Fazarkely, 2020) , was Dr. Elizabeth Hannon's (deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science) lament of a decline in submissions by women. My first response was, although certainly this was likely to be a consequence of the pandemic closures, wasn't it too soon to know? My second response was, is this true for submissions to Hormones and Behavior?

To answer these questions, I began collecting the gender breakdown of articles submitted to the journal, and I went back several months for comparisons. October 17, 2019 was the date of the change of the journal's submission system from EVISE to Editorial Manager, and I used that date until the end of 2019 as a first time period to investigate. For a second roughly similar amount of time, I used January 1, 2020 to March 18, 2020, which is an approximate date of the closing of many labs in North America. The third time frame was March 19, 2020 until May 31, 2020. I estimated (guessed at?) gender from Google searches when I did not know the author or when the name was more ambiguous as to which gender the name was usually assigned. There was a small percentage of papers, however, where I was unsuccessful. Table 1 shows my results. The number of submissions is similar across the three timeframes, though slightly lower in the third. As an aside, the number of submissions from January to the end of May in 2020 is higher at 220 than the 191 papers submitted for the same time period in 2019, which is good news.

Some of the results are positive in terms of gender balance, with a slightly higher proportion of women than men as first authors and relatively equal numbers of men and women as mid-authors and as last author, typically the position of the principle investigator. These numbers are certainly better than the proportion of about 37% women first authors based on an analysis of 60,000 journals over the past five years for Times Higher Education (Matthews, 2020) . The high proportion of women submitting papers to Hormones and Behavior reflects the high proportion of women in neuroendocrinology, which Nicole M. Baran wrote about in an article entitled "How women came to dominate neuroendocrinology" in 2018. The proportion of women submitting to Hormones and Behavior, however, does decline in 2020, consistent with a growing number of reports for other journals (e.g., Andersen et al., 2020; Cui et al., 2020; Muric et al., 2020) , though some report no decline (Fox, 2020) . Nevertheless, it remains early days, and the negative consequences of COVID-19 for research will likely grow.

The pandemic has amplified the inequalities in academia as it has in many facets of life. BIPOC, LGBTQQIP2SAA, and people with disabilities continue to be under-represented in science; the toll of the pandemic on their research careers may well exceed that of women. Baran (2018) provides a timely perspective in her discussion of the success of women in neuroendocrinology as evidenced in the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) and in the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD). She writes "Once enough women were in the field, it created a culture that was accepting of new female entrants." and quotes Elizabeth Adkins-Regan (a former Editor-in-Chief of Hormones and Behavior) "Women are attracted to fields where they would be let in and be treated as equal." Baran also writes: "Despite substantial progress in the inclusion of women in both OSSD and SBN, the two societies remain overwhelmingly white. The societies have made limited efforts to be more inclusive of scientists of color, LGBTQI + scientists, and other underrepresented groups, but their success with including women points the way forward." It will be important to increase greatly the efforts of inclusiveness to also redress the disparities in the consequences of the pandemic for the careers of scientists.

As for the effect on Hormones and Behavior, we seem to be weathering the pandemic, and we are grateful for the support we receive from the research community and the reviewers who have been able to take on reviewing during these difficult times.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104814

Hormones and Behavior 124 (2020) 104814 0018-506X/ © 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc. T Table 1 The estimated proportion of women authors submitting to Hormones and Behavior. 

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PhD) Editor-in-Chief, Hormones and Behavior E-mail address: cmccormick@brocku.ca