Correlation of Time from Submission to Acceptance of Astronomical Papers with Gender of Lead Author

Abstract

To explore whether gender bias has an effect on publication times, we looked at the elapsed time from submission to acceptance, \Deltat, for female and male first authors submitting to the Astrophysical Journal. For the years 1998 and 2018, around 4000 papers were collected and analyzed to determine first author gender and \Deltat. On average, papers with women as first authors take two weeks longer to be accepted for publishing than papers written by their male counterparts. Although we do not believe a week is a long enough elapsed time to give female authors a disadvantage, it shows that there are gender discrepancies within astrophysics that need to be addressed. We hope by collecting voluntary demographic data from first authors publishing to astrophysical journals that biases such as these can be resolved.