Perspective from grad school: Unconsciously done

Abstract

Implicit, or unconscious, bias is getting a lot of press. As scientists, we often consider ourselves as experts at placing our biases aside and simply being objective. However, in the world of publishing—you know, the way we gauge our success and value—we as the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) community have done very little to prevent bias from affecting the outcome of scientific work. The review process is single blind: Reviewers know the names of the authors of a given submission and the institutions they represent. This doesn’t sound too bad, except the whole point about implicit biases is that we don’t realize they’re affecting our judgments of others. This means that bias can exclude authors according to their gender, perceived ethnicity or nationality, or institution without reviewers even realizing it. My first paper was published recently. After nearly a year of submitting, revising, and submitting to different journals,