Speaking of gender bias

Abstract

A lot can be learned about the history of science in America from browsing through the front matter of PNAS across its 104-year history. You’d have to look through 73 volumes, for example, before coming across the name of the first distaff editor-in-chief. In 1985, molecular biologist Maxine Singer became the journal’s first female editor; at the time she was appointed, she presided over an Editorial Board of 16 NAS members, all of whom were men. By the time her term ended in 1988, plant molecular biologist Mary Dell-Chilton had joined the board, raising its percentage of female members from 0 to 6%. Today, PNAS has 215 Editorial Board members, 52, or 24%, of whom are female. All things considered, that’s not really an impressive rate of change—just short of a fourfold increase in representation across three decades. Even the US Congress, a longtime bastion of masculinity, has managed to better that rate; over that same time interval, the representation of women in Congress increased from 25 to 110 (proportionately, from 2 to 20%). Election to Congress, however, is open to members of the US population who meet a half-dozen or so minimum requirements of age, citizenship, and residency, so for decades, the eligible pool has been ∼50% female. In contrast, appointment to the PNAS Editorial Board is limited to members of NAS, another longtime bastion of masculinity, and election to NAS has many more stringent requirements than does election to Congress. In 2019, NAS has 2,811 members (including active members, emeritus members, and foreign associates); of these, 448 are women (16%). Although many factors may be invoked to account for the fact that, today, male emeritus members outnumber female emeritus members 10 to 1 (70 vs. 6), the ratio is in part a reflection of the historical gender skew …