Is political science peer review biased against women?

The Monkey Cage published a post by Dawn Langan Teele and Kathleen Thelen: "Some of the top political science journals are biased against women. Here's the evidence." The evidence presented for the claim of bias appears to be that women represent a larger percentage of the political science discipline than of authors in top political science journals. But that doesn't mean that the journals are biased against women, and the available data that I am aware of also doesn't indicate that the journals are biased against women:

1. Discussing data from World Politics (1999-2004), International Organization (2002), and Comparative Political Studies and International Studies Quarterly (three undisclosed years), Breuning and Sanders 2007 reported that "women fare comparatively well and appear in each journal at somewhat higher rates than their proportion among submitting authors" (p. 350).

2. Data for the American Journal of Political Science reported by Rick Wilson here indicated that 32% of submissions from 2010 to 2013 had at least one female author and 35% of accepted articles had at least one female author.

3. Based on data from 1983 to 2008 in the Journal of Peace Research, Østby et al. 2013 reported that: "If anything, female authors are more likely to be selected for publication [in JPR]".

4. Data below from Ishiyama 2017 for the American Political Science Review from 2012 to 2016 indicate that women served as first author for 27% of submitted manuscripts and 25% of accepted manuscripts.

APSR Data---

The data across the four points above do not indicate that these journals or corresponding peer reviewers are biased against women in this naive analysis. Of course, causal identification of bias would require a more representative sample beyond the largely volunteered data above and would require, for claims of bias among peer reviewers, statistical control for the quality of submissions and, for claims of bias at the editor level, statistical control for peer reviewer recommendations; analyses would get even more complicated accounting for the possibility that editor bias can influence peer reviewers selection, which can make the process easier or more difficult than would occur with unbiased assignment to peer reviewers.

Please let me know if you are aware of any other relevant data for political science journals.

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NOTE

1 The authors of the Monkey Cage post have an article that cites Breuning and Sanders 2007 and Østby et al. 2013, but these data were not mentioned in the Monkey Cage post.

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