Gender discrimination: science is no exception

Gender discrimination can be found in the most unexpected fields. An international team, involving Demian Battaglia, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de neurosciences des systèmes, as well as researchers from Yale and the Max Planck Institute (Germany), has just demonstrated that women are underrepresented in the peer review of scientific publications. This research is published in the journal eLife on March 21, 2017. Gender discriminations are a well-known phenomenon. Scientific research is not immune to these issues, particularly academic publications, one of the cornerstones of scientific work. To be validated, an article must be approved by independent researchers, who are supposed to be selected on the basis of their skills rather than their gender. Yet an international team has found that women scientists—already in a minority in their field—are underselected for peer review.