Criticisms of Peer Review

With peer review being such an important part of scholarly articles getting published, you would hope that there would be no bias and that everyone would receive equal opportunity. Sadly, this is not the case. Women are constantly looked down upon and discriminated against in the academic world, especially when it comes to fields such as biology. Men are always looked at as superior because women are “not good enough” at one thing or another.

I think that a great way to solve this issue would be to either not list the names of authors during peer review so that the review couldn’t be gender biased, or to list the names of authors alphabetically. If the names were listed alphabetically then we wouldn’t have to worry about women’s names being listed mater just because of their gender, thus removing the gender bias.

While we are improving as a nation when it comes to gender inequality, there are still some pressing issues that need more attention, but I believe that we can start to close the inequality gap in research by making the peer review process more gender neutral.