The scientific impact of gender in behaviour, ecology and evolution: authorship and citation performance

Over the last few decades, gender bias across scientific disciplines has been revealed in the form of skewed gender ratios among invited speakers in conferences, authorship in scientific journals and academic positions. Despite recent improvements in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, many gender imbalances remain, especially in aspects that affect scientific impact and academic performance. Here, we analyse more than 100 000 papers in the fields of behaviour, ecology and evolutionary biology over the past 20 years to investigate dynamics of gender ratio in authorship and examine its effect on citation performance, with a particular focus on animal behaviour research. Despite the improving gender ratio towards a balanced representation, we still see that the gender of first authors relates to the gender of the last author, that male-dominated author groups still prevail and that there is a very low representation of female single authors. Using proportional odds modelling, we find that having female authors, and higher gender diversity in the authors' group, decreases a paper's chances of achieving higher citation performance, an effect that is, however, less evident in animal behaviour research. Our results highlight the need for more systematic investigation of the sources of gender imbalances and the importance of community-driven initiatives and changes in academic practices. • Authors' gender diversity has increased over the past two decades. • A strong male bias persists, especially in single author publications. • Female authorship often leads to lower citation performance. • Animal behaviour papers show balanced gender ratios and lower citation biases. • Articles in method- and review-focused journals remain male dominated.