I could swear someone said it’s getting better, but it’s not

As least as far as leadership positions for women in business goes, according to this article. And the reason? Well, it’s complicated, and there is this and that, but basically it’s bias.

The number of women leading the largest companies has always been small. This year, it got 25 percent smaller… evidence shows that the obstacles for female executives aren’t just because of their individual choices. There are larger forces at work, experts say, rooted in biases against women in power, mothers who work or leaders who don’t fit the mold of the people who led before them.

Effects of anonymization

There’s a nice summary here of several studies of anonymization in peer review. The summary itself comes from a study showing that 74-90% of reviews (reviewers were invited to guess author identities) contained no correct guesses of author identity.

reviewers with author information were 1.76x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from famous authors, and 1.67x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from top institutions…when reviewers knew author identities, review scores for papers with male-first authors were 19% higher, and for papers with female-first authors 4% lower.

Read more.