Authors and editors assort on gender and geography in high-rank ecological publications.

Peer-reviewed publication volume and caliber are widely-recognized proxies for academic merit, and a strong publication record is essential for academic success and advancement. However, recent work suggests that publication productivity for particular author groups may also be determined in part by implicit biases lurking in the publication pipeline. Here, we explore patterns of gender, geography, and institutional rank among authors, editorial board members, and handling editors in high-impact ecological publications during 2015 and 2016. A higher proportion of lead authors had female first names (33.9%) than editorial board members (28.9%), and the proportion of female first names among handling editors was even lower (21.1%). Female editors disproportionately edited publications with female lead authors (40.3% of publications with female lead authors were handled by female editors, though female editors handled only 34.4% of all studied publications). Additionally, ecological authors and editors were overwhelmingly from countries in the G8, and high-ranking academic institutions accounted for a large portion of both the published work, and its editorship. Editors and lead authors with female names were typically affiliated with higher-ranking institutions than their male peers. This description of author and editor features provides a baseline for benchmarking future trends in the ecological publishing culture.

Grant-Writing Bootcamp: An Intervention to Enhance the Research Capacity of Academic Women in STEM.

Broadening the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) fields is more than a social-justice issue; diversity is paramount to a thriving national research agenda. However, women face several obstacles to fully actualizing their research potential. Enhancing the research capacity and opportunity of women faculty requires purposeful changes in university practice. Therefore, we designed an intervention, a grant-writing bootcamp informed by self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan 2012), to support the participants' feelings of relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Three grant-writing bootcamps were run over an 18-month period. Using a pre- and post-test design over the span of 1 year (and contrasting results with a comparison sample who were not part of the intervention) showed that the women participating in the grant-writing bootcamp significantly increased the number of external grants submitted, the number of proposals led as principal investigator, the number of external grants awarded, and the amount of external funding dollars awarded.