Gender Distribution of Scientific Prizes Is Associated with Naming of Awards after Men, Women or Neutral

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors The article should present more research results. The research conducted and the conclusions obtained from the study should be described in more detail. Describe the research methods used. The article as it stands is a mere academic-level statistical analysis. Unfortunately, the article is very weak.    

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their time to evaluate our work.

We would like to point out that a detailed Methods section can be found at the end of the manuscript, as requested by the journal template. We hope the reviewer will find the information required in this section.

We would also like to highlight that the purpose of this manuscript is to solely present and describe the data set. An in-depth analysis of surrounding factors and potential suggestions for improvements on this issue has been published in Nature Human Behaviour (DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01773-9)

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper presents an interesting dataset that is concerned with the gender of awardees of scientific prizes and medals. Overall the paper is clearly written. Please find my additional comments below.

Figure 1 could be better presented; currently the figure is somewhat difficult to decipher. In addition, what is the correspondence between the left panel and the right one at the same horizontal level? What does each bar correspond to? If they correspond to individual prizes, the authors should clearly annotate this in the caption. In short, I suggest the authors to enhance the presentation of the information in this figure, and potentially consider normalizing some of the number for better visualization. 

 

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for their time and helpful comments.

We have revised Figure 1 including the figure and its caption accordingly, highlighting that the left (coloured) part of the figure represents absolute numbers of female/male recipients of individual prizes (at each row) while the right part indicates the relative proportion of female recipients as percentage. To highlight this fact, we have adapted the graphical representation of the right part of this figure to indicate both, female and male recipient percentages. This also serves the normalization of the data presented in this part of the figure as suggested by the reviewer.

We have further added some more information to all other figure legends.

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The purpose of the paper is clear, and the discussion is very appropriate. In Table 2, there are 2 details that may need checking. In the top panel, the individual gender categories sum to 345, while the value for "All" is given as 346. Similarly, in the bottom panel, the categories sum to 78, while the value given for "All" is 79.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their careful reading and spotting this discrepancy. We have checked the data set and have corrected Figure 2 and the text. There is now consistency across the text, all figures and Table 1 (8,747 awardees across 345 awards), in line with the deposited data at OSF.

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript  lacks sufficient quality for publication in an International Journal. 

Regarding the manuscript, data-3001105 , I have the following thoughts: 

The topic is interesting, original and relevant. However, we don't know the exact origins/source(s) of the data ("11 general Scientific Societies") — there is no justification for this choice: why these awards and not others? And what is the origin/source of the data? The paper reads like a newspaper report with some basic statistics (absolute/relative frequencies, with measurements over time, but there isn't even a single application of a hypothesis test (I think the data are a sample, for the authors didn't collect the whole population).

In order to be a scientific paper, the sampling/data collection process must be identified and justified. The methodologies could include statistical inference processes (comparison tests, correlation tests, etc.), time series analysis, but with methodologies from this area, etc. 

In terms of graphical representations of the data: Figure 2 is not correct; the 50 scale halfway down the % axis is fine, but the bars are incorrect (they are comparing graphs in the same figure); the bar to represent (13) is lower than the bar to represent (12) in absolute terms in two graphs, for example. The graphs are not the most suitable for representing time series data (in particular those in Figure 3 and Figure 4). The authors should consult texts on time series representation.

I rejected the paper because Data "publishes in two sections: a section on the collection, treatment and analysis methods of data in science; a section publishing descriptions of scientific and scholarly datasets (one dataset per paper)."

This paper does not provide adequate treatment and analysis methods of data in science, nor adequate/scientific descriptions of scientific and scholarly datasets.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

 Moderate editing of English language required.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for taking the time to read and comment on our work.

We have selected the oldest general comprehensive (interdisciplinary) scientific societies that award prizes and record (and publicize) the details of previous award recipients. Of course, we encourage the scientific community to extend the analysis to other societies, including other disciplines as well as of course also towards other under-represented groups – as we already highlight in the paper.

We would furthermore like to highlight that the source of data and access to them is described in detail in the method section of the paper.

The reviewer is correct, there are not hypotheses tested in this paper. The paper represents a data paper which is in line with the focus of this journal and papers published therein.

The data discussed in this paper represent the entire population for each of the awarded prizes but of course, this sample population will be progressing as more prizes and medals will be awarded in future.

Regarding their comments to Figure 2, there seems to be a misunderstanding. The numbers in brackets on top of each bar do not repeat the numbers already indicated by the size of the bars themselves but the number of different medals and prizes in each of the categories. We have highlighted this in the figure legend now and thank the reviewer for highlighting the potential for misunderstanding.  

With regards to their comments on suitable styles for the representation of time series we like to emphasize that figure 3 is actually not representing a time series. For figure 4, unfortunately the reviewer does not substantiate why they think time series cannot, or should not, be represented this way despite it actually representing a common way to depict time series of categorical data (3 categories + no-data in our case). See e.g. https://www.rti.org/rti-press-publication/visualization-categorical-longitudinal-times-series-data for examples.    

 

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I believe that the study is not very relevant for all scientists and readers. However, there is a group of people interested in this problem. The study is conducted and described very poorly.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thank the authors for addressing my comments from the previous review round. I don’t have further comments.