In Story 3 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned how editorial safetyism, caused by a worry to publish something that might be deemed “controversial,” delays important and corrective information from being published. We also learned that this occurs when the topic being discussed has to deal with sex or gender. Story 4 is another example of the issues that exist within peer review when one attempts to say that sex differences exist, and one is unlucky enough to have a social constructionist or determinist review their paper.
On April 16, 2022, we submitted a paper titled, “Sex differences in interest and willingness to participate in exercise and sports science research,” to the high-ranking exercise journal, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. Our paper summarized the results of our survey in which we asked men and women about their interest and willingness to participate in exercise and sports science research and the factors that impact this interest and willingness to participate.
After 6.5 months, on November 1, 2022, we received comments from two peer reviewers on our paper. Reviewer #1 was supportive of our paper and recommended only minor revisions. Reviewer #2 was a much different case.
Among many other critiques of paper, one of Reviewer #2’s primary concerns was our use of the word “sex” rather “gender” throughout the paper. The reviewer’s opinion was that by using the word “sex” rather than “gender,” we were not accounting for any social factors that might account for the psychological differences that we observed between the male and female survey takers. However, by using the word “sex,” we were not necessarily discounting any social influences. Instead, we had asked participants about their birth sex, and also, for most people, there is no difference between their birth sex and their gender.
Nevertheless, as there were only two reviewers, we needed to address Reviewer #2’s comments carefully. Reviewer #2 seemed to be in favour of rejecting our paper. At minimum, Reviewer #2 was using their position of power in this instance to try to bully us into using their preferred nomenclature.
However, for the sake of our work, our self-esteem, and for all other academics who conduct research in this space, we did not feel that giving into the reviewer’s demands, just for the sake getting the paper through peer review, was the right thing to do. Just as in war, appeasement does not work in the long run. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile, particularly as it pertains to language and nomenclature.
We needed to find a way to address Reviewer #2’s concern without causing them to feel unheard or causing them to overreact and reject our paper. Also, at this point, our paper had been under review for 6.5 months. We wanted to get our paper through peer review as quickly as possible, and we did not want to have to submit the paper to another journal.
One day, a solution to our problem with Reviewer #2 occurred to me: I asked myself, “Do we even need to use the words ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ in our paper? Would it be possible to remove mention of these words and not lose any scientific legitimacy?”
Sure enough, this was possible, and that is exactly what we did. We carefully reworded and restructured sentences such that instead of calling results “sex differences,” we simply referred to them as “differences between men and women.” For example, the original title of our paper was, “Sex differences in interest and willingness to participate in exercise and sports science research.” We simply changed the title to, “Men and women differ in their interest and willingness to participate in exercise and sports science research.”
I actually prefer the latter title. I think it stronger and clearer. And by not referring to “sex” or “gender,” no reader will be confused about what we believe to be the causes of the differences we observed. Identifying the causes of such differences in interest and willingness to participate in exercise research was not the point of the study. The point was simply to examine whether such differences exist.
So, two weeks after receiving the reviewers’ comments, on November 15, we submitted the revised version of our paper. Given that Reviewer #1’s feedback was minimal, and given that we found a trick to not let Reviewer #2 serve as the gender word police, we thought, given that the paper had already been under review for 6.5 months, that our resubmission would be quickly processed. This was not the case.
We did not receive the second round of reviews on our paper until April 3, 2023, nearly five months after our resubmission and nearly one year after our original submission. Moreover, during the five-month period, we repeatedly emailed the editorial office asking for status updates about our paper. In return, we received unhelpful responses from an editorial assistant who had no administrative power. We also attempted to contact the associate editor directly via his university email, but we did not receive a response. Then, we attempted to contact the chief editor of the journal. Again, no response. We even offered the editorial office a solution to the associate editor’s incompetence and unprofessional behaviour; we suggested that they simply hand our paper off to a different associate editor. That potential solution never came to fruition.
In this second round of reviewer comments that we finally received in April, Reviewer #2 was still not happy. The reviewer made comments about the “underrepresentation” of females as participants in exercise research, and how we were not doing enough to discuss this in our paper. The reviewer also suggested that because we were not discussing such things that our results did not have much to offer. This was a ridiculous statement considering that we have been the only researchers to actually ask women (and men) about their interest in participating in such research and the factors that influence their participation, which, can be used in efforts to try to increase both male and female participation. In effect, Reviewer #2 was disappointed that we were not serving as feminist activists or as wimps who bow to the gender langue police. Moreover, the editor was on Reviewer #2’s side, which made the process even more annoying. Thus, on April 11, we once again submitted a revised version of our paper, this time including responses to both concerns of Reviewer #2 and the editor.
Then, finally, a month later, on May 15, 2023 our paper was finally accepted for publication. It appeared online later that month.
In total, the paper took 1.5 years to get through peer review. The abnormally long review time was due a combination of an incompetent editor and a social constructionist peer reviewer. For a simple survey study to take this long to get through peer review is unacceptable.
Nevertheless, the good news is that we were able to get the results published in a major journal. Moreover, in December of 2023, we published a follow-up piece in another journal. Also, we have written about our results at Reality’s Last Stand on Substack.
The review process associated with this paper was long and excruciating. Yet, remarkably, it was not the longest review that I have gone through. The longest review I have experienced is the topic of Story 5.
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Personal drama in academic peer review: Story 4 – Gender word police