In June 2021, researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora turned a magnifying glass on Nature’s written journalism. Computational biologists Natalie Davidson and Casey Greene reported that most of the individuals we quoted were male.
Using automated methods, the authors found that 69% of the people quoted directly in Nature’s written journalism in 2020 were male (N. R. Davidson and C. S. Greene Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/gkscd5; 2021). This figure had been falling — the authors’ analysis of some 16,000 articles published between 2005 and 2020 found that the number was 87% in 2005 — but 69% was still unacceptably high.