Women make up around 1 in 4 entries in indices from five major evolutionary psychology textbooks
An index of her own: An investigation of the proportion of women indexed in evolutionary psychology textbooks.
Thomas V. Pollet 1, 
@tvpollet
thomas.pollet@northumbria.ac.uk
Karolina Kovářová 1
Jeanne Bovet 1,
@Jeanne_Bovet
jeanne.bovet@northumbria.ac.uk
1 Dept. of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Introduction
Little is known about a potential gender bias in citations for evolutionary psychology and related disciplines.
Schmitt (2015) has argued however, that overall, evolutionary psychology is relatively unbiased in its citations in favour of men or women.
In this descriptive project, we examined the indices of five major recent textbooks covering evolutionary psychology. Even though we expect there to be fewer women than men indexed in textbooks we did not have an estimate in mind.
Schmitt (2015) used 37.2% to argue that the proportion of women cited in a paper on evolutionary psychology and feminism (Buss & Schmitt, 2011) was sociohistorically appropriate, as it mirrored the % of female authors at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting of 2013 (Meredith, 2013).
A recent survey among scholars in ‘Evolutionary Human Science’ reported that 38.1% (n = 579) were women (Kruger et al., 2022).
Methods
All analyses were conducted in R 4.2.1 (R Development Core Team, 2008).
Descriptive statistics (i.e. the proportions or percentages) and a Random Effect Meta-Analysis on the proportions via the ‘meta’ package (Balduzzi et al., 2019; Schwarzer et al., 2015).
Maximum Likelihood and the Agresti-Coull method (Agresti & Coull, 1998) for the estimation of the confidence interval.
A fuzzy joining procedure via optimal string alignment (“OSA”) of eight characters, in combination with a strict match of the first three letters of the last name, to identify which women were indexed in more than one textbook (Navarro, 2001; Robinson, 2020).
Five textbooks
- Buss (2019) Evolutionary Psychology - New Science of the Mind (6th ed.),
- Shackelford (2020) The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Integration of Evolutionary Psychology with Other Disciplines,
- Welling & Shackelford (2020) The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Endocrinology,
- Workman & Reader (2021) Evolutionary Psychology: an introduction (4th ed.) and
- Workman et al. (2020) The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior.
Results
Figure 1: Women in Evolutionary Psychology Textbooks. Note: Buss = Buss (2019); Shack. = Shackelford (2020); Well. = Welling and Shackelford (2020); Work1 = Workman and Reader (2021); Work2 = Workman, Reader and Barkow (2020)
Welling & Shackelford (2020) had a higher proportion of women included than other textbooks, 43.01%, 95% CI [38.16%; 47.99%].
The remaining four textbooks indexed less than 25% women.
Excluding Welling & Shackelford (2020) leads to an estimate of around 1 in 5 entries being women (random effect estimate of 21.85%, 95%CI [18.28%; 25.90%]).
Figure 2: Forest plot of proportions (‘events’ are women indexed). The tips of the diamond present the 95% CI for the effect size estimates, the red bar interval represents the prediction interval.
- 26 women indexed in more than one book. Majority only once.
Figure 3: Word cloud of women indexed more than once
Conclusion
Women make up around 1 in 4 entries in indices from five major textbooks.
Few women indexed in more than one textbook.
Many limitations (e.g., attribution of gender).
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by a BA-Leverhulme small research grant to Thomas Pollet and Jeanne Bovet.
References
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Buss, D. M. (2019). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind (6th edition). Psychology Press.
Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (2011). Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism. Sex Roles, 64(9), 768–787. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-9987-3
Kruger, D. J., Fisher, M. L., Platek, S. M., & Salmon, C. (2022). The 2020 Survey of Evolutionary Scholars on the State of Human Evolutionary Science. EvoS Journal, 9(1), 37–63.
Meredith, T. (2013). A journal of one’s own. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 7(4), 354. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0099183
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Robinson, D. (2020). Fuzzyjoin: Join tables together on inexact matching. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=fuzzyjoin.
Schmitt, D. P. (2015). On accusations of exceptional male bias in evolutionary psychology: Placing sex differences in citation counts in proper evidentiary contexts. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 9(2), 69. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000029
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Shackelford, T. K. (2020). The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Integration of Evolutionary Psychology with Other Disciplines. Sage.
Welling, L. L., & Shackelford, T. K. (2020). The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and behavioral endocrinology. Oxford University Press.
Workman, L., & Reader, W. (2021). Evolutionary psychology: An introduction (fourth edition). Cambridge University Press.
Workman, L., Reader, W., & Barkow, J. H. (2020). The Cambridge handbook of evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. Cambridge University Press.
