Discrimination in Scientific Review - A natural field experiment on blind versus non-blind review

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impacts of gender, as well as other author characteristics, on reviewers’ grading of papers submitted to an international conference in economics in Sweden in 2008. Correcting for other variables, including country and research field as well as researcher academic level, we focus on the difference in grades between blind and non-blind review treatments. We find little effect of non-blind reviewing and no significant evidence of gender or any other type of discrimination. Furthermore, we do not find any significant difference between the average grading by female and male reviewers.