As there is some anecdotal evidence that the #Covid_19 pandemic hits female scientists disproportionally large in terms of manuscript submissions, I decided to check the numbers for "my" journal, @Geoderma_Jrnl. Short answer: this may indeed be the case. Long answer: (1/9)

I checked the latest 125 manuscripts submitted to our journal over the last three weeks, and compared them to 125 submitted one year ago. For each, I tried to determine the gender of the first author and the corresponding author. This is actually much harder than it may (2/9)

sound, as gender is not recorded during submission for privacy reasons. Therefore I had to do some heavy googling as well as using a genderization module. When in doubt, I left the manuscript out. I also noted the country of employment of the first author. (3/9)

I found that, overall, the percentage female first authors dropped from 38% in 2019 to 32% in 2020; the percentage female corresponding authors dropped from 24 to 18%. The total number of manuscript submissions increased, as it has done steadily of the last years. (4/9)

It is important to realize that the largest part of our submissions (~43%) comes from China, where the worst of the #Covid_19 pandemic may already have passed. For that reason, I also looked at the subgroup of European and North-American manuscripts (35 in my set). (5/9)

Then, the contrast is much larger: for European and North-American studies, the percentage female first authors has dropped from 48% in 2019 to 26% now; the percentage female corresponding authors from 41% to 17%. For Chinese manuscripts, the percentage female first authors (6/9)

remained relatively stable around 35%. This indeed seems to corroborate the anecdotal evidence that female scientists are hit disproportianlly hard by the #Covid_19 related restrictions in the various countires. (7/9)

I should end with a huge disclaimer: I am not a bibliometrician and this is still a small dataset from one journal. So my (very preliminary!) findings may turn out to be a misinterpretation or an outlier. Yet, I hope that this contributes a bit to understanding how (8/9)

#Covid_19 affects scientific functioning. I intend to repeat this analysis after the summer, when (hopefully!) restrictions will have lifted. (9/9)

PS apologies for the various spelling errors.... Very embarrassing, especially for an editor. Should have double-checked....