To explore the effect of institutional bias on peer-review decisions, researchers asked editors from the world’s leading economics journals to evaluate a handful of abstracts to guess whether the paper was published or not, the citations it received, and their overall assessment of its quality.

While editors saw the same abstracts, the study varied whether they could ​see the name and affiliation of the author. Despite 79 percent of 165 respondents being male, the analysis found there was no overt gender bias in assessments, with women facing no bias when the name of the author was visible to the editor compared to when it was not.