During the Joint Math Meetings, I found myself discussing with a large and diverse group of people whether double-blind refereeing would be a good idea for math publications. This is not standard practice, although the referee usually does have anonymity in the process. This conversation began because a recent study (to be published soon in MAA FOCUS in an article written by Francis Su and Betty Mayfield) showed that women in mathematics are underrepresented when it comes to publishing. By this I mean that given how many women are mathematicians (and active members of professional societies like AMS or MAA), only a small percentage of those (I forget the number) are publishing in the big journals. As you can tell I have very few details (this is a study that hasn’t been published yet, after all), but what I was interested in doing in this post was discussing whether double-blind refereeing could solve the problem of representation of women and minorities in journals, and whether this under-representation is really caused by the refereeing process.  What I’m most interested in, actually, is opening this topic for discussion. Continue reading →