A rare resignation has focused attention on scientific societies' treatment of women. Theresa Markow, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), has stepped down in protest that women were not adequately considered for the editorship of its journal, Evolution.

Many think the incident is symptomatic of a wider issue. “I see this as truly problematic,” says Patricia Gowaty, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. “And it is not unique to the SSE.”

The society's rules state that it should create a nominating committee to choose a chief editor. But instead, the society appointed a man after informal queries. It then rejected Markow's request to redo the process. Markow, a geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, resigned the SSE presidency on 18 March, about ten weeks into her term.

“I strongly feel that being inclusive with respect to gender ... is non-negotiable,” Markow wrote in her resignation letter. “I cannot serve as president of a society when the council and I share such major contrasts of view.”

Officers at the SSE admit the selection process was flawed, adding that they regret Markow's departure. “This resignation has brought into focus the issue of participation of women,” says ecologist Dolph Schluter of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. “The society should address that.” Schluter is the SSE's previous president, and he oversaw the search for an editor.

A committee has been formed to tackle the issue, Schluter points out. However, the society's 2,400 members were not informed of Markow's resignation until 11 April, after Nature called for comment.

In the SSE's nearly 60 years, Evolution has had only one female editor — Markow, from 1995 to 1999. Other journals are similar. Daphne Fairbairn, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, says she had a “discouraging” experience when she proposed female candidates for an editing position at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, published by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. “No one else came up with a single woman candidate,” says Fairbairn. “When I raised the issue, they looked at me dumbly.”

They would say ‘she is nasty’, or ‘she didn't do a good job’. No one was going through the men's list and saying those things.

She says society leaders criticized her suggestions unfairly. “They would say ‘she is nasty’, or ‘she didn't do a good job’. No one was going through the men's list and saying those things.” When Fairbairn's term as North American editor ends, the journal will have no female editors.

Juha Merilä, a biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland and the journal's editor-in-chief, acknowledges there are difficulties appointing women. There are few women at high levels of science in Europe, he says, so the pool of candidates is small. “I am, of course, a little disappointed,” he says. “I went through quite a few names; all declined because of other responsibilities.”

A man's world? Women researchers accuse some societies of being old boys' clubs. Credit: IMAGE100/ALAMY

The journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, The Auk, has not had a woman editor in its 123-year history. But Kimberley Sullivan, an ornithologist at Utah State University in Logan, has a grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to address such issues, and seems to be making progress. The society's existing fellows pick new fellows at the union's annual meeting, from a slate of nominees. At her first fellows' meeting, Sullivan says women nominees were “trashed”. “They started blackballing nominees, with someone saying: ‘I was with her on a field trip and she misidentified a bird’,” she says. “It was terrible.” The younger men on the slate came in for the same treatment, she says.

Sullivan presented data from her NSF study at last years' meeting, arguing that the union's tactics were turning it “from an old boys' club into an old men's society”. For the first time, the entire slate of prospective fellows was inducted without criticism. “I think the organization has been an old boys' club,” says president-elect Erica Dunn, of the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa. “But the mood is to change.”

For Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University in New York who has an NSF grant to promote women in Earth sciences, change can't come soon enough. “This is a civil rights issue,” she says. “We are trying to create women leaders at the institutional level.”