Here was scrupulous evidence of female birds owning their sexual destiny and the paternity of their eggs. But Stutchbury’s team struggled to get their pioneering paper published. ‘We had reviewer after reviewer tell us that we were just point blank wrong,’ she told me. The reviewers of academic papers are anonymous, but given the field was at least 80 per cent male at the time, the sexual identity of the commentators is easy to guess. Especially when you factor in the level of mansplaining involved in their rejections.
