[alexmlamb]

"Studies have shown that journal editors prefer reviewers of the same gender, that women are underrepresented in the peer review process, and that reviewers tend to be influenced by demographic factors like the author’s gender or institutional affiliation. "

Most venues are double blind, so reviewers wouldn't know about the latter things. Having fewer women in the reviewer pool is unfortunate, but it's hard to see how it would effect the mean review quality in a direct way assuming that men and women are equally good at reviewing (maybe in an indirect way it could harm reviews by increasing the load per-reviewer).

[bmc7505]

Not sure if this is the case, but I'd like to play devils advocate. While most venues are double blind, it is still possible there is a subconscious gender bias. Many studies have shown that gender can be readily detected from anonymized authors based style alone.

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-0310

http://cs224d.stanford.edu/reports/BartleAric.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...

[xioxox]

Whether venues are double blind is extremely field dependent. In my field no journals are to my knowledge. However, many people use an initial rather than a first name, so it's difficult to assign gender unless you already know the person.

[abdullahkhalids]

Depends on the field. In my field, I know pretty much the twenty groups who have the expertise to review my work and every paper of mine I could identify with high certainity from the referee's comment which group they belonged to.