Meta-analyses in the psychological sciences typically examine moderators that may explain heterogeneity in effect sizes. One of the most commonly examined moderators is gender. Overall, tests of gender as a moderator are rarely significant, which may be because effects rarely differ substantially between men and women. While this may be true in some cases, we also suggest that the lack of significant findings may be attributable to the way in which gender is examined as a meta-analytic moderator, such that detecting moderating effects is very unlikely even when such effects are substantial in magnitude. More specifically, we suggest that lack of between-primary study variance in gender composition makes it exceedingly difficult to detect moderation. That is, because primary studies tend to have similar male-to-female ratios, there is very little variance in gender composition between primaries, making it nearly impossible to detect between-study differences in the relationship of interest as a function of gender. In the present article, we report results from two studies: (a) a meta-meta-analysis in which we demonstrate the magnitude of this problem by computing the between-study variance in gender composition across 286 meta-analytic moderation tests from 50 meta-analyses, and (b) a Monte Carlo simulation study in which we show that this lack of variance results in near-zero moderator effects even when male-female differences in correlations are quite large. Our simulations are also used to show the value of single-gender studies for detecting moderating effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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在荟萃分析中检测性别作为调节因素：研究间方差受限的问题。

心理科学中的荟萃分析通常检查可以解释效应大小异质性的调节因素。最常被审查的主持人之一是性别。总体而言，将性别作为调节因素的测试很少显着，这可能是因为男性和女性之间的影响很少有显着差异。虽然在某些情况下这可能是正确的，但我们还认为，缺乏重大发现可能归因于将性别作为荟萃分析调节因素进行检查的方式，因此即使这种影响很大，也不太可能检测到调节作用在幅度上。更具体地说，我们认为，小学之间的性别构成缺乏差异，使得检测适度性变得极其困难。也就是说，由于初选研究往往具有相似的男女比例，初选之间的性别构成差异很小，因此几乎不可能检测研究之间兴趣关系作为性别函数的差异。在本文中，我们报告了两项研究的结果：(a) 一项荟萃分析，其中我们通过计算来自 50 个荟萃分析的 286 项荟萃分析调节测试中性别构成的研究间方差来证明该问题的严重性。 -分析，以及（b）蒙特卡罗模拟研究，其中我们表明，即使男女之间的相关性差异相当大，这种方差的缺乏也会导致接近于零的调节效应。我们的模拟还用于展示单性别研究对于检测调节效应的价值。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。