Abstract
Despite substantial progress for women in science, women remain underrepresented in many aspects of the scholarly publication process. We examined how the gender diversity of editors and reviewers changed over time for six journals in ecology and evolution (2003–2015 for four journals, 2007–2015 or 2009–2015 for the other two), and how several aspects of the peer review process differed between female and male editors and reviewers. We found that for five of the six journals, women were either absent or very poorly represented as handling editors at the beginning of our dataset. The representation of women increased gradually and consistently, with women making up 29% of the handling editors (averaged across journals) in 2015, similar to the representation of women as last authors on ecology papers (23% in 2015) but lower than the proportion of women among all authors (31%) and among members of the societies that own the journals (37%–40%). The proportion of women among reviewers has also gradually but consistently increased over time, reaching 27% by 2015. Female editors invited more female reviewers than did male editors, and this difference increased with age of the editor. Men and women who were invited to review did not differ in whether they responded to the review invitation, but, of those that responded, women were slightly more likely to agree to review. In contrast, women were less likely than men to accept invitations to serve on journal editorial boards. Our analyses indicate that there has been progress in the representation of women as reviewers and editors in ecology and evolutionary biology, but women are still underrepresented among the gatekeepers of scholarly publishing relative to their representation among researchers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 13636-13649 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Ecology and Evolution |
Volume | 9 |
Issue number | 24 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The British Ecological Society and the Society for the Study of Evolution provided permission to access their databases and funding to support this project. We thank Mark Rausher, and Ruth Shaw (Evolution) and David Gibson (J Ecology) for sharing their editor invitation and response rates. Katie Simmons assisted with extracting the reviewer database for Evolution. Emilie Aimé, Christopher Grieves, Kate Harrison, Simon Hoggart, Erika Newton, Alice Plane, James Ross, and Leila Walker extracted the reviewer databases for the BES journals. Josiah Ritchey revised the R code (shared with us by C. Sean Burns) for submitting reviewer given names to genderize.io. Emilie Aimé, Emilio Bruna, J.W. Hammond, Jenny Meyer, and Josiah Ritchey provided comments on earlier versions of this paper or these analyses. This work was approved by the University of Kentucky's Institutional Review Board (IRB 15-0890) and was supported in part by the Kentucky Agricultural Research Station at the University of Kentucky.
Funding Information:
The British Ecological Society and the Society for the Study of Evolution provided permission to access their databases and funding to support this project. We thank Mark Rausher, and Ruth Shaw () and David Gibson () for sharing their editor invitation and response rates. Katie Simmons assisted with extracting the reviewer database for . Emilie Aimé, Christopher Grieves, Kate Harrison, Simon Hoggart, Erika Newton, Alice Plane, James Ross, and Leila Walker extracted the reviewer databases for the BES journals. Josiah Ritchey revised the R code (shared with us by C. Sean Burns) for submitting reviewer given names to genderize.io. Emilie Aimé, Emilio Bruna, J.W. Hammond, Jenny Meyer, and Josiah Ritchey provided comments on earlier versions of this paper or these analyses. This work was approved by the University of Kentucky's Institutional Review Board (IRB 15‐0890) and was supported in part by the Kentucky Agricultural Research Station at the University of Kentucky. Evolution J Ecology Evolution
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Keywords
- bias
- discrimination
- editorial boards
- equality
- gender
- peer review
- scholarly publishing
- women in science
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Ecology
- Nature and Landscape Conservation