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© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

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.

Details

Title
Gender diversity of editorial boards and gender differences in the peer review process at six journals of ecology and evolution
Author
Fox, Charles W 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Duffy, Meghan A 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Fairbairn, Daphne J 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Meyer, Jennifer A 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Entomology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA 
 Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 
 Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA 
 British Ecological Society, London, UK 
Pages
13636-13649
Section
ACADEMIC PRACTICE IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Dec 2019
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
e-ISSN
20457758
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2335095410
Copyright
© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.