Gender and geographical disparity in editorial boards of journals in psychology and neuroscience – Nature.com

Editorial board analysis

Our first analysis considered gender representation in psychology. The sample included a total of 2,864 editors. Overall, there were significantly more male (n = 1,706) than female (n = 1,157) editors (Table 1 and Fig. 1a). This was primarily driven by the larger categories, namely category 2 (associate and section editors) and category 3 (advisory and editorial board members). There was no significant difference in gender representation among category 1, the smallest and most senior category (editors-in-chief and their deputies), although men (n = 49) outnumbered women (n = 37) in that category too. Data from 2017, 2 years before the data presented here, indicated that approximately 45% of full professors, 53% of associate professors and 65% of assistant professors in psychology in the USA were female³³. The proportion of female editors (all categories) was significantly lower than expected based on the proportion of female faculty (χ²(1) = 10.39, P = 0.001). The proportion of female editors-in-chief was not statistically different from the proportion of female full professors (χ²(1) = 0.16, P = 0.688).

Table 1 Overall proportion of editors who were male and female in the top 50 journals in the field of psychology, and in each of the three subcategories: (1) editors-in-chief and their deputies, (2) associate and section editors and (3) advisory and editorial boards

Fig. 1: Overall proportion of male and female editors in the top 50 journals in psychology and neuroscience.

a,b, The overall proportion of editors who were male and female in the top 50 journals in psychology (a) and neuroscience (b), and in each of the three subcategories: (1) editors-in-chief and their deputies, (2) associate and section editors and (3) advisory and editorial boards.

The above analysis did not consider variability in the proportion of male and female editors at the individual journals. To quantify this, we calculated what percentage of journals had proportions of male and female editors in ten-point percentage increments. For over three-quarters of psychology journals (76%), more than half of editors were male, while for only 20% of journals were the majority of editors female (Fig. 2a). The interested reader can refer to Supplementary Data 1 for the specific journals in each position, denoted by number. Over half of the journals (54%) had more than 60% …….

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01012-w