Gender Representation on Journal Editorial Boards in the Mathematical Sciences

PLoS One. 2016 Aug 18;11(8):e0161357. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0161357. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

We study gender representation on the editorial boards of 435 journals in the mathematical sciences. Women are known to comprise approximately 15% of tenure-stream faculty positions in doctoral-granting mathematical sciences departments in the United States. Compared to this group, we find that 8.9% of the 13067 editorships in our study are held by women. We describe group variations within the editorships by identifying specific journals, subfields, publishers, and countries that significantly exceed or fall short of this average. To enable our study, we develop a semi-automated method for inferring gender that has an estimated accuracy of 97.5%. Our findings provide the first measure of gender distribution on editorial boards in the mathematical sciences, offer insights that suggest future studies in the mathematical sciences, and introduce new methods that enable large-scale studies of gender distribution in other fields.

MeSH terms

  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Mathematics / organization & administration*
  • Mathematics / statistics & numerical data
  • Periodicals as Topic / statistics & numerical data*
  • Sex Factors
  • United States

Grants and funding

This work was supported by a Wallace Scholarly Research Activities Grant from Macalester College. Additional funding came from a crowdfunding campaign via Experiment.com. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.