Gender representation in rheumatology journals: an assessment of editors, editorial boards, and authors

Diversity is widely recognized as a driver of excellence and innovation. In recent years, women have become an increasingly significant part of the rheumatology workforce. We aimed to assess the gender representation of the leading rheumatology journals' editors and to explore whether editors' gender correlates with the gender of the first and last authors of published articles. We conducted a cross-sectional study and extracted editorial members of rheumatology journals in quartiles 1 to 3 (Clarivate Analytics) from each journal's website. We categorized editorial positions according to the level of influence in manuscript acceptance decision-making (levels I to III). The gender of editors and of the first and last authors in all 2019 original articles published in a sample of 15 rheumatology journals was assigned using a combination of digital gallery and manual searches. There were 2242 editors' names retrieved from 43 journals, 24 (26%) of the 94 editors at level I, 139 (36%) of 385 editors at level II, and 469 (27%) of 1763 at level III were female. The imbalance between journals was heterogeneous. Females were the first authors in 1342 (48%) and the last authors in 969 (35%) of the 2797 published articles. However, we found no significant correlation between editors' and authors' gender. Our data showed uneven gender representation on the editorial boards of most rheumatology journals, but we did not find any apparent vertical segregation or influence on publishing by gender. Our findings suggest that a generational transition may be occurring among authors.