Gender Representation on Journal Editorial Boards in the Mathematical Sciences

TL;DR

This study measures gender representation on mathematical sciences journal editorial boards, revealing significant underrepresentation of women compared to their presence in faculty positions, and introduces a semi-automated gender inference method.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale measurement of gender distribution on editorial boards in the mathematical sciences and develops a new semi-automated gender inference method.

Findings

Women hold 8.9% of editorial positions.

Certain journals and countries significantly exceed or fall short of average.

The gender inference method has 97.5% accuracy.

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 pool, the likely source of journal editorships, 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.