Gender Representation on Journal Editorial Boards in the Mathematical Sciences

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.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure

Cognitive Load of Rating Scales

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Keynote - Shilad Sen

Shilad Sen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and a data science research fellow for Target Corporation. He studies the relationship between algorithms, software, and people and focuses on biases and inequalities along dimensions such as race, gender, and geography. Sen’s research has been recognized through grants from the National Science Foundation, best papers awards at top computer science conferences, and coverage in popular press venues including The Atlantic. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and Bachelor’s Degrees in Math and Saxophone Performance from Northwestern University. See 2019 Keynotes page for full vide

Distribution of journals by proportion of editorships held by women.

<p>The median journal’s editorial board is 7.6% women, indicated by the vertical dashed line. The large spike at the left of the histogram represents 62 journals having less than one-half percent women on the editorial board. In fact, 51 journals have no women, accounting for 11.8% of the 435 journals in our data set.</p

Distribution of publishers by proportion of editorships held by women.

<p>The median publisher has 7.3% editorships held by women, indicated by the vertical dashed line. The large spike at the left of the histogram represents 18 publishers having less than one-half percent women on the editorial board. Of these, 16 publishers have no women at all. All 18 are all publishers with only one journal appearing in our data set. The three small, rightmost bars also correspond to publishers each with a single journal each in our data set, the largest of which has 21 editorships.</p

Proportion of editorships in each country that are held by women.

<p>Countries with no editors are shown in gray.</p

Publishers with over 100 editorships, ordered by representation of women.

<p>The number on top of each bar gives the quantity of editorships from each publisher and the percentages within the bars state the proportion held by women, represented by the green area. The four publishers with the highest representation of women are scientific societies or university publishing houses.</p