Gender presence on the editorial boards of journals in the Women's Studies

In the scientific journals, being part of the editorial boards, including the journals' members and chief editors


Introduction
The presence of women in science has been a topic that has aroused increasingly more interest in the literature over the last decades (Flynn, 1995;Keller, 2004;Salvai, 2013).Since the 70s-80s, the feminist movement has had an important role in this trend.At that moment, through the so-called second wave, which essentially was a political and social vindication, the feminist movement called for unofficial inequality in sexuality, family, work and the right to have an abortion, among others (Keller, 2004).After the second wave, other feminist waves that have occurred have kept changing society from different perspectives (Flynn, 1995;Keller, 2004;Mikhailvna et al., 2020).This panorama of changes and claims also affected the scientific context that historically had been considered masculinized and influenced by the patriarchal structure.The goal of the feminist movement in science was, broadly speaking, to make science more inclusive and more accessible to women, considering the structural factors that pushed women out of scientific disciplines (Keller, 2004).
To make these changes possible, policies such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which stipulates that gender equality is a right, have been made (The Lancet, 2020;UN Women, 2021).In science, these changes were also reflected in different statements that address the issue of the presence of women in science from different perspectives, as does the "Guidance on Gender Equality in Horizon 2020" of the European Union (European Commission Directorate-General for Research & Innovation, 2016).For example, in 2020, the "Gender Gap Index" announced that the gap between women and men was generally narrowing in several areas and that it is a global trend (World Economic Forum, 2020), although it is necessary to highlight that it is still far from egalitarian, especially in areas related to power and political responsibility (Black, 2016).Regarding women in academia, over the last century, it was found that their situation has been changing towards greater presence (UNESCO, 2019).Nevertheless, women remain less represented than men in many countries and regions around the world (CATALYST, 2020;UNESCO, 2019).This situation of inferiority in terms of women's presence is also noted in the upper-level positions that they occupy in science.For example, in the case of the European Union, only 21.7 % of the heads of higher education institutions were women; and this is also the case in Canada, where women proportionally held the lowest ranking positions (European Commission, 2019;Statistics Canada, 2019).This underrepresentation of women was also, unsurprisingly, the case of the editorial boards of scientific journals, including the journals' members and chief editors (Amrein et al., 2011;Balasubramanian et al., 2020;Cho et al., 2014).These boards are in fact chosen because of their scientific prestige, and they are who makes important decisions about the running of a journal.The importance of the scientific publication of original articles in journals is well known, so it is not surprising to imagine that being part of editorial board member's places their members in positions of power and responsibility (Spector et al., 2019).
To face all these realities, there is a discipline that has been growing progressively and that was born to answer many of these questions that affect women's lives in all contexts, including scientific.This discipline, known as "Women's Studies", aims, basically, to place women's lives and experiences at the center of the studies (Robinson, 1997;Salvai, 2013).For this reason, it is relevant to analyze whether this underrepresentation of women in science and, specifically, in the context of scientific publication could also affect the discipline of Women's Studies.The presence of women in this area is especially important and we sought to study their situation, inequalities, needs and claims around the world.The goal of our study is to analyze the journals included in the thematic category Women's Studies of the Journal Citation Report (JCR) Social Sciences Edition from two different perspectives.
First, this study aims to know how the composition is of both the members of the editorial board and their editors-in-chief.Secondly, this study examines the gender of articles' authors and reviews published in journals at the Women's Studies category, in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science (WoS) core collection on 2019.This will provide insight into the female-male variables of both the journals and the authors who publish in them.

Methodology
Journal-level data were obtained from the Journal Citation Report (JCR) Social Sciences Edition 2019 edition, which included 45 journals.
For this study, the official web pages or sites of each journal were consulted, and the surnames and names of the professionals included as the editor in-chief (EC) or editorial board members (EBMs) were extracted.In the case of not finding members with the above designation, other similar entries were selected, such as "editorial board members", "editorial collective", "international editorial board", "editorial review board", or "editorial advisory board", among others.Supplementary Material Table 1 describes the sections with members included and excluded in each of the 45 journals analyzed.
To classify the EC, EBM and authors identified, we use the differentiation linked to the person's name.Henceforth, when we refer to differences between women and men, we do so through their male or female names.
The official names of the publishers were standardized based on the information provided by the JCR Social Sciences Edition.Through this process, the publishers acquired by publishing group were integrated into a single entity.
A double methodology was used to assign the gender of the ECs and EBMs.First, all the data were obtained from the journals' web pages and tabulated in a Microsoft Excel data matrix.A column with all the first names and another column with the countries were created from the institutional affiliation information provided by the committee members.From here, the statistical package Genderize.io(https://genderize.io), which provides a probability of male or female gender based on a frequently updated database that currently includes more than 200,000 distinct first names from more than 79 countries and languages, was used.Moreover, the Genderize.iohas been used in related prior work and provides a minimum accuracy of 82 % with an F1 score of 90 % for women and 86 % for men (Hartzler et al., 2021;Karimi et al., 2016).
In second place, to assign gender to the authors who could not be classified with Genderize.io,based on the data available to us, an exhaustive search was performed on the authors' affiliation's websites, on the academic social network ResearchGate and Google Images.In case they were researchers, an attempt was made to locate them through unique identifiers such as the WoS ResearchID, Scopus author ID and ORCID.
The retrieval of papers published in 2019 in the study journals was performed by searching the journal titles in the Social Science Citation Index database in November 2020 and was limited to articles and reviews.An Excel matrix was created from these records, and the gender (s) of the author(s) was identified using the procedure described above.
With all the data obtained, all the matrices were imported into a SQL database that included the following variables: 1. Journal-level variables: journal name, country of issue, publisher, and quartile of the journal in the Women Studies category of the JCR. 2. Editorial board member and editor-in-chief level variables: gender, country and geographic area of EC and EBM members.3. Article-level variables: authors' gender, country of affiliation, and geographic area.
The geographic area variable included whether the members of the committees or the authors of the papers belonged to one of the following three major areas: The United States, the European Union and rest of the world.For the grouping of European Union countries, the 27 countries that comprise the European Union plus the United Kingdom and the member countries of the Schengen area without borders (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) were considered.Although the United Kingdom left the European Union on January 31, 2020, as the study period refers to December 31, 2019, it was decided to include it within the geographical area of the European Union.
The following indicators were calculated from the data collected: the gender distribution of ECs and EBMs by journal, publishers, countries and quartile of the journal in the JCR and the country of affiliation and geographical area of members and the gender distribution of the authors of papers grouped by journals, country of affiliation and geographical area.

General data
Table 1 shows the overall data obtained and shows that 1437 members (ECs and EBMs) participated in the 45 journals analyzed in the Women's Studies area.The total number of EBMs was 1362, of which 1119 (82.2 %) were women and 243 were men (17.8 %).
There were 75 ECs from 40 journals (5 journals did not identify their EC(s)).Some journals have more than one EC (according to the classification described in Supplementary Material Table 1).The gender distribution of the ECs shows that 73 were women (97.3 %) and 2 were men (2.6 %).
The 2436 articles and reviews published during 2019 contained 6469 author signatures, which is an average of 2.65 authors per paper.Of these, women accounted for 4681 signatures (72.4 %).The number of single author papers was 963, of which 788 (81.8 %) were written by women.Of the 1473 (60.5 %) multiple author papers published in collaboration, 40.1 % involved only women, and 4.8 % involved only men.

Gender by journals
In 43 of the 45 journals (95.5 %), the representation of women was greater than that of men.In 6 journals, all EBM members were women: Feminism and Psychology, Feminist Legal Studies, Feminist Theory, Feministische Studien, the Psychology of Women Quarterly and Women's Health Issues.In addition, in 80 % of the journals (n = 36), the participation of women in the committees was higher than 75 %.Only in one journal, Women and Health, did the committee include more men than women (58.3 %); and in Radical Philosophy, there was gender parity, with 6 women and 6 men (Supplementary material Table 2).
In 38 of the 40 journals, the ECs were women; and in the other 2 journals, the ECs were shared between both genders.There is a marked variety in the number of the ECs of the journals since, for example, the journal Gender and History has up to 8 ECs (7 women and one man), 8 journals have 3 or 4 ECs, and 8 others have 2 ECs (all women); the remaining 23 journals have a single EC, of which 23 were women.
Regarding the gender of the 2436 papers published in 2019, in 5 journals, the participation of women was over 90 %.In journals such as Women and Therapy and Frontiers-A Journal of Women Studies, this number is 94 %.In contrast, Asian Women is the only journal where men outnumber women in participation, with 56.5 %.In the journals that publish the most articles, such as the Journal of Women's Health, Women's Health or Women's Health Issues, the participation of women as authors ranges between 60 and 75 %.In addition, it was observed that journals related to health disciplines, such as Journal of Women's Health, Women's Health, Health Care for Women International, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Women's Health Issues, accounted for almost half of the men authors (47.4 %) (Supplementary material Table 2).

Gender by country of EBMs and ECs and productivity of Women's Studies journals in 2019
Supplementary Material Table 3 shows all the countries of the EBMs, ECs and authors who published papers during 2019.The EBMs identified belong to 65 different countries.The country with the highest representation is the United States (n = 619, 45.4 %), followed by the United Kingdom (n = 254, 18.6 %), Canada (n = 72, 5.3 %) and Australia (n = 64, 4.7 %).The 8 countries with the highest representation among EBMs correspond to the 8 countries where the journals are published with the exception of Canada, which does not publish any of the 45 journals but is represented by 61 women and 11 men.
In 28 countries, all EBMs are women, but it should be noted that some countries have low participation.In addition, there are 9 countries where no women participated on the committees, but these are countries where the male representation is one man and Jordan, which has 2 male EBMs.
If we set a threshold of at least 10 EBMs, male or female, the highest percentages of women are in France (92.6 %), Australia (89.1 %), South Africa (88.2 %), India (87.1 %) and Germany (85.7 %).Fig. 1 shows the distribution of the percentages of participation of women and men by country (18 countries with more than 8 members).
The ECs identified belong to 15 different countries.In relation to gender, 10 of them only include women as ECs, with Canada, Argentina and South Korea standing out with 7, 4 and 2, respectively.France has only one male EC.The United States, United Kingdom, India and Brazil have large representations of women, with 36 women and one man in the United States and 10 women and 1 man in the United Kingdom.Brazil is the only country in which there is a man and a woman as CEs.It is striking that the journal Social Politics, published in the USA, has ECs belonging to Costa Rica, Canada, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
When the information on the geographical areas of the ECs is compared with the country where the journal is published, it is found that 47 (62.6 %) of the ECs are from the same country where their journal is published.In the journals from Australia, France, India and South Korea, their EC belongs to that country.
The authors of the papers published in 2019 are affiliated with institutions from 95 different countries.A total of 6469 authors participated, of which 50 % (3327) belonged to the United States, 6.8 % (n = 443) belonged to the United Kingdom and 4.6 % (n = 296) belonged to Australia.In these three countries, the participation of women is between 75 % and 80 %.If individual country data are analyzed to see the gender breakdown between men and women, Colombia stands out with 89.5 % (17 women vs. 2 men), Belgium with 88.9 % (16 women vs.  A. Sixto-Costoya et al. men), Austria with 88.5 % (23 women vs. 3 men), and New Zealand with 85.9 % (55 women vs. 9 men).
If we compare the presence of EBMs among the three large world blocks, the United States, the European Union and the rest of the world, we find that of the total number of members (1362), 619 (45.4 %) are from the United States, 403 (29.6 %) are from the European Union and 340 (25 %) are from the rest of the world.Regarding gender, the number and percentage of women from the United States were 513 (82.9 %), those from the European Union were 337 (83.6 %) and those from the rest of the world were 269 (79.1 %) (Fig. 2).
When analyzing the data in relation to the geographical area affiliation of the EBMs, the results show that of the 619 members of the United States, 75 % are members of the committees of journals from that country.In addition, with respect to the European Union, of the 403 members from the area, 311 (77.2 %) of them are members of journals from the same geographical area.Regarding the rest of the world members, of the 340 members from that classification, 138 (40.6 %) belonged to journals in the European Union.The percentage of women from each of the geographical areas ranged from 80 % to 85 %, the percentage of European women EBMs in European journals was 64 %, and that of US women in US journals was 83 % (Table 2).

Gender by publishers of Women's Studies journals
The 45 journals were published by 21 different publishers (Table 3).The publishers with the largest number of journals are Taylor and Francis Group (n = 12), SAGE Publications (n = 9), and John Wiley and Sons (n = 3).The rest publish only one or two journals.The percentage of women EBMs varies according to publishers but is always above 50 %, with the exception of Radical Philosophy where there is parity.Five publishers had a percentage of women above 90 %: Walter de Gruyter (100 %), Johns Hopkins University Press (95.2 %), Oxford University Press (93.3 %), Elsevier (92 %) and Éditions La Découverte (91.3 %).At the opposite pole are Sookmyung Women's University (58.5 %) and University of Nebraska Press or Equinox Publishing (66.7 %).

Gender by quartile of Women's Studies journals in the JCR
The percentages of women's participation in EBMs by quartile of journals in the JCR are approximately 80-85 % with no differences according to quartile (Fig. 3a).The gender of the authors signing the 2436 papers published during 2019 broken down by gender shows an increase of 10 percentage points of men with respect to EBMs.The participation of men in the published papers was between 31.4 % in third-quartile journals and 21.9 % in fourth-quartile journals (Fig. 3b).Currently, scientific journals are the main vehicle of scientific communication due to their fundamental role in the creation and transmission of scientific knowledge, allowing it to be subjected to public debate.In journals, editors enjoy great power in scientific communication, since they are responsible for making decisions about what will be reviewed and published, identifying the important topics that deserve attention, and establishing research currents and priority lines of publication (Pan & Zhang, 2014;Urbancic, 2005).Editors have the privilege of having first-hand knowledge of the most recent scientific advances in the field and the opportunity to influence them through recommendations and peer review and to exchange information on existing problems and possible solutions.In addition, they act as central nodes in the network of researchers in the subject area and can extend their personal network of professional relationships, enhancing their status and professional growth (Addis & Villa, 2003).In addition, editors often decide who will hold other positions related to the management of the journal, such as associate editors and editorial board members; and in some cases even select their successors (Metz et al., 2016).For all these reasons, the membership on editorial boards (EBMs or ECs) is an indicator of academic prestige and professional progress, which also allows integration into professional networks.This impact, in fact, goes beyond guaranteeing the quality of publications.For this reason, it is vital to know the standing of women within these dynamics in order to determine their degree of influence in terms of presence.
To date, the results obtained on this subject in previous studies have followed a very similar trend: the percentages of women as ECs, EBMs and author positions were much lower than those of men.For example, in the case of EBMs, women accounted for 9 % in mathematics (Topaz & Sen, 2016), 22 % in marketing (Pan & Zhang, 2014) and 22 % in management (Metz et al., 2016).In biomedical areas, percentages including 18 % in the journals of several specialties (Kaji et al., 2019), 19 % in radiology (Erren et al., 2014) 21.5 % in general medicine (Wenger, 2008) and 33 % in pediatrics (Alonso-Arroyo et al., 2021) have been found.In some biomedical areas where professionals are traditionally mostly women, such as in pediatric nursing, maternity, lactation and physiotherapy journals, these percentages are somewhat higher, but they are still lower than those of men (Alonso-Arroyo et al., 2021).
If we focus on the causes of this historical asymmetry, we find that there are several causes and that they interact with each other, making it  difficult to separate their relative importance.There is a wide range of factors, including cultural and structural factors, that influence the lower representation of women than men in most subject areas (Budden et al., 2008).Cultural factors are difficult to determine and enumerate since the totality of cultural institutions (such as the family, the school and the state, among others) fosters a system project, even before a person is born.In this way, differences become stereotypes and roles that are comprehended from childhood and that mark the personality of the adult person and have an influence on their decisions (El-Hout et al., 2021).One of the greatest cultural obstacles is embodied in the belief that places men as the model to be reflected (androcentrism or patriarchy) in which women must assume to follow in their footsteps to achieve accomplishments.Regarding the structural factors, they include career interruptions due to family matters (childcare and ascendant care); limited ability to have time to participate in committees; and an unequal distribution of less prestigious academic roles, such as secretarial and mentoring (Ceci et al., 2014;Ecklund et al., 2012;James et al., 2019).These studies have also shown that when women and men have different scientific interests, men's interests prevail, which is in line with the androcentric system (Castelló-Cogollos et al., 2019).The disadvantages are, in fact, cumulative since any missed or delayed step hinders progressing to the next (Addis & Villa, 2003).The factors detected in the field of journal publication must be added to these comprehended and internalized cultural and structural factors.Among the factors specific to the field, we must highlight the little support from the institutions in which women work or the associations of which they are part regarding offering the necessary support for them to occupy editorial positions and the existence of numerous unconscious prejudices towards women editors (Ceci et al., 2014;Ecklund et al., 2012;James et al., 2019).However, our study on the Women's Studies subject category in the Web of Science has allowed us to observe another perspective that is different from the rest of the scientific areas.
On the one hand, among the results obtained in the journals of the WoS Women's Studies subject category, we identified a high participation of women in EC (92 %) and EBM (82.2 %) positions while the percentage of women signatories of articles was 72.4 %, resulting in an "inverted truncated pyramid".This inverted truncated pyramid means that the higher the level of decision-making positions in scientific journals is (from highest to lowest: ECs, EBMs and signatories), the higher the percentage of women with respect to men.This participation is the highest we have found in the literature review on the representation of women as ECs and EBMs of scientific journals in various subject areas.Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in journals where the EC is a woman, the journals tend to have a higher proportion of women among their EBMs, which is logical since women tend to form their own female social and professional networks, according to network theories and homosocial theories (Pan & Zhang, 2014).
These results demonstrate that solutions to overcome the structural barriers to equity can be addressed, at least in the field of scholarly publishing.However, it is important to mention that the category of Women's Studies was created to respond to the historical lack of a space in which to place women at the center of studies and that, possibly for this reason, they are the majority in this field, both as authors and editors, as we have seen in the results of our study.If we focus our attention on the different journals included in this category, we observe that the common denominator is that they publish studies that place women at the center, the use of the gender perspective and the feminist approach.If there is one thing we note, it is the variety of topics addressed by the journals, ranging from health sciences to law, philosophy, politics and education.This shows that the lack of studies with a gender focus has been generalized in various disciplines, hence the interest and the need for journals in this category.In this regard, the area of Women's Studies, led, promoted, and consolidated from the beginning by women, shows the importance in science of the fact that both women and other groups that have been historically oppressed have the capacity and the means to lead their own projects based on their interests and the problems that affect them without any detriment to other groups, men in this case, being able to become involved and participate.Following our results, the presence of men publishing in the Women's Studies area and even as EBM of the journals is good news because it reflects that interest in the area is reaching beyond the group that is directly affected by it.Moreover, this presence of men as EBM also shows an interest of the Women's Studies journals to sit some researcher men on board.The reason of why these men were selected and drafted by women editors would be an interesting object of research from a qualitative perspective in a future study, but we could venture that these men might have in common not only their training and professional experience in the field, but also their commitment to feminism, belonging to the group of so-called "allies" (Casanova Cuba, 2021).In this sense, the interest of some men to get involved in gender research could be explained by the hard work of feminists in raising awareness in society, including men, about the importance of moving away from the androcentric model and conducting science that considers research from the perspective of women (Pleasants, 2011).Although it is not expected that men will be attracted to this area to the same extent as women, it has been observed that within the group of men who do participate as authors, there is a particular interest in health-related research.In this regard, it has been observed that the male participation as authors is mainly in healthrelated journals, being the total number of men participating in these journals a 47 % out of the total men's authors, which shows that currently there is topics in Women's Studies area where men have been more involved.Finally, with regard to male participation in this area, it is it is important to bear in mind another issue.If fields such as STEM are observed, it can be seen that women, even today, are still clearly in a minority.The reasons for this minority go back a long way and have to do fundamentally with the exclusion, whether direct or indirect, of women in these disciplines (Ecklund et al., 2012;El-Hout et al., 2021).In this case, the area of Women's Studies, we are not talking about the same thing.This field is dominated by women from authorship to management positions because its very existence is due to a historical vacuum that has been evidenced and claimed by women and that cannot be compared with the dominance of men in the field of STEM.In fact, the situation of women in the STEM field clearly demonstrates the current need for further work in the area of Women's Studies.
On the other hand, regarding the results by geographical area, we observed also a generalized majority of women as ECs, EMBs and signatory authors in all countries.However, despite this high representation, it is important to highlight the strong Anglo-Saxon and European bias existing both in the geographical area of ECs and EBMs and in the signatories of the papers detected.In this sense, we observe a reality that is not new in science and from which this area is not exempt.This could be explained by a series of cultural limitations and biases of the main databases, mostly oriented to the natural sciences and centered in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially focused on English speakers (Aliaga et al., 2013).This Anglo-Saxon bias has been perceived by non-Englishspeaking scholars for decades and pointed out by them as a hindrance to science that is influenced by both language and country of origin (González-Alcaide et al., 2012;Vandermotten, 2012;Yitzhaki, 1998).Following this reasoning, countries in which the language used for scientific communication is not English and which are not Anglo-Saxon or European may have more difficulties in publishing their work.In the field of gender studies, there are also voices that raise this situation and express their disagreement, arguing that this bias may leave out other realities and other points of view of the woman situation in the world, especially those from the global South (Matos, 2010;Pérez-Bustos, 2017).Although our study was developed following a quantitative perspective and did not analyze the specific ethnicity or race of the ECs, EMBs and authors, the broad view that we obtained by geographical areas confirms this perspective of geographical bias that favors Anglo-Saxon and some European countries at least in terms of the specific weight of each country in the journals included in the thematic category of Women's Studies.
Finally, as an idea for future work, it would be very interesting to analyze from a qualitative perspective some relevant issues raised by the results of our study.First, the possible differences between disciplines in the area of Women's Studies could be studied in depth, for example, we have detected that some journals only had in common the study from a gender perspective, since they came from disciplines as different as health, politics, law or philosophy.Secondly, another study could focus on knowing and analyzing who the men involved in Women's Studies are and where they come from, in order to understand why they have come this far and how it would be possible to get other men involved in this field.Finally, another interesting focus would be on the women in power in Women's Studies journals.This question will demand an intersectional reflection on power relationships between women of different social or political background within the countries and the regions.The results could tell us interesting clues about inequalities among women, gatekeeping, or privilege.In such case, race or citizenship would not be recognizable through the name of the editor or the author, so a qualitative method would be necessary, taking, for example, a smaller sample of journals to analyze.

Limitations
This work has some limitations that should be considered.Firstly, we assume the differentiation between female and male gender through the linkage of the first name to one or the other gender.Although we perform this process using the genderize.ioprogram, whose consistency has been tested, we are aware of the risk this has, mainly for the following two reasons: 1) we know the country each person is affiliated with, but we do not know where that person is from, and 2) we could be overlooking gender identities that go beyond the linking of a gender to a certain name.
Secondly, we did not analyze all the participants in the editorial process of the journals and only analyzed EBMs and ECs, excluding a great variety of other complementary positions and their complexity.Nevertheless, we emphasize that the 1437 members identified (1362 EBMs and 75 ECs) represent a sufficiently representative number for the analysis.Then, with regard to authorship, only the gender of authors who published in a single year was analyzed.However, almost six thousand and five hundred authorships were identified, which also represents a large sample that allows us to obtain a better understanding of the phenomenon under analysis.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Participation of women and men per country of EC and EBM (18 countries with more than 8 members).

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. Participation of women and men by geographical areas of EBM.Table2Gender by geographical areas of journals and geographic areas of the of EBM.

Discussion
This work has made it possible to identify the participation of women in the ECs and EBMs of the 45 journals included in the Women's Studies subject category of the Web of Science and in the articles published in these journals in 2019.The analysis of women's participation as ECs, as EBMs and as authors of published articles is of great interest as it allows us to determine what positions women occupy in scientific communication from several perspectives: as researchers contributing their work to the scientific community and as resource persons in leadership and decision-making positions.

Fig. 3 .
Fig. 3. Participation of women and men by quartile of journals according to JCR of EBM & papers 2019.

Table 1
Summary of general data.

Table 2
Gender by geographical areas of journals and geographic areas of the of EBM.

Table 3
Number and percentage of females and males of EC and EBM per publisher (sorted alphabetical).