Back in July this year, I blogged about the representation of women on the editorial boards of economics journals. My analysis was quick and dirty, and I ended that post with the hope that others would conduct a more systematic and rigorous analysis in the not-so-distant future. Soon after, I came across this new working paper by Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri, and Nicole Venus that does exactly that! So, in today’s blog, I want to summarize what these authors find and how their analysis and conclusions differ from mine.
Data
Funk et al use panel data spanning 1960-2019 from 15 journals in economics.[1] In addition to the "top-8" journals, they selected 7 "top-field" journals in such a way so as to have a variety of fields and to include “fields with a stronger male and female representation”. The second criterion seems a bit odd to me given the selection bias that it is likely to introduce. In contrast, my analysis included a larger set of 30 journals, but only focused on the current gender composition of editorial boards in 2024 preventing me for examining trends. Crucially, the following journals are not included in Funk et al but are included in my analysis: AER: Insights, the four AEJ journals, the two new JPE journals, JHR, JEBO, JHE, JIE, and 4 development journals.[2]
The editorial boards are organized in different ways across journals and over time within the same journal. This introduces some subjectivity in how editors are grouped. Funk et al use two categories: “Editor” and “Associate Editor” with each category being mapped to multiple editorial positions for several journals. Their Editor category is similar to what I called Tier 1 and 2 editors in my analysis (though not for every journal) and where most power resides.
What does data reveal?
- Funk et al find that during 2000-2019, 10% of Editors and 15% of Associate Editors were female (Fig 2 from their paper is reproduced below). I find a somewhat larger share (25% of Tier 1-2 and 22% of Tier 3) in the 2024 data if I restrict my sample to the journals in Flunk et al (except for JF). The shares are even higher for my full sample of 30 journals. This suggests that female representation has improved in the last 5 years that are not included in Flunk et al’s analysis. It is also striking how far we have come---according to Flunk et al, during 1960-1979 and 1980-1999, the share of females among Editors was merely 2.8% and 1.5%, respectively!
- Unfortunately, Flunk et al do not present journal-wise trends in the female share of editors, making it difficult to assess whether the pace of improvement has been similar across journals or whether it is being driven by a select few journals.
- The increased representation of women on editorial boards is likely to be partially driven by the increase in the proportion of women in the pool of actively publishing economists. During the 1960s, the share of women among active economists was around 5%; by 2019 this had increased to more than 20%.
- This is Flunk et al’s key finding: After conditioning on an individual’s number of journal publications, the number of citations in top-5 journals, academic age, professional connections, and year fixed effects, they find that during 2000-2019 women have been over-represented in the editorial boards of the top-8 journals (statistically significant for AER, QJE, and JEEA). In contrast, there was no significant gender gap among the 7 top-field journals.
What does this mean?
How should we interpret the evidence presented in Flunk et al? On the one hand, it is reassuring to see that, conditional on publication and citation records and academic connections, women have either a higher (in top-8 journals) or a similar (in top-field journals) likelihood of becoming a journal editor as male economists. On the other hand, there is plenty of emerging evidence that shows that female economists face substantial barriers throughout their careers that impede, among other things, their research activity, publication outcomes, and social network formation (Lundberg and Stearns 2019).
Using data from 1970-2017, Ductor et al 2023 show that women on average produce 20% fewer articles, 43% fewer publications in the top-5 journals, and, 44% less “quality weighted” research output than men, even after conditioning on observables. They connect these gender disparities in research output to collaboration patterns in economics---women tend to have fewer collaborators, collaborate more often with the same coauthors, and a higher fraction of their coauthors collaborate with each other, and these network features that an average woman displays are related to lower output, whereas the average male network is associated with higher output. Ghosh and Liu (2019) argue that women also begin their academic careers in lower-ranked economics departments than men, which puts them at a disadvantage in terms of matching with high-quality coauthors and contributes to the gender gap in top journal publications.
Moreover, the editorial process itself is not gender-neutral in several ways. Female researchers are held to a higher bar by referees and journals (Card et al 2019; Hengel 2022; Hengel and Moon 2023). Moreover, “referees spend longer reviewing female-authored papers, are slower to recommend accepting them, manuscripts by women go through more rounds of review and their authors spend longer revising them” (Alexander et al 2023). Women’s research output also receives less recognition---women receive less credit for co-authored papers, particularly when the co-authors are male (Sarsons et al 2021). Some papers also suggest that all-female-authored papers are less likely to be accepted than all-male-authored papers in economics conferences, even after controlling for observables that capture quality differences (Hospido and Sanz, 2020).
Additionally, women are disadvantaged in terms of receiving seminar invitations (Doleac et al 2021) and, when invited, face a more hostile seminar and conference environment than male speakers (Dupas et al 2021). Women are asked more questions during an economics seminar and the questions asked of female presenters are more likely to be patronizing or hostile. These findings are concerning especially because seminar and conference presentations are primarily how economists get feedback on their papers, disseminate their research output, and build their professional networks.
In fact, as I mentioned in my previous post, gender gaps in access to elite networks can exacerbate the burden on a small group of senior female economists from elite departments, with some of them serving on multiple editorial boards and getting lots of accolades, as the profession tries to overcome the lack of representation. Meanwhile, other women (and even men) can continue to feel discriminated against because of gender.
To conclude
Funk et al make a very nice contribution to our understanding of the gender gaps in journal editorial boards in economics. My takeaway from their study is not that there are no gender gaps in the representation of women in editorial positions. Rather, I conclude that if we want to improve women’s share in these gatekeeping roles, we need to start by fixing the barriers that prevent women from publishing high quality research in top journals in the first place.
[1] The 15 journals are: American Economic Review (AER), Econometrica (ECMA), Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), Journal of Political Economy (JPE), Review of Economic Studies (REStud), Review of Economics and Statistics(ReStat), Journal of European Economic Association (JEEA), Economic Journal (EJ), Journal of Development Economics (JDE), Journal of Monetary Economics (JME), Journal of Finance (JF), Journal of Econometrics (JEc), Journal of Labor Economics (JOLE), Journal of Economic Theory (JET), and Journal of Public Economics (JPubE).
[2] The 15 additional journals included in my analysis are: AER: Insights, AEJ: Applied, AEJ: Micro, AEJ: Macro, AEJ: Policy, JPE: Micro, JPE: Macro, Journal of Human Resources (JHR), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), Journal of Health Economics (JHE), Journal of International Economics (JIE), Economic Development and Cultural Change, World Development, World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Development Studies, World Bank Research Observer. However, I did not include Journal of Finance.
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