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Gender and geographical disparity in editorial boards of journals in psychology and neuroscience

Nature Neuroscience volume 25, pages 272–279 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

We reviewed publicly available information from the top 50 journals worldwide in psychology and neuroscience to infer the proportions of editors by gender and country of affiliation. In both fields, the proportions of male and female editors differed significantly, both across editorial roles and within various role categories. Moreover, for 76% of psychology journals and 88% of neuroscience journals more than 50% of editors were male, whereas only 20% and 10%, respectively, had a similar proportion of female editors. US-based academics outnumbered those from other countries as editors in both psychology and neuroscience beyond what would be expected from approximate rates of senior psychology and neuroscience scholars worldwide. Our findings suggest that editorial positions in academic journals—possibly one of the most powerful decision-making roles in academic psychology and neuroscience—are balanced in neither gender nor geographical representation.

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Fig. 1: Overall proportion of male and female editors in the top 50 journals in psychology and neuroscience.
Fig. 2: Proportion of male and female editors at each of the top 50 journals in psychology and neuroscience.
Fig. 3: Country of affiliation of editors at the top 50 journals in psychology and neuroscience.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a University of California San Francisco Weill Institute Women in Neurosciences RFA for Research Support for Female Learners Impacted by coronavirus disease 2019, awarded to E.R.P. This study and A.F.’s time were supported by the Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London. We thank M. Tsakiris and M. Patrick for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, and the many editors who provided their comments about the findings.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Eleanor R. Palser & Maia Lazerwitz

  2. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Life Sciences Addition, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Maia Lazerwitz

  3. Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, UK

    Aikaterini Fotopoulou

Authors
  1. Eleanor R. Palser
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  2. Maia Lazerwitz
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  3. Aikaterini Fotopoulou
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Contributions

E.R.P.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, data curation, writing—original draft, writing—review & editing, visualization, project administration and funding acquisition. M.L.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, writing—review & editing. A.F.: conceptualization, methodology, resources, writing—review & editing, supervision, project administration and funding acquisition.

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Correspondence to Eleanor R. Palser.

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Nature Neuroscience thanks Carmen Sandi, Cassidy Sugimoto, and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2 and Supplementary analysis

Supplementary Data 1

Tabulated data for editorial boards of the top 50 psychology journals.

Supplementary Data 2

Tabulated data for editorial boards of the top 50 neuroscience journals.

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Palser, E.R., Lazerwitz, M. & Fotopoulou, A. Gender and geographical disparity in editorial boards of journals in psychology and neuroscience. Nat Neurosci 25, 272–279 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01012-w

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