William L. Allen, Associate Editor
Gender differences in academic publications: why it matters
Across fields, there are concerns about the extent to which gender disparities exist in academic journal publications. Several studies of professional social science—including in economics, political science, and sociology—indicate women remain underrepresented in the pages of top journals. Inequalities in this regard may be particularly consequential because peer-reviewed publications remain one of the most important factors that contribute to success in applications for academic jobs, promotions, and grants.
While there are several reasons for this pattern, including authors’ perceptions of where their kinds of work are more likely to be favorably received, the simple fact of its presence has been enough motivation for some journal editorial teams to explicitly measure and report on the gender breakdown of both submissions and published work where possible.
Estimating gender differences in authorship at Evidence & Policy
Professionally, one strand of my research agenda examines how social scientific evidence is produced and communicated. Therefore, since I joined Evidence & Policy as an associate editor in 2019, I have been interested in measuring the proportion of authors published in the journal by gender, and tracking this over time. Since manually ascertaining the gender of all published authors would be time-consuming, I relied on estimating this using the Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT). This is a computational tool that can automatically identify the gender of authors in the context of analyzing course syllabi (see here for more details on the tool itself and its original use, and here for details on the algorithm encoded into the tool).
There are limitations to using automated tools for text analysis, which can be prone to error in situations where names are ambiguous or not present in dictionaries. Moreover, names may not indicate what algorithms think they indicate, which is why the tools used to generate this analysis report probabilistic estimates: a manually coded analysis of authors would likely generate different estimates. Although the methods underpinning computational tools like those used for this analysis are generally robust, these results should not be over-interpreted as a finely-grained picture of how a journal (or a course syllabus, as was their original intended use case) performs in terms of representing scholarship by female authors.
Initially, I did not have a strong hunch regarding the presence or absence of gender differences in the journal: the fields to which we speak are diverse, and so are the constituent groups that tend to turn to Evidence & Policy as a resource. In fact, a recent tweet (here) from the 2022 International Transforming Evidence Network conference—which had strong representation from the evidence use and policymaking areas—asked this question with respect to the conference attendees.
Figure 1 shows how the estimated proportion of female authors published in the “Research” section of the journal—which is where original research articles mainly appear—have changed between 2014-2023. On average over this period, female authors comprise an estimated 56.8% of research article authors, which does not differ whether looking at regular issues or special (themed) issues.
Figure 1. Estimated proportion of female authors published in the “Research” section of Evidence & Policy, 2014-23
Implications of gendered patterns in scholarship about evidence and policymaking
This account, while simple, still raises important questions about how and to what extent gender differences ought to be expected in Evidence & Policy, especially given what is now known about the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on research productivity—in my own area of political science as well as more widely—that have disproportionately fallen on female academics. Yet since we do not have data on the proportion of female scholars in the fields on which the journal draws for its submissions, it is difficult to say whether the measured gender balance in the journal’s pages is over or under the expected value.
Moreover, a related question is whether citation practices in the field of evidence and policymaking also display differences along lines of gender. Indeed, concerns about inclusive citation practices have led several journals to amend their policies to exclude reference lists from overall word limits (such as the British Journal of Political Science and Policy & Politics). This is intended to allow more space for accurately giving credit to larger and more diverse bodies of work, rather than a few citations perceived to be “core” or “canonical” to a subject.
Overall, this exercise has been a useful window for the Evidence & Policy editorial team onto the journal’s outputs. Going forward, we are keen to develop ways of supporting authors from a variety of backgrounds which historically haven’t appeared in journals like ours. More generally, I hope it inspires further and broader reflection about the gendered dynamics that exist across all areas of academic publishing—from the supply of research, to demands from editors, reviewers, and publishers.
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