Diversity is the fuel of innovation. Global diversity—geographical or international diversification—is indispensable for developing a true psychological science of human beings but remains poorly understood. We surveyed 68 top psychology journals in 10 subdisciplines and examined the global diversity of authors, editors (i.e., members of academic editorial teams), and journal ownership. Results show that (a) the global diversity of authorship, editorship, and ownership is low in top psychology journals, with the United States boasting outsized influences; (b) disparity intensifies along the hierarchy of authors, editors, and journal ownership and substantially differs between subdisciplines and journal types; (c) removing the United States markedly increases global diversity and eliminates differences in diversity between subdisciplines and between authorship and editorship; and (d) more authors and editors are from the journal’s home country (vs. a foreign journal) and from the editor-in-chief’s home country (vs. a journal with a foreign editor-in-chief), and the home-country biases are most pronounced in the United States—journals from the United States or with U.S. editors-in-chief have the lowest global diversity in authorship and editorship. These results provide substantial novel insights into the global diversity of psychology journals, with implications for a new diversity policy to stimulate the generation of variety and, by extension, innovation.
Discourse on gender diversity tends to overlook differences across levels of hierarchy (e.g., students, faculty, and editors) and critical dimensions (e.g., subdisciplines and geographical locations). Further ignored is its intersection with global diversity—representation from different countries. Here we document and contextualize gender disparity from perspectives of equal versus expected representation in journal editorship, by analyzing 68 top psychology journals in 10 subdisciplines. First, relative to ratios as students and faculty, women are underrepresented as editorial-board members (41%) and—unlike previous results based on one subfield—as editors-in-chief (34%) as well. Second, female ratios in editorship vary substantially across subdisciplines, genres of scholarship (higher in empirical and review journals than in method journals), continents/countries/regions (e.g., higher in North America than in Europe), and journal countries of origin (e.g., higher in American journals than in European journals). Third, under female (vs. male) editors-in-chief, women are much better represented as editorial-board members (47% vs. 36%), but the geographical diversity of editorial-board members and authorship decreases. These results reveal new local and broad contexts of gender diversity in editorship in psychology, with policy implications. Our approach also offers a methodological guideline for similar disparity research in other fields.
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