The Impact of Academic Publication: Inequity for Women in Behavior Analytic Journals

Abstract

The number of women in higher education has increased over the past few decades but are still not at an equal level to their male counterparts, especially at the tenured level. One area of note within the tenure process is research. This area is highly valued by certain universities and could shed light on discrepancies in the number of female faculty as the faculty position becomes more prestigious. The author downloaded 21 years of publication data for seven prestigious behavior analytic journals and used quantitative methods to determine if the rates of publication differed between a previous study and today. There were 8,778 final articles yielding 27,225 authors in total. Data showed that women are represented more frequently overall, across time and all journals, less frequently in prestigious authorship positions, and more often when the sex of the editor at the time of publication was also female. While women's participation has increased over time, and since the original study, there is still disproportionate representation compared to the entirety of the field, in the order of authorship positions, and for editor-in-chief positions.

Diversity in the United Kingdom: Quantification for higher education in comparison to the general population

“…This was also corroborated by another study (Lerman et al, 2022). In psychology, a similar trend is observed, with fewer females in first or last authorships (Krebsbach, 2022). However, another study highlighted that these differences might be explained by confounding factors, such as self-citation and total number of authors, at least in medicine (Andersen et al, 2019).…”

Journal Authorship by Gender: A Comparison of Economic Education, General Interest, and Fields From 2009 to 2019

“…What about the pool of reviewers? Card et al (2020) find no impact of this in the journals they examined, but others question the dominant role of males in the review process (Krebsbach, 2022).…”