Contextualizing gender disparity in editorships in psychology

Discourse on diversity typically regards psychology as a well-balanced discipline in gender. But treating psychology as a singular entity may disguise important differences across subdisciplines and geographical locations. Further, little is known about how gender diversity may be related to other forms of diversity, particularly geographical (national) diversity—representations from different regions. As a case study, we focused on gender disparity in journal editorships—positions of central power in the landscape of scholarship. Combining gender and geographical diversity analysis, we analyzed 68 top psychology journals from ten subdisciplines. In contrast to previous results based on a specific segment of psychology journals, we found that females are overall underrepresented both as editorial board members (EBMs; 41%) and as editors-in-chief (EiCs; 34%). Importantly, gender disparity in editorships varies substantially across journals, subdisciplines, genres of scholarship (empirical, review, and method), continents, and countries/regions. With a few exceptions that reach gender parity (e.g., EBMs in developmental psychology; EBMs in Canada and Hong Kong), the majority of subdisciplines and regions witness varying degrees of female under-representations. Of note, under female (vs. male) EiCs, women are much better represented as EBMs (47% vs. 36%), and become the majority in subdisciplines such as developmental and multidisciplinary psychology. But this gender effect is not general, as the geographical diversity of EBMs and authorships decreases under female (vs. male) EiCs. Together, these results not only reveal the overall gender diversity in editorships in psychology, but also characterize its local and broad contexts, with new implications for policies.