The Role of Scientific Publishers in Addressing Gender Disparity in Academic Publishing

Come and see our poster at the TMS meeting in San Antonio on how we’re trying to improve gender diversity on the editorial boards of our journals:?

Scientific publishers can, and must, play a role in driving equality in research. Journals and conferences are supposed to help drive science, but also reflect the diversity of the field that they serve. This diversity involves balancing the field when it comes to age, geographical distribution or gender. Applying a gender disambiguation methodology to data from Scopus, we found US-based authors publishing scholarly articles in materials science from 2011-2015, 23% of them were women. This proportion of varied across country, ranging from as high as 37% in Brazil, to as low as 12% in Japan. Of the over 3,000 editors and editorial board members involved in Materials Science journals at Elsevier, 13% are women.Gender balance on editorial boards was identified as an area of primary focus. The aim is to improve balance through attentive editorial recruitment to better represent the materials science community served by these journals.