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Despite substantial progress for women in science, women remain
underrepresented in many aspects of the scholarly publication process. We
examined how the gender diversity of editors and reviewers changed over
time for six journals in ecology and evolution (2003-2015 for four
journals, 2007-2015 or 2009-2015 for the other two), and how several
aspects of the peer review process differed between female and male
editors and reviewers. We found that, for five of the six journals, women
were either absent or very poorly represented as handling editors at the
beginning of our dataset. The representation of women among handling
editors increased gradually and consistently, with women making up 29% of
the handling editors (averaged across journals) in 2015, similar to the
representation of women as last authors on ecology papers (23% in 2015)
but lower than the proportion of women among all authors (31%) and among
members of the societies that own the journals (37-40%). The proportion of
women among reviewers has also gradually but consistently increased over
time, reaching 27% by 2015. Female editors invited more female reviewers
than did male editors, and this difference increased with age of the
editor. Men and women who were invited to review did not differ in whether
they responded to the review invitation, but, of those that responded,
women were slightly more likely to agree to review. In contrast, women
were less likely than men to accept invitations to serve on journal
editorial boards. Our analyses indicate that there has been progress in
the representation of women as reviewers and editors in ecology and
evolutionary biology, but women are still underrepresented among the
gatekeepers of scholarly publishing relative to their representation among
researchers.
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