Gender representation on environmental sciences editorial boards

Abstract

Gender representation in science has been extensively investigated by scientists from different disciplines and locations. Men continue to publish, collaborate, and obtain more citations than women. We investigated the relationship between Editor-in-Chief (EiC) and Editorial Boards' (EB) gender representation and the impact factor (IF) of environmental science journals (ESJ). We analyzed EiC/EB members of the top ESJ in the Web of Science databases that published at least 10,000 articles from their first publication until 2021. Binary gender information was assigned to 9153 members from 39 journals. IF ranged from 0.854 to 11.236 (x̅=5.05). Women represented 20 % of EiC positions and 23 % of EB members. Although, the majority of female EiC/EBs were represented in journals with an IF lower than the mean. No correlation was found between EiC's gender representation and the IF (p > 0.05). Regarding the hypothesis that female EiC was associated with EB gender equity, the link was not significant (p = 0.3). Our hypothesis of no association between gender proportion and IF was accepted for journals with IF>5 (p = 0.2) but rejected for IF.