Background/Purpose: The assessment of the frequency distribution of females and males is occurring in different academic areas. Academic publishing is not exempt from potential structural disparities. We aimed to assess the gender representation, by decision-making level, of the editors and editorial boards of the 45 leading journals focused on rheumatology.

Methods: This was an exploratory, cross-sectional, audit-type study. The 45 most influential journals in rheumatology were identified on Scimago Journal & Country Rank. The names of the Editorial members were extracted from each journal’s website. A digital gallery was used to assign one of the binary denominations of female or male based on the probability that a name was culturally given to a woman or man. All individuals with names whose accuracy for one gender denomination was below 80% were manually searched. The editorial positions were categorized according to the influence level in editorial decision-making. Based on the study design and data characteristics, only descriptive statistics were used.

Results: Overall, there were 2,186 names retrieved from 44 journals (one excluded since no longer publishing); 597 (27%) were assigned as females, 1566 (72%) males, and 23 (1%) missing data. The number of listed individuals per journal ranged from 3 to 374. The categorization by decision-making level showed that 76 (3.5%) were at the editor-in-chief level, 391 (18%) at the associate editor level, 1676 (77%) as editorial board members, and 34 (1.5%) were unclassified.

The frequency distribution of assigned gender by decision-making level was different: 19 (25%) females and 57 (75%) males were at the editor-in-chief level; 129 (33%) females and 261 (67%) males at the associate editor level; 443 (26.5%) females and 1220 (73.4%) males at the editorial board level.

Some journals showed an even gender distribution, such as Arthritis & Rheumatology, with 56 members almost equally distributed among all decision-making levels. However, others had a significant imbalance, e.g., a journal with 79 members had males in 2 out of 3 editor-in-chief level positions, 11 out of 16 associate editor level positions, and 41 out of 60 editorial board level positions.

Conclusion: Overall, these data show unequal gender representation in editorial members and most rheumatology-focused journals. It remains to be determined whether rheumatology societies are incurring vertical segregation.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/gender-representation-of-the-editors-and-editorial-boards-of-the-top-45-rheumatology-focused-journals/