From Emilio Bruna: We were sent this quite useful feedback via email, so I am posting our reply here (anonymized and edited to protect the identity of the author).
Hi ----, thanks for taking the time to write and provide feedback on our manuscript. I hope the inline answers below clear up some of your questions. Before I do, a bit of context. The manuscript was submitted as a peer reviewed letter to a general interest journal in in Environmental Biology, it was not intended to be a comprehensive review of all journals in the field (though we cite several of those with similar results to ours). That explains both its brevity and the cursory description of the methods, which are available in more depth online (see the citation for Cho et al in the Literature Cited) and will accompany the data archiving. In essence, it was our hope that these results would stimulate conversation and discussion among the leadership of journals of how best to approach an important issue in our field – gender representation in academic settings.
Ten journals is a very small sample size and it’s unclear how these particular journals were chosen.
Each student selected a journal that they considered the premier journal in their field. As we say in discussion the sample size (N=10) certainly limits our ability to draw broad inference about the field as a whole, but it doesn’t preclude our drawing conclusions about the trends for individual journals.
It is also unclear how you defined “associate editors” and “subject editors” as used in Figure 2.
Journals have different names for the same positions. Based on our research, what some journals call “Handling Editors” or even "Associate Editors" are functionally equivalent to “Subject Editors”, meaning they are assigned a manuscript by an Editor-in-Chief, solicit and synthesize reviews, and either make a decision (e.g., Ecology) or recommendation to an Editor-in-Chief (e.g., Biotropica). We will work to clarify the methods and descriptions of the positions in the manuscript.
I’m unclear what you mean when you say you “surveyed 10 highly regarded journals.” Who did you survey and did you really get a 100% response rate? Or, do you mean you simply looked at the names of the editorial board members and guessed whether they were male or female based on their name?
By “survey” we meant we quantified the gender composition of the Editorial Boards. In some cases this required communication with a current or former EIC to clear up a few doubts. But we avoided guessing – we did internet searches, interviewed faculty, etc. to confirm identity. We will better clarify tho s int he revision. In addition, one of the reasons I personally believe so strongly in archiving data and making them freely available to others is that this a means of correcting errors. Once the data are archived, please do review them and let us know if we made any mistakes.
The paper states that males and females earn the same number of degrees in the STEM subjects; however, it does not state that the sexes are equally distributed among the sciences. You assume that since women earn 50 % of the degrees, that for any journal, 50% of the potential editorial board members should be women.
Actually, we didn’t assume this at all, in fact, in lines 15-17 of the manuscript we state that despite receiving similar numbers of degrees they are under presented at upper levels of both academic and industry.
This is not shown to be true. It may be true that they now earn 50% of the degrees, but they do not make up 50% of the workforce. The field has been male-dominated for decades, and thus most of the experienced professionals that would be considered for editor positions are indeed males. Your results are not surprising and they reflect that journals do comparatively well in providing women with editorial positions with their numbers a simple reflection of the lack of women in this field until the past decade or two.
This is the precisely the central point of our manuscript: for what gender ratio should journals strive? As we state on lines 65-72, a journal’s board can reflect the current gender ratio of the field. We argue for the alternative – that a journals editorial board should reflect what we hope the field will one day look like, in part because the opportunities this affords and role models it provides might help reduce disparities more quickly.
Respectfully yours,
Emilio Bruna
