Ecology Peer-review Journals:
Lack of diversity in editorial boards may lead to disparities in editorial and peer review which contribute to gender and geographic disparities in scholarly publishing. For all papers submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from January 2004 to June 2014, we use a comprehensive dataset of the peer review process to examine how the gender, seniority and geographic location of editors and reviewers influence the recruitment of reviewers and the scores given to papers by reviewers. The gender composition of chosen reviewers was still extremely predominantly white, although the percentage of women appointed as reviewers grew over the ten years mainly because the amount of females on the editorial board grew and female editors accepted more female reviewers than white editors did. Also in the year where they picked the most women, male editors picked < 25% female reviewers, while female editors regularly selected < 30–35% female reviewers. Even, editors over-selected reviewers from their own regional area. People who were invited to review were less likely to respond to invitations to review but more likely to approve them if they replied. Females invited to review reacted equally to the invitation irrespective of whether the publisher who invited them was male or female, but people invited to review were both less likely to reply and more likely to refuse if the publisher was female. Review scores offered to papers did not vary between male and female reviewers, and there was no disparity in final decisions (proportion of papers rejected) between male and female reviewers.
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