Gender and Editorial Outcomes at Legislative Studies Quarterly

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12255
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Date: 01 August 2019

Gender and Editorial Outcomes at Legislative Studies Quarterly

A recent issue of the Legislative Studies Section’s newsletter, The

Legislative Scholar, had a very informative discussion of gender

issues related to the section. Some of the contributions made ref-

erence to Legislative Studies Quarterly. Not having data on sub-

missions to the journal, conclusions regarding publication rates

were without a denominator, and I would like to provide some

further information in that regard.

We have submission data dating back to 2016 when the journal

first started using ScholarOne (and the point at which it moved

to WashU). Our managing editor at Wiley, Michelle Mart ire, sent

the names and countr ies of residence of every author who submit-

ted to the journal since the beginning of 2016 to https://gender-

api.com/, and it assigned gender, male or female appare ntly being

the only options, to each name. I then hand coded the gender

of any scholar about whom the API was less than 75% certain.

Michelle then integrated that gender data back into a dataset

about submissions and manuscript status. This dataset included

453 manuscripts.

As a frame of reference, the newsletter reported that 22% of

Legislative Studies section’s members are women. Clearly, the

journal is not limited to section members for submissions, but

the section does provide some point of reference. In the last three

years (plus a few weeks into 2019), 26% of all authors who sub-

mitted to the journal were women (I counted an author once per

submission). Female authors were 26% of all authors whose man-

uscripts did not get published (this includes a few works about

which a decision has not yet been reached), and they were 27% of

all the authors whose work was accepted for publication.

Female authors submitted 28% of the manus cripts that were solo-

authored. Solo-authored work by female authors was accepted

10% of the time. Solo-authored work by male authors was ac-

cepted 11% of the time. Women were 26% of the authors on co-

authored papers.

© 2019 Washington University in St. L ouis

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 3, August 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12255