Gender diversity in academic publishing—comment on Galak and Kahn (2021)

Galak and Kahn (2021) report and discuss the results of the 2019 Academic Marketing Climate Survey. In their survey, they contacted faculty in marketing departments of Business Schools and surveyed them with respect to their perception of organizational climate. The questions covered general perceptions of organizational climate as well as explicit discrimination, implicit bias, and social and sexual harassment/assault. A key conclusion from their survey is that women view the organizational climate less favorable compared to men. This result is—on the one hand—very much in line with previous studies and surveys that covered similar questions in other academic fields (e.g., Allgood et al., 2019(economics); Ellemers, 2014 (behavioral and brain science); Pololi & Jones, 2010(medicine); Sabharwal & Corley, 2009 (several social science disciplines)). On the other hand, this result is particularly noteworthy because marketing should in theory—and we very much agree with Galak and Kahn (2021) in this respect—provide an ideal environment for female researchers. A main reason for that is that marketing research is intellectually close to fields like psychology or anthropology, where female researchers are well represented (e.g., American Psychological Association 2017).

Against this background, Galak and Kahn (2021) make an important contribution by providing empirical evidence that can inform the debate of how female scholars are represented in our departments and in our discipline more generally.

In their study, Galak and Kahn (2021) focus on organizational climate, and their survey contained only one question that referred to unfair treatment in publishing decisions. The answers to this question reveal little difference between women and men, in particular if compared to the substantial differences in response to other questions (e.g., teaching, invitations to participate in research conferences, service obligations, or compensation). Given that it was beyond the scope of Galak and Kahn’s survey to analyze the perceptions or experiences that scholars face in the domain of academic publishing in detail, we believe it is important to complement their analysis in this respect. The reason is that publication success is the key determinant of professional success of academics, i.e., hiring and promotion decisions depend first and foremost on academic journal publications. Hence, we argue that an assessment of disadvantages that female researchers face is incomplete if not complemented with an analysis of potential hurdles that female scholars face in publishing.

Therefore, we seek to complement Galak and Kahn (2021) by providing an assessment of gender diversity and a potential gender gap in academic publishing in the field of marketing research. In particular, we will answer the following research questions:

We proceed by describing our data.

For our analyses, we cover publications in two sets of journals across two decades. First, we compiled a list of marketing journals, which we obtain from the Scimago journal ranking (https://​www.​scimagojr.​com/​journalrank.​php). Here, we selected marketing as a subject category, and focused on the subset of journals that are part of the Web of Science core collection. From this list, we drop journals that are not primarily marketing journals. This results in a list of 81 marketing journals (see Appendix Table 2). We use publications in these 81 journals to assess the gender gap within marketing. Secondly, we use all 24 journals that are included in the UT Dallas journal ranking.¹ Joining these two lists results in a total of 101 journals (4 marketing journals are also on the UT Dallas list), for which we collect all publications since 2000 through the Crossref API. The data capture metadata for 92,089 publications across all 101 journals from 2000 to 2020.

While the data set contains the full names of all authors, it does not indicate their gender. We therefore implemented the following approach to determine the authors’ gender. First, we obtain the US Social Security Card Applicants dataset² containing the 1000 most frequent names of applicants for every year from 1880 to 2018. For each name, this data set contains the information of how often it appeared in a female vs. male application. To determine the most likely gender for a given name, we then implemented a Naïve Bayes approach and calculated the conditional probability of the authors’ gender. In the first step, we examined the authors’ given name. If the conditional probability exceeded the threshold of 0.6 for either class, we assigned the respective label “female” or “male” (Zhao & Kamareddine, 2017). For probabilities between these thresholds, we classified the authors’ names as “unisex”. For those names for which we could not calculate a conditional probability with the available data, we repeated the procedure considering the last three letters of the first names. If the algorithm again assigned “unknown”, we sent the remaining names to a gender classification API (gender-api.com). To assess the accuracy of our approach, we randomly selected 500 author names from the list of marketing journals. Two research assistants manually identified the respective author’s gender (e.g., by visiting author homepages). We then compared the manual classifications with the classifications produced by the algorithm and find a classification accuracy for the algorithm of 0.90. Finally, we manually screened a sample of the 1000 most productive author names to correct remaining misclassifications.

Across all 101 journals, this approach led to a label distribution of 66.3% male, 33.1% female, 0.51% unknown, and 2.06% unisex names for a total of 90,392 unique author names. In the following, we will focus our analysis on author names that were either classified as male or as female.

Before we proceed with our analysis, we have to clarify how we measure a potential gender gap. Is a gender gap present if women account for less than 50% of authorships, or is a gender gap present if the share of female authorships is below the share of female marketing faculty? It is probably not realistic to expect that women account for 50% of publications if they constitute substantially less than half of marketing faculty. That is the reason why we will benchmark our data with the female share of marketing faculty. Galak and Kahn (2021) report that approximately 39.6% of marketing faculty in Business Schools is female, and we will use this number as a point of reference.

So what do these numbers tell us? An optimistic view would be that the female share in academic publishing in marketing is higher than in other fields of business and economics, and higher than in many other areas of research (Larivière et al., 2013). A less optimistic view is that—even in marketing—there is a long way to go until we achieve gender equality in academic publishing. Although the gap has become smaller over time, it appears that the development has stalled, and with the current pace, it is unlikely that we will reach parity any time soon. An area of particular concern is the difference between the most prestigious journals and the rest of the field. The fact that the female share is lower in the leading journals compared to the rest suggests that there is a glass ceiling. We believe that this is a problem that has to be tackled.

Galak and Kahn (2021) conclude that their empirical evidence allows decision-makers to “see evidence that illustrates that the systemic discrimination that is prevalent in much of the working world is also strikingly present within academic marketing.” With our analysis, we seek to complement their assessment with the goal of informing decision-makers. In line with their findings, we have to conclude that female scholars appear to be facing hurdles in academic publishing that male scholars only face to a lesser extent, and that academic publishing in marketing in many journals continues to be dominated by male scholars.

So why do we see a lower share of female publications? We now discuss potential explanations.

As mentioned earlier, Galak and Kahn (2021) find that the organizational climate is perceived as less favorable by female scholars. Other research (Offermann & Malamut, 2002; Seibert et al., 2004) argues that inferior organizational climate reduces work performance. Although we cannot draw a direct causal link here, it is possible that an unfavorable organizational climate for women is at least partially responsible for the gender gap in academic publications.

Galak and Kahn (2021) report that female scholars feel a stronger burden in terms of internal service and teaching. A potential implication from this observation is that female researchers have less time for research and publications.

An alternative explanation is that—because of the unfavorable organizational climate—women choose not to enter academia, which leads to less female authored publications. This explanation would also be in line with the “leaky pipeline” that can be observed in many academic areas and in marketing as well (e.g., Sato et al., 2020). However, this explanation cannot account for the glass ceiling that we described above. Its presence suggests that the female scholars face hurdles in their professional work that male authors do not face to the same extent.

Another area of concern is that female participation is especially low in quantitative marketing research (publication share below 20% in these types of journals; similarly, Bravo-Hermsdorff et al. (2019) find female publication share in INFORMS journals below 20%). This low share of female scholars in the field of quantitative marketing may give rise to a self-enforcing mechanism because Krishna and Orhun (2020) find that there is a gender performance difference in quantitative business school courses. One way that they identify to mitigate this lower performance of female students in quantitative courses is through a female instructor, which is a difficult thing to implement if the share of female scholars is particularly low in this domain of marketing. So we need to break this mechanism to achieve the goal of more equal share within the departments and more female publications in this field.

Lastly, previous research has discussed a lack of networks for female scholars that their male counterparts rely on in their research as a source for differences in research productivity (Casad et al., 2021). A lack of networks may both contribute to a less favorable perception of the organizational climate as well as a lower research output of female scholars. A very rough measure for network size and strength could be the publication activity as single authors. However, these numbers suggest that male authors are more likely to publish as single authors, i.e., 9.9% of all male authorships are single authorships compared to 8.4% of all female authorships (difference is significant with p<0.01). Clearly, these considerations call for a more nuanced measurement of the role of research networks, which is an interesting area for future research.

We believe our findings on the publication gap and the potential reasons mentioned above warrant a discussion about appropriate countermeasures.⁶ Assuming that the underrepresentation of female scholars in academic publishing creates additional obstacles for women in academia, the situation cannot be improved without active steps from journals and societies, as well as marketing departments to improve the climate especially for female scholars. What can be done? Galak and Kahn (2021) discuss a number of actions, which we very much support. In addition, we want to highlight a few aspects specifically related to empowering women in publishing. First, supportive social networks are important to be successful in academia. Schools and professional associations (e.g., AMA or INFORMS) are suitable places to host and further strengthen initiatives in this domain (see also Casad et al., 2021). Second, professional association, journals, and other leaders in the field should take an even more active role in advancing female scholarship. Invitations to conferences and keynotes, invitations to review and to serve in the leadership of journals (e.g., ERB), and invitation to seminar presentations are direct measures that can be adapted right away.

While the results that we present suggest that the field of marketing is in a somewhat better position than many other disciplines, we are still far from closing the gender gap and should therefore strive to further improve the work environment for female scholars.