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Gender inequality study shows women strongly under-represented on marketing academic journal boards

  • Date: Fri, Apr 9, 2021

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Women are significantly underrepresented in the editorial boards of marketing academic journals, and awards and recognition favour men, new research from the University of Bath School of Management has found.

In their study ‘It’s hard to be what you can’t see - gender representation in marketing’s academic journals’, Professor Andrea Prothero of Business and Society at University College Dublin and co-researcher Professor Pierre McDonagh examined gender representation in 20 marketing academic journals through three areas - the gender composition of editorial boards, special issue celebrations and the awards process.

The research found that since 2017 the number of women in editorial board roles had grown by 4.5% and that the number of female editors-in-chief had risen to 39 percent from 18 percent over the same period. But men still held 68% of all editorial board roles and the discrepancy was even greater at the advisory board level.

“The results are stark, disappointing and somewhat shocking. I think many people might expect both marketing and academia to be progressive areas but in 2021 it is simply not acceptable for example, that 88% of advisory board members within our journals are men, or that some journals in our field have never had a female editor-in-chief,” McDonagh said.

Read the original article first published here and the research paper here. Image courtesy of the University of Bath.

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