Thread by @rsfrankl

New paper just out!! Our team* assess gender and country of residence for editorial teams in quantitative human geography journals and you'll probably never guess what we found. 1/n

* @CaitHRobin @VikkiHouldenPhD @darribas @DrDelmelle @udemsar @MobileHarv and David O'Sullivan

"Who Counts? Gender, Gatekeeping, and Quantitative Human Geography"

First off, the important bit: the paper is published in
@theAAG's Professional Geographer and is available here, with 50 free downloads. 2/n

tandfonline.com/eprint/83QBUAA…

Our paper was inspired by research on gender & gatekeeping in geography by @CarolinSchurr @DrMartinMuller & Imhof, who also focus on human geography, but neglect dynamic quantitative human geography sub-fields and journals. We wanted to rectify that. 3/n

https://twitter.com/theAAG/status/1295743880474894337?s=20

Actually, who am I kidding? Speaking for myself, anyway, this paper was driven by exhaustion with counting women on journal editorial boards and ending up wanting to throw something. 🤯 So here are some numbers for an admittedly small sample of journals. 4/n

The pre-print paper is up on @socarxiv and we did a whole thread back when we finished the analysis. So if this feels like déjà vu all over again...it's ok, it's healthy to have a regular reminder of just what our discipline looks like. Drink up! 5/n

OK, here's the cool stuff on the paper. 😍 We not only tally gender for editorial teams for 8 flagship quantitative human geography and GIS journals (see photo), but also collected year of PhD and country of residence—for editors, associate editors, & editorial board members. 6/n

Basically, what can we say? Only one journal tops 40% female on their editorial team (@GeogAnalysis 🙂), and most are about 1/3 female. 7/n

BUT. We have estimated seniority—or academic age—for our editorial teams, so we can also see whether teams are mostly male because their members are largely very senior in the field. Like many disciplines, seniority=male, in the main. What do you think we see? 8/n

To visualise age/gender structures across journals we create these "Tetris" plots that highlight demographic structures across journals. Conclusion: there are lots of structures that still lead to a paucity of women on journal teams (this is my favorite part of the paper btw) 9/n

I hesitate to call out any journals by name because these are my friends and colleagues, but if anyone wanted to ask Transactions in GIS, Environment and Planning B, or Journal of Geographical Systems what their strategy is, I'd be delighted to hear it. 10/n

For any geographers thinking that this is a "quant" problem, I recommend the Schurr, Müller & Imhof paper. Below is one panel from their Figure 2—our journals aren't nearly as balanced as the best of the best, but better than the worst, which come in at about 20% female 😳 11/n

Similar to other human geography journals, we find our quant human geography journals are also largely Anglophone in terms of team member country of residence.

This left us hungry to know about country of origin for all these folks, but that has to wait for another paper! 12/n

Finally, our use of "gatekeeping" in the title is intentional. Papers that purport to represent all human geography while also excluding quantitative human geography are—how shall I put this?—not helpful to the larger discipline...or to the geographers in those sub-fields. 13/n

On behalf of all my co-authors, I end on this high note ⬇️ around inclusion and disciplinary solidarity, from our paper's conclusion (14/n):

And, hey: I've got a GREAT Reviewer 3 story if you ever catch me in person again