Only 36% of chief editors at top journals are women

Just over a third of chief editors of top-ranking scientific journals are women, according to a letter to the journal Nature (2024, DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-03121-x ). The letter writers used names and publicly available images to estimate the gender of the chief editors of the 200 most highly ranked journals in the SCImago Journal and Country Rank , a portal that contains data on more than 34,000 journals published by some 5,000 publishers. Of those 200 titles, 174 had a single person in the position of chief editor, of which 62 (36%) were women, the study found. There was no significant difference between the percentage of female chief editors at medical and nonmedical journals. The demographics of the editors also revealed a strong bias toward the US and UK : 82 editors (47%) were based in the US, and 71 (41%) were in the UK. Female chief editors showed a similar