The interplay of author and editor gender in acceptance delays: evidence from accounting journals

Abstract The objective of this study is to examine the impact of the gender of editors and authors, as well as their interaction, on acceptance delays (ACCDEL) of articles. We focus on genders of the corresponding author and the editor overseeing the manuscript. Using data from three top accounting journals from 2015 to 2020, we conduct a regression analysis to test the hypotheses regarding longer ACCDEL for articles under female editorship or authors, those with gender-opposite editor-author pairs, and those with coincident genders editor-author pairs. We find that when the genders of editors and corresponding authors differ, there is a significant increase in ACCDEL compared to submissions where the genders of editors and corresponding authors match. Our results suggest the existence of a prevalent gender homophily effect.