Ladies, gentlemen, and scientific publication at the Royal Society, 1945-1990
Abstract
This paper extends the scholarship on gender and scientific authorship by exploring women’s involvement in editorial decision-making. Prior to 1945, women scientists could submit their work to the journals of the Royal Society, but they were excluded from all editorial and evaluation roles: such gate-keeping roles were reserved for Fellows of the Society. We draw upon the Society’s archive to examine the experiences of female authors, referees, and communicators in the period after women were admitted to the Fellowship. We investigate the involvement of women in both anonymous roles (e.g. as referees), and in publicly-visible positions of editorial responsibility (e.g. as communicators, and committee chairs). We reveal that women were better represented in both types of roles in the 1950s than in the 1970s and 1980s. These findings are pertinent to current debates about bias in the peer-review system, and the gendering of academic reward and recognition structures.
Citation
Rostvik , C M & Fyfe , A 2018 , ' Ladies, gentlemen, and scientific publication at the Royal Society, 1945-1990 ' , Open Library of Humanities , vol. 4 , no. 1 , pp. 1-40 . https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.265
Publication
Open Library of Humanities
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2056-6700Type
Journal article
Rights
[Submitted Manuscript] Copyright the Authors 2018. This is the submitted version, please do not circulate without the authors’ consent. [Accepted Manuscript] © the Authors. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/olh.265 [Final published version] © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
The research for this article was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant AH/K001841, as part of the project ‘Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: The Economic, Social and Cultural History of a Learned Journal, 1665–2015’. See: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophicaltransactions/.Collections
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