Women in Antiquity: An Analysis of Submissions, Peer Review, Editorial Decisions, and COVID-19

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recently, some academic archaeology journals have evaluated the gender distribution of authors, often finding female contributors underrepresented. *Antiquity is a journal of world archaeology with submissions from authors of many nationalities; however, we lacked data on the gender of our authors. We therefore analyzed the gender distribution of submissions from 2015 to 2019. Data from the ScholarOne submission system were supplemented with online research to establish the gender identity of authors based on self-identification. All submissions were classified as female/male single or first author—we identified no nonbinary authors. We then tracked the editorial decisions on papers, providing a longitudinal dataset with which to contextualize the authorship of the articles published each year. In addition, we undertook a parallel analysis of the gender of peer reviewers. Our analyses, completed in late 2019, were undertaken in order to establish a quantitative baseline against which to measure future performance. Unexpectedly, COVID-19 demonstrated the value of such statistics. Early in the pandemic, several editors observed a decline in numbers of submissions from female authors. We were therefore able to extend our dataset into 2020 and to assess whether the coronavirus had a disproportionate impact on the ability of women archaeologists to submit research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32732