(Press-News.org) Women are significantly underrepresented in the editorial boards of marketing academic journals, and awards and recognition favour men, new research from the University of Bath School of Management has found.
In their study 'It's hard to be what you can't see - gender representation in marketing's academic journals', Professor Andrea Prothero of Business and Society at University College Dublin and co-researcher Professor Pierre McDonagh examined gender representation in 20 marketing academic journals through three areas - the gender composition of editorial boards, special issue celebrations and the awards process.
The research found that since 2017 the number of women in editorial board roles had grown by 4.5% and that the number of female editors-in-chief had risen to 39 percent from 18 percent over the same period. But men still held 68% of all editorial board roles and the discrepancy was even greater at the advisory board level.
"The results are stark, disappointing and somewhat shocking. I think many people might expect both marketing and academia to be progressive areas but in 2021 it is simply not acceptable for example, that 88% of advisory board members within our journals are men, or that some journals in our field have never had a female editor-in-chief," McDonagh said.
Prothero said she and McDonagh were moved to study this issue as they believed many scholars were not aware of the scale of the gender discrimination problem in marketing academic journals or of the particular challenges around awards and celebrations of academic achievement.
"Our research also highlighted how journal celebrations also favour men. Special issues for example include reflections from previous editors (who are mostly men), and invited commentaries (who are mostly men). And, where journals and/or their related associations celebrate outstanding research through awards processes, those awards which are named after leading figures in the field are all named after men!" she said.
McDonagh said he and Prothero were not arguing that women are deliberately excluded from awards and recognition, but that structural, systemic and institutional biases meant male colleagues were privileged over women.
"And this of course, also means that injustice and inequality for female academics are perpetuated. Our goal is to get scholars in the marketing academy to think differently about things that are hidden in plain sight. We also want them to join us in asking for meaningful change with respect to existing gender discrimination in the marketing journals," he said.
McDonagh said publishing houses and editors should take four steps towards tackling gender representation issues.
Firstly, build diversity into existing journal review boards, and second, introduce a quota system to ensure diversity of people across advisory boards, manuscript review boards, and in roles such as associate editors, co-editors, and editors-in-chief. Publishing houses in particular, have been discussing more inclusive and diverse editorial boards across academia, but Prothero said it was important to move beyond talk and implement new policies. And, while this study focused on gender representation, other dimensions such as race were equally as important.
"As a third step, we should ask awkward questions of the leaders in our field - why do the majority of named awards in our field honour white men? We request awards which also honour the leading people of colour and females in our field, he said.
Finally, Prothero and McDonagh urged editors-in-chief to celebrate those less visible to others.
"We have female role models for younger scholars to inspire them to greatness, but they are not celebrated or included either in editorial boards or in special issue celebrations to the same extent as men. Let's rectify this. Quite simply the current status quo is an injustice - not everyone is a white male academic, so why do they dominate everything?" he asked.
INFORMATION:
Notes to editors:
For further information please contact Tony Roddam at the University of Bath press office on +44 7971 500460 or press@bath.ac.uk
Pierre McDonagh is Professor of Critical Marketing & Society at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. Pierre has researched sustainable consumption & production since the early 1990's and helps people understand what sustainable communication entails. He also writes about issues in gender equality in marketing and the benefits and challenges of critical marketing communications. He recently co-authored 'The Dark Side of Marketing Communications' with Tim Hill, which features as part of the Routledge series on Studies in Critical Marketing.
Andrea Prothero is Professor of Business and Society in the UCD College of Business at University College Dublin, Ireland, and Co- Director of the UCD Centre for Business and Society (CeBaS). Her research broadly explores the area of Marketing in Society with a key focus on sustainability and gender issues.
University of Bath
The University of Bath is one of the UK's leading universities both in terms of research and our reputation for excellence in teaching, learning and graduate prospects.
The University is rated Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the Government's assessment of teaching quality in universities, meaning its teaching is of the highest quality in the UK.
In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 research assessment 87 per cent of our research was defined as 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent'. From developing fuel efficient cars of the future, to identifying infectious diseases more quickly, or working to improve the lives of female farmers in West Africa, research from Bath is making a difference around the world. Find out more: http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/
Well established as a nurturing environment for enterprising minds, Bath is ranked highly in all national league tables. We are ranked 6th in the UK by The Guardian University Guide 2021, and 9th in both The Times & Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021 and the Complete University Guide 2021. Our sports offering was rated as being in the world's top 10 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject in 2021.
Worldwide 39 percent of the adults were overweight in 2016, according to statistics of the World Health Organization. In the US the prevalence of obesity was 42.4 percent in 2017/2018, according to a survey of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
Concurrently millions of people want to lose weight. Physical exercise is an important option to achieve this. After all, more calories are consumed through sport than when sitting, standing or lying down.
But what influence does sport have on (direct) eating habits? Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Nebraska (USA) have now investigated this ...
An international research team has sequenced the genomes of the oldest securely dated modern humans in Europe who lived around 45,000 years ago in Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria. By comparing their genomes to the genomes of people who lived later in Europe and in Asia the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, show that this early human group in Europe contributed genes to later people, particularly present-day East Asians. The researchers also identified large stretches of Neandertal DNA in the genomes of the Bacho Kiro Cave people, showing that ...
Working safely is not only about processes, but context - understanding the work environment and circumstances, and being able to predict what other people will do next. A new system empowers robots with this level of context awareness, so they can work side-by-side with humans on assembly lines more efficiently and without unnecessary interruptions.
Instead of being able to only judge distance between itself and its human co-workers, the human-robot collaboration system can identify each worker it works with, as well as the person's skeleton model, which is an abstract of body volume, says Hongyi Liu, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Using this information, the context-aware robot system can recognize ...
3D-mammography reduces the number of breast cancer cases diagnosed in the period between routine screenings, when compared with traditional mammography, according to a large study from Lund University in Sweden. The results are published in the journal Radiology.
"Our results indicate that 3D-mammography, or digital breast tomosynthesis, possibly detects cancers that would otherwise have been diagnosed later at a more advanced stage", says Kristin Johnson, doctoral student at Lund University and radiology resident at Skåne University Hospital.
A large prospective screening study conducted at Skåne ...
WESTMINSTER, Colorado - April 07, 2021 - As the number of weed populations resistant to multiple herbicides continues to soar, it is clear that better tools are needed to help growers rapidly diagnose resistance issues. With more timely access to information, they can take earlier, proactive steps to keep resistant weeds from spreading.
A recent article in the journal END ...
An international team of researchers has studied individual differences in the behaviour of red deer. They found that several observed behaviours form a personality component, which they labelled "Confidence/Aggressiveness".
As is commonly known, individual people behave consistently different from each other and these kinds of consistent differences in behaviour are called personality. Studies on species other than humans, from insects to elephants, have found that personalities are widespread in nature.
The team consists of researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, the University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic, the University of Vienna, Austria, and the University of Turku, Finland and is led by Bruno Esattore from the Department of ...
Cardiovascular diseases are usually complex and affect multiple organs simultaneously. Treatments for vascular diseases in the brain may therefore have implications for the treatment of cardiac diseases. It is therefore important to understand the respective causes and effects. This study explores the causes of intracerebral haemorrhages and links them to the risk of stroke associated with atrial fibrillation. It suggests a fundamental new assessment of the effects of blood thinning on intracerebral haemorrhages.
About 1,000 patients with intracerebral haemorrhage are treated at stroke units each year in Switzerland. Intracerebral haemorrhages are more often fatal than other forms of strokes, ...
Most materials go from being solids to liquids when they are heated. One rare counter-example is helium-3, which can solidify upon heating. This counterintuitive and exotic effect, known as the Pomeranchuk effect, may now have found its electronic analogue in a material known as magic-angle graphene, says a team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science led by Prof. Shahal Ilani, in collaboration with Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
This result, published today in Nature, comes thanks to the first ever measurement of electronic entropy in an atomically-thin two dimensional ...
For those who live in an area blighted by ticks, the threat of Lyme disease can cast a shadow over the joy of spring and summer. These blood-sucking arachnids can transmit bacteria into the bloodstream of their unsuspecting host, causing the disease. Early treatment is essential, but current tests are not usually sensitive enough to detect the disease in early-stage patients. A recent study in open-access journal END ...
A joint research team led by Dr. MAO Fangyuan and Dr. ZHANG Chi from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. MENG Jin from the American Museum of Natural History have discovered two new species of mammal-like, burrowing animals that lived about 120 million years ago in what is now northeastern China.
The new species, described in Nature on April 7, are distantly related. However, they independently evolved traits to support their digging lifestyle. They represent the first "scratch diggers" discovered in this ecosystem.
"There are many hypotheses about why animals dig into the soil and live underground," said Prof. MENG, lead author of the study. "For protection against predators, ...
