Male Gatekeepers: Gender Bias in the Publishing Process?

Using data on articles published in the top-five economics journals in the period 1991 to 2018, we explore whether the gender composition of editorial boards is related to the publishing success of female authors and to the quality of articles that get published. Our results show that a low level of representation of women on editorial boards harms the publishing success of female authors, while a higher level of representation increases the share of published articles that are (co-)authored by women. We also find evidence that female editors benefit article quality. While the number of unique female editors in our sample is rather small (a dozen), several robustness checks corroborate these findings, which are of direct relevance for the equity and efficiency of the academic publishing process. Our findings are broadly consistent with existing evidence on the behavior of gender-mixed hiring committees.