Abstract
Representation matters. Women have slowly been closing the achievement gap with men, but less so in the highest levels of various organizations. In 2000, a study was published that examined the prevalence of women authors in behavior analytic academic journal articles. They found a significant discrepancy between the frequency of women being published compared to men. The effect was greater when the editor of the journal was a man. This study analyzed the same journals, and further included four more of the most prominent journals in the field, from where the original study left off (1998-2019) to answer a series of research questions. There were 8,521 final articles (duplicates and articles without authors were removed) yielding 29,627 authors in total, across eight journals over a total of 21 years. A total of 2,241 authors were labeled as “unknown.” Initial data shows that women are represented less frequency in all categories of authorship compared to men (11% less frequently). While women’s participation has increased over time, and since the original study, there is still disproportionate representation compared to the entirety of the field. Further studies should examine the reasons behind the discrepancies, the representation of people of color (POC) in behavior analytic journals, and the representation of women and POC in prominent journals in other fields.