Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Diversity in Aesthetics Publishing

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What follows is a guest post by Sherri Irvin. Sherri is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art with strong interests in ethics and philosophy of race. She has written extensively on matters related to contemporary art and on aesthetic experience in everyday life and is currently working on two books, both under contract with Oxford University Press: Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art, which argues for a view of the ontology of contemporary artworks, and Body Aesthetics, a multi-authored collection that treats the aesthetics of the body in relation to art, evolutionary theory, ethical considerations, race, age, gender, disability, sexuality and sport. Sherri is also a member of the editorial boards of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Philosophy Compass.

UPDATE(12/10/2014)
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Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism editors Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker have announced some changes to the journal’s editorial policies: “[B]eginning with issue 73.4, we will adopt a new citation policy. We will move from a system in which all citations are in endnotes to one with in text citations and a reference list. Like our recent addition of abstracts at the beginning of each published paper, this change generates greater transparency about the contents of articles.  “However, it also supports the second change that we will introduce, which is that JAAC’s instruction to contributors we will include our support for the GCC 2 language (Gendered Citation Campaign). The new instruction reads: We encourage authors to check whether there are significant but under-recognized papers or books by women philosophers, or philosophers from other under-represented groups, which you might have overlooked so far in producing your paper and/or assembling your bibliography.” 

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In my work as a reviewer and editor, I’ve seen a number of aesthetics manuscripts that fail to acknowledge relevant prior work (both philosophical and artistic) by women and people of color. When I became the first female co-editor of the aesthetics section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy last year, I noticed that only 5 out of 37 (13.5%) articles that had been commissioned by the aesthetics section since the SEP’s inception were by women. (I am one of 5 co-editors of the section. All the others are male, and all of us are white.)

These and other experiences have led me to be curious about the state of publishing in aesthetics, which has the reputation of being a particularly collegial and woman-friendly sub-discipline of philosophy. I decided to do some research about the gender balance of publishing in 3 major aesthetics journals since 2010, and also to query the editors about their policies and practices.[1] I focused on the two most prominent print journals, the British Journal of Aesthetics (BJA) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC), and the most prominent online journal, Contemporary Aesthetics (CA).

Data on Gender Balance for BJACA and JAAC

I collected information about the gender balance of the authors, referees, editorial boards and editorial consultants of BJACA and JAAC. I also collected information about the gender balance of membership in the ASA and BSA.[2]


 

 

Gender Balance of Published Articles

BJA and JAAC are quite similar regarding the gender balance of articles published since 2010, women have authored about 20% of the articles in each journal. The balance of CA is strikingly different, with 33.3% of articles authored by women.[3]

From the overall numbers, I broke out contributions to symposia and special issues, since these typically involve some pre-selected or invited contributors and thus may enable the editors of the journal or of the issue to have a greater influence on gender balance. I found that, as compared to the overall gender balance, women were somewhat more highly represented in symposia and special issues in BJA (at 25%) and CA (at 39.7%), with little difference from the overall ratio in JAAC (at 20.9%). Only 24 out of 139 (17%) total articles in BJA were in special issues or symposia, as compared to 29/93 (31%) for CA and 55/134 (41%) for JAAC.

At the suggestion of Ted Gracyk, co-editor of JAAC, I compared these numbers to the gender compositions of the professional organizations with which BJA and JAAC are affiliated. The British Society of Aesthetics (affiliated with BJA) has approximately 31.2% female membership, whereas the American Society for Aesthetics (affiliated with JAAC) has approximately 32.5% female membership (though I was unable to code for gender in about 1.8% of cases, so the actual number is probably a few tenths of a percent higher).

We thus have a situation where, in our two main print journals, women are very significantly underrepresented as compared to their membership in the affiliated professional organizations.

CA, on the other hand, is publishing work by women at a rate that closely mirrors their membership in these organizations (though it is not formally affiliated with either).

Gender Balance of Decision Makers

I also looked at the gender balance of the groups responsible for decisions about each journal or the articles to be published.

Both CA and JAAC publish lists of their referees. The referees for the last full publication year were 44.8% women for CA and 22.4% women for JAACBJA does not publish or maintain an annual list of referees and does not track the gender balance of its referees.

Women are currently well represented on the Editorial Boards of all three journals, relative to their membership in the ASA and BSA: 31.3% for BJA, 37.5% for CA, and 38.1% for JAAC. Both BJA and JAAC have made recent changes to their Editorial Boards that have increased the representation of women. (Full disclosure: I was recently added to the EB of JAAC.)

BJA and CA, but not JAAC, also employ a supplemental team of consultants to the editorial board. The BJAEditorial Consultants of BJA are 23.1% women[4] and the CAInternational Advisory Board is 50% women. (I omitted deceased members of the CA IAB, since I am interested in the gender balance of current decision makers.)

Editorial Policies and Practices

I asked the editors of all three journals to tell me about their review process and about specific efforts they are making in relation to diversity and inclusiveness.

According to the editors, all three journals employ double anonymity in their review process: the author and referees are mutually unaware of each other’s identity, but the action editor for the article typically knows the identities of both.

Elisabeth Schellekens, co-editor of BJA, reports recent efforts to improve the gender balance of the Editorial Board and Editorial Consultants. In addition, she and co-editor John Hyman have worked “to broaden the journal’s contents to include new or less mainstream topics or areas of research,” and they are now receiving more submissions in such areas. With regard to citation of work by women, Schellekens reports, “We have never made it conditional of acceptance that an article should contain references to female authors but, where possible, we have suggested them.” In addition, “It has always been a serious consideration in the choice of special issues and symposia that there should be at least a few possible contributors who are female.” She reports that, in her experience, women are significantly less likely to accept an invitation to participate in a symposium or special issue, but also significantly less likely to pull out once they have accepted such an invitation.

Arnold Berleant and Yuriko Saito report that CA does not have, in Saito’s words, “a specific policy or practice to encourage submissions from female writers and minority writers.” However, “our practice has been to support and encourage good works that address diversity of issues and approaches. We also specifically discourage those works in aesthetics that are relevant only to a narrow circle of professional philosophers/aestheticians – what Arnold refers to as ‘in-house debates.’ We make sure that the issues and discussion are accessible and relevant to general readers from different disciplines, including practicing artists. This also means that we consider submissions that do not use the typical philosophy/aesthetics vocabulary, methodologies, approaches, etc.”

In addition, CA has an editorial practice (though not formal policy) regarding authors whose first language is not English. Saito reports that Berleant “specifically tries very hard … to encourage works from non-English speaking authors whose language may need a lot of editorial work. As long as the content is there, we do not automatically reject submissions because of poor English. [Berleant] spends an inordinate amount of time and effort working with the authors to improve their writing. I think this adds to the cultural diversity of our collection.”

Berleant notes that CA’s only explicit policy related to diversity is this one, noted on the CA web site: “In order to ensure diversity of subject matter, approaches, and voices, papers by authors who have not published in Contemporary Aesthetics for at least a year prior to submission are normally given precedence.” He adds, “[O]ur commitment to diversity does not include explicit attention to gender, institution, or nationality.”

Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker, co-editors of JAAC, have continued a practice initiated by previous editor Susan Feagin of collecting statistics on gender and geographic distribution of submissions and acceptances (see next section). They report, “JAAC’s mission as an interdisciplinary journal generates a duty to editors to be as inclusive as possible.” For acceptances, they rely primarily on peer reviewers, whom they select “according to two criteria: we do not ask anyone to review a manuscript if they’ve done a report for us within the last six months, and we prioritize peer reviewers who have themselves published peer-reviewed work on the topic of the manuscript.”

Gender & Geographic Balance of Submission & Acceptances in JAAC

Since July 2011, JAAC has been keeping figures on the gender balance and geographic distribution of authors who submit articles and whose articles are accepted. BJA and CA do not collect this information.

These figures reflect authors, not manuscripts. If an accepted manuscript had a man and a woman as co-authors, its acceptance is reflected in both the “women” and “men” columns.  

It is notable that over the past three years, women authors have submitted to JAAC at a rate substantially higher than the rate at which they are published in JAAC from 2010-2014, and closer to the proportion of women members in the ASA. During 2 of the last 3 years, the acceptance rate for women has been lower than for men. Though the differences seem small (only 2-3 percentage points), another way of putting them is that in 2012-3, men were 21.4% more likely than women to have their manuscripts accepted, while in 2013-4, they were 11.6% more likely.

US submissions tend to be accepted at a rate slightly over 20%, while submissions from non-English-speaking countries tend to be accepted at far lower rates. There has been a steep upward trend over the past three years in the acceptance rate of submissions from English-speaking countries other than the US (which may, of course, be a statistical anomaly).

Conclusions

It is, of course, impossible to draw any conclusions about causation from these data. But a few things are notable. In the two most prominent print journals in aesthetics, the representation of women is significantly lower than the rate at which women belong to the relevant professional organizations. In JAAC, the rate at which women have been published since 2010 is lower than the rate at which they have submitted articles from 2011-2014.

A much higher proportion of the articles in CA are authored by women, as compared to both BJA and JAAC. It also has twice as many women among its referees (as compared to JAAC) and editorial consultants (as compared to BJA).

JAAC is tracking gender and geographic balance of submissions, acceptances and referees, while BJA and CAare not. BJA is actively trying to broaden the range of topics that the journal is understood to embrace. CA has since its inception embraced (and, in my judgment, effectively signaled that it embraces) diversity of topics, and has an editorial practice of fostering publication by authors whose first language is not English.

Further Research Directions

There are many questions that would be worthy of further study, including these:

1.  How do the publication rates of women in these journals compare to the rates at which women belong to philosophy department faculties? Since some, and perhaps many, members of the ASA and BSA are not professional philosophers, it is difficult to be sure that the gender balance of the ASA and BSA is reflective of the gender balance of the profession (though I am aware of no special reason to doubt that it is).

2. How do other aesthetics journals, such as the Journal of Aesthetic Education and Evental Aesthetics, compare to BJACA and JAAC?

3. How does the gender balance of submissions and published articles vary from country to country?

4. Are there identifiable differences in the topics that women and men tend to write about?

5. How do the citation rates for work by women compare to those for work by men? This would be a very important next line of inquiry, given the evidence that women’s scholarly work is systematically under-cited (see here and here). Especially notable is Kieran Healy’s finding that in top philosophy journals, David Lewis is cited almost twice as many times as all women combined.

6. All of these questions need to be studied in relation to racial and ethnic minorities as well. Such research might require surveying people about their race and ethnicity.

Proposals

1. Publish bibliographies.

Given the evidence that women are systematically undercited, and the likelihood that scholars of color are as well, it would be valuable to take steps to improve the situation. Data about citation would be easier to collect if journals published bibliographies at the end of each article rather than just footnotes with embedded citation information. Bibliographies would also be easier for scholars and referees to scan if they are checking to make sure that relevant research by members of underrepresented groups has been cited.

2. Check for citations by women and scholars of color.

Authors, referees and editors should make a habit of checking to make sure relevant work by women and scholars of color has been cited. Editors could expressly instruct referees that this is among their tasks.

3. Work toward inclusion of women and scholars of color in symposia and special issues.

Editors and editorial boards should work to ensure that symposia and special issues are likely to have women and members of racial and ethnic minorities among their contributors. Those submitting proposals should address this, and editors and EBs can take this into account in deciding which proposals to accept. Those of us deciding which projects to undertake – what kind of books to edit, what special issues and symposia to propose, etc. – can consider topics that women and scholars of color are writing about, so that there will be a supply of people to collaborate on these projects with us.

4. Reach out to encourage scholars to submit their work and to propose symposia and special issues.

If editors become aware of a session that includes high-quality work by women or scholars of color, they can express interest in having particular papers or a symposium submitted for consideration. Cultivating relationships with scholars conveys to them that their work is more likely to be welcomed.

5. Look beyond non-standard English.

If we value diversity of topics, approaches and methods (as, I would argue, we should), and if we value the availability of excellent work from scholars around the world, we may need to make a special effort not to reject work based largely on linguistic infelicities.  

6. Collect data about gender balance of submissions, acceptances, and referees.

I applaud JAAC for collecting and publicly sharing the data they have collected. Given that CA has a gender balance that seems to more closely reflect the gender balance of participation in the profession, this seems less urgent for them (though such information would still be useful, if only to allow us to gain more insight into what they are doing right). I hope that BJA will consider tracking these data as well. Given that editors can be subject to implicit bias regarding who comes to mind as a referee for a given paper, it would be useful to know how the gender balance of referees shakes out.

7. Use the double-anonymous evaluation system with care.

The editors of BJA and CAexpressed their opposition to triple-anonymous evaluation, and the editors of JAAC simply noted that they do not use this system. I understand the editors’ reasons for wishing to know the identities of authors and referees, and if I were an editor I, too, would want this information. But editors should be cautious about the possibility that, despite their best intentions, they may themselves be subject to implicit bias that affects the review process. They should also be alert to the possibility that implicit bias has affected a referee’s report: referees sometimes know the identity of the author of a work they have been asked to review (especially in a small discipline like aesthetics), and may infer or assume some aspects of the author’s social identity based on the content of the paper even if they don’t know the author’s name.

8. Reflect directly on these issues and formulate policies and practices.

The editors and editorial boards of journals that seem to be publishing work by women and scholars of color at a rate lower than that of their participation in the profession should reflect directly on how they might more effectively attract top quality work by members of underrepresented groups, so as to close the gap. I hope the above suggestions, and others that commentators will add below, will assist in this effort.

I am grateful to BJA editors John Hyman and Elisabeth Schellekens, CA editors Arnold Berleant and Yuriko Saito, and JAAC editors Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker for answering my questions about their editorial practices and providing information to assist in my analyses. I would also like to thank Dabney Townsend of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) and Caroline Auty and Berys Gaut of the British Society of Aesthetics (BSA) for supplying information about membership in the ASA and BSA, respectively.


[1] I asked the editors of the journals to answer the following questions: 

1. Does [your journal] have a formal policy or a set of informal practices that relate to diversity and inclusiveness in its content / authors / referees / editorial board / the works cited by its authors / the topics or authorship of symposia and special issues? 

2. Do you keep figures on the gender breakdown of authors who submit papers and whose papers are accepted? If so, would you be willing to share them? 

3. Does your review process employ triple anonymity? 

4. Is there anything else you’d like me to know? 

[2] All gender coding of items for this post was done by me, except in the case of BSA membership. My method of coding people as women and men was as follows. I relied on my knowledge of the gender presentation of people with whom I am personally acquainted. As a next step, I relied on first names where those names are used almost exclusively by people of one gender. For names not very strongly associated with a particular gender, I did internet searches for pictures indicating gender presentation and/or reliable references indicating gender. Where all of these methods failed, I did not code the person for gender. Non-coding occurred only for some of the ASA membership listings I received. I assume that this hybrid method of coding is associated with a small but non-zero error rate. I am not aware of anyone I coded having a gender identity other than ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ but if any recent authors, referees, editorial board members or editorial consultants who are represented in my data identify in this way, I hope they will inform me so that I can correct the data. I do not mean to erase other gender identities. 

[3] I used a “fractional authorship” model: where articles have multiple authors, I gave each author credit for an equal fraction of the article. If an article was co-authored by a man and a woman, it was counted as .5 woman-authored. If we were to place articles with at least one woman author wholly in the woman-authored category, the numbers would be slightly higher:BJA: 22.3%CA: 34.4%JAAC: 21.6% 

[4] This includes Anne Eaton, who has been mistakenly left off the masthead of the last two issues of the journal and whose membership in the EC is not yet reflected on the BJA web site.

4 Comments

  1. Thank you for this important work, Sherri.

  2. Yes, many thanks to Sherri and Christy.
    Elisabeth Schellekens

  3. Thanks for doing this, Sherri!

  4. This is great and much needed work. Thank you!

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