The Gender Gap: A Review of Publishing Practices in Urban Policy and Research

Abstract

Things are changing in the field of urban research, whereas once there were few established female voices (see, for instance, Sandercock 1975, Harman 1983, Fincher 1990, Sandercock and Forsyth 1992, Jacobs 1993), there are nowmany. In Australasia, these range – from senior University leaders such as Ruth Fincher, Robyn Dowling and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett who have helped elevate a new generation of women within the academy, to mid-career and emerging scholars such as Michelle Lobo, Virginia Marshall and Lisa Stafford whose critical perspectives shine a light on the need for diverse voices to bring about deep change across universities and urban and environmental policy more widely (Stafford 2019, Marshall 2021, Lobo 2022). It is no coincidence that in recent years there has been increasing awareness among urban researchers – but also within our journals and university departments – of the need to ensure that the story of our cities is told and interpreted by a range of voices. From the sciences to the humanities, there is increasing recognition that academic publishing and citation practices have reflected and also reinforced systemic patterns of bias and exclusion within the academy. Often cited examples include the under-representation of women on editorial boards and among reviewers, as well as the well-documented gender mismatch of grant funding success (Lundine et al. 2018 provide a useful review). The editorial board ofUrban Policy and Research (UPR) acknowledges the gender gap in academic publishing and the complex drivers of this gap. In this 40th year of the Journal, we aim in this Editorial to initiate a conversation about scholarly practices of research andwriting in the field of urban research – how it is changing, and what future change could occur? We consider current conversations within feminist urban scholarship and across academic publishing more broadly, about patterns of bias in authorship and citation practices. We then reflect on the body of recent work published in UPR to explore and document the changing gender diversity of authorship in the journal. Using lead authorship as a measure, we examine the gender balance of papers published in our journal over the first 20 years of this century. We contemplate the implications of this analysis for the changing scholarly community that UPR is serving, and what a journal like UPR needs to consider as it seeks to becomesmore inclusive and more representative of the changing urban academic landscape in Australasia.