Editorial leadership of academic journals: a question of gender imbalance?

The work aims to investigate the existence of a specific type of discrimination against women in the scientific world, namely, the gender imbalance in the composition of the editorial boards of scientific journals. Specifically, the work is finalised to assess the presence (or the absence) of women scholars in the leadership of the most prestigious international journals of accounting and verify if there is a glass ceiling (Lehman, 1992; Baxter and Wright, 2000; Cotter et al., 2001; Goodmann et al., 2003) and a crystal cliff phenomenon (Broadbent and Kirkham, 2008) in the governance of scientific journals. The research design includes a theoretical analysis derived from a review of papers on gender imbalance in science and academia manifested in the scientific journal editorial leadership. Secondly, the work presents the first result of an empirical investigation focused on the scientific journals in the field of accounting ranked in the list proposed by the Association of Business Schools (ABS) in 2015 and included in the Italian ANVUR list (2018). study serves two main purposes. First, it provides a snapshot of gender composition of editorial teams of accounting journals, which to our knowledge has not before been measured. Second, it provides a benchmark to which future measurements can be compared, thus enabling longitudinal assessments of any changes over time.