Gender balance and geographical diversity in editorial boards of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and Chemical Geology

Gender balance and geographical diversity in editorial boards of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and Chemical Geology Journal Item How to cite: Pourret, O.; Anand, P.; Bots, P; Cottrell, E; Dosseto, A; Gunter, A; Hedding, D. W.; Ibarra, D. E.; Irawan, D. E.; Johannesson, K; Labidi, J; Little, S; Liu, H; Makhubela, T. V.; Carbonne, J M; Perez-Fodich, A; Riches, Amy; Tartèse, R and Tripati, A (2022). Gender balance and geographical diversity in editorial boards of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and Chemical Geology. European Science Editing, 48, article no. e89470.

OP and AD are members of the editorial board of Chemical Geology. AD was a member of the editorial board of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. Until recently, KJ was an associate editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and is currently one of the editors-in-chief of Chemical Geology. SL was a member of the editorial board of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. AR previously assembled and steered an editorial team while serving as guest managing editor of a special issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and has provisionally agreed to serve as a guest editor for future special issue(s) of this journal.

Funding statement
This research did not receive any specific grant from any professional societies or funding agencies in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors.

Authorship contributions
OP: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, visualization, writing original draft, revising, reviewing, and editing. All other authors (listed alphabetically and not in the order of their intellectual contribution): data curation, formal analysis, writing original draft, revising, reviewing, and editing.

Data sharing statement
The data underpinning the analysis reported in this paper are deposited at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7110935. Results: Gender parity, limited to men and women, and the number of countries of affiliation increased steadily between the late 1980s and 2021. However, the geographic distribution remained dominated by affiliations from North America and Western Europe. The editor-in-chief or board of editors had a significant impact on the diversity of the editorial boards, and both geographic and gender diversity may evolve with nearly every newly appointed editor. However, the persistently substantial under-representation on editorial boards of affiliations outside North America and Europe is of concern and needs to be the focus of active recruitment and ongoing monitoring. This approach will ensure that traditionally low geographic diversity is increased and maintained in the future.  We focused our analysis on the editors' country of affiliation, which was determined based on each member's university affiliation.
This coding method is unlikely to accurately reflect the nationality of the member in question because the member could be affiliated to a university in a country different from her or his country of origin (nationality).
Without collecting personal information on an editor's nationality -information that may be unavailable or protected by privacy laws -it is impossible to establish the nationality.        25,26 Such 'helicoptering' practices 26 benefit both fundamental and applied research in the West as well as resource mining by Western companies. A long-held concern is that these practices could perpetuate the brain drain from affected geographical regions, thereby widening economic inequities between the respective regions. Hence, for an EB to be inclusive, to reduce biases, and to help set the tone for good scientific conduct more generally, the EB needs -at a minimum -to be as diverse as the research community it represents, to be mindful of diversity among global societies that we serve, and to be active in engaging members of regions subject to 'helicoptering' practices.

Impact of Editor-in-Chief and board of directors
The governance of a journal is key to setting its mode and ethos of operation, its scope, rigour, and reputation and establishes key role models for the scholarly community.
The composition of the EB changed markedly following the appointment of a new EiC (Figures 2 and 3   Our findings indicate that journals such as GCA, which have a rotating editorship, exert more direct influence on the binary gender and geographic diversity of the EBs than journals such as CG that do not rotate the editorship ( Figure 5).

Recommendations
Recommendations to improve the scientific excellence and diversity of EBs of journals are listed in Boxes 1 and 2, which are built on the existing guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics, 29 our earlier work, 5  • approaching people whom you have seen presenting at conferences or workshops, or whose work you have read.
• Advertise vacancies for editorial positions or post open calls for expression of interest to join your board. Use social media to spread the word and encourage colleagues to do the same. Invite applications and assess those fairly, with clear and consistent selection criteria. Involve others in decision-making to mitigate any unconscious biases.
• Put diversity targets in place in order to hold yourself and your editorial board to account over time. Think about the gender and ethnic mix within your particular field: your board should at a minimum reflect this. Progress can be iterative and continue as board members come and go.
• Appoint one or more board members to act as diversity champions who can actively support your aims.
• Put fixed terms in place for editorial board members, enabling you to regularly review and refresh your board.
• Think broadly about the areas of expertise you would like to see represented on the board and proactively seek out individuals with those areas of expertise to improve representation or diversity. • Inform the geochemical community, EiCs, and other journal leaders that they should emphasize at the journal's society meetings their results and actions taken to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion while promoting diversity among EB members.
• Present an annual or biannual infographic of diversity of the EB and/or the geographical or regional distribution of published articles. This may attract attention from, and improve engagement with, diverse researchers, as well as raise diversity, equity, and awareness of inclusion in scientific publishing space.
• Engage and prompt dialogue with scientists from under-represented groups and nations with the purpose of building understanding of how to attract and how to better support or prepare them to participate in their role as a member of an EB.
• Encourage individual EB members to act as mentors to newly appointed editors from under-represented identities (BAME/BIPOC, women, LGBTIQ+, minority-gender identities and socioeconomic backgrounds, disabled people and intersections thereof) if this has been requested (see the previous point).
• Invite identified people (see the previous point) to serve as guest editors to special issues or to join the EB when a position is available (such expansion is not a necessity but may accelerate changes; see Figure 5).
• Allow authors to publish articles in several languages as GCA and CG did in the past (English, German, French).