RIPE 2023 diversity statement

As part of our commitment to diversity in academic publishing, since 2021 the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) publishes annual diversity statements providing information about RIPE’s editorial team and contributors (see Bair et al., 2021). Below we detail the composition of our editorial board and international advisory board, as well as the composition of our contributors and submitting authors for 2023 by gender and location of institution (we are unable to collect more data on our contributors beyond these characteristics).

Editorial team and international advisory board

We welcomed three new editors to the editorial board in 2023, as well as several new members to our international advisory board (IAB). Our board consists of six women and two men, with one editor based in Canada, four in the United States, one in the United Kingdom, one in Italy and one in Turkey. Our managing editor (she/her) is also based in the United Kingdom.

RIPE’s international advisory board currently consists of 58 members, 30 of whom are men and 28 of whom are women. The journal’s IAB board stems from 16 countries with the majority (roughly 75% of the board) being located in the “Anglo five”: the USA (23 members), Canada (11 members), the UK (6 members), Australia (3 members) and New Zealand (1 member). RIPE’s remaining IAB members stem from Austria (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Denmark (2), Germany (2), Malaysia (1), the Netherlands (2), the Philippines (1), Singapore (1), South Africa (1), and Switzerland (1). As IAB members rotate off the board, the journal is committed to improving its regional representation outside of the Anglo-5 specifically and outside the Global North more generally.

Authors and guest editors

In 2023, RIPE published 102 articles across 6 issues (3 of these were commentaries, 2 were papers written by the editorial board—our 2022 diversity statement, and the introductory article to the journal’s 30^th anniversary special feature “Looking back and looking forward in IPE”—one was a pedagogical intervention, and the remaining 96 were research articles). Published manuscripts were written by 186 authors, 76 of whom were women (41% of the total), 23 of whom were based at institutions outside Anglo 5 and EU/EFTA countries (12% of the total) and 45 of whom were graduate students, postdoctoral fellows or research assistants (24% of the total). We believe the substantial jump in the latter was likely driven by our 30^th anniversary special feature, which invited original articles from early career researchers and emerging scholars on the future directions of IPE (these articles − 12 in total - were published across the last five issues in Volume 30). RIPE also published one special forum this year on international regime complexity (Henning & Pratt, 2023). This forum was edited by two men, and included 6 manuscripts, 3 of which included women authors.

In regards to the gender of our authors, we distinguished between five different types of authorship (see Bair et al., 2023): co-authored papers whose authors are solely men, single-authored papers by men, co-authored papers with both men and women authors, single-authored papers by women, and co-authored papers whose authors are solely women.¹ We also distinguished manuscripts by whether one of the authors stemmed from outside of the Anglo 5/EU/EFTA countries (the “rest of the world”, ROW), and whether one of the authors was an early career researcher (defined as being either a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or a research fellow/associate—we did not include pre-tenure assistant professors in this distinction). Table 1 is a frequency table of manuscripts we published in 2023 based on these distinctions: 48.0% of manuscripts published in 2023 had at least one woman author, 18.6% had at least one author from outside the Anglo 5/EU/EFTA (RoW) and 38.24% had at least one author who was a graduate student, post-doctorate or research fellow.

Table 1. Contributions and submissions by author characteristics.

	Published Articles		Submissions
	Number	% of Manuscripts	Number	% of Manuscripts
Gender team
Male team	15	14.71	121	23.40
Single author (male)	38	37.25	169	32.69
Mixed team	25	24.51	140	27.08
Single author (female)	16	15.69	57	11.03
Female team	8	7.84	16	3.09
Total	102		517
Manuscripts with:
At least one woman author	49	48.04	213	41.20
At least one author from RoW	19	18.63	221	42.75
At least one ECR author	39	38.24	NA	NA

Submissions

As of December 15, RIPE received a total of 517 manuscripts in 2023. In contrast to published articles where authors are required to submit a short biography, which contains information on authors’ academic positions, we are unable to collect data on the professional rank of authors for submissions. However, our ­submission system provides us with the location of the submitting author. We manually coded the gender composition of authors for each submission through their professional websites (we were unable to identify the gender of all authors for 14 submissions). We classify submissions using the same gender and location (of author) criteria used above; Table 1 provides the frequency of submissions written by our five different gender categories and author (institutional) location. 41.20% of total submissions had at least one woman author, while 42.75% of submissions had at least one author from outside the Anglo 5/EU/EFTA countries. Taking our submissions and publications data in Table 1 together, women appear to be more successful in the peer review process than men (as their representation amongst published articles is higher than their representation amongst submissions), while scholars from outside of the Anglo-5/EU/EFTA countries are less successful in the peer review stage than scholars from within these countries (as their share amongst published articles is much lower than their share amongst submissions).

Figure 1 provides the number of authors by (inferred) gender (lefthand side) and the geographical location of the submitting author (righthand side) for all submissions since 2019. The share of women authors to total authors within submissions has gradually risen over time (from 26% of total authors in 2019 to 29% in 2023), as has the share of submitting authors from institutions outside Anglo 5/EU/EFTA countries (rising from 26% in 2019 to 43% in 2023).

Figure 1. Breakdown of submissions by gender (for all authors) and geographical location (of submitting author only).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare there is no Conflict of Interest at this study.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 None of our contributors identified as they/them in their author biographies.