Gender ratios in LI (women/overall)*

In the last 6 years the gender situation has somewhat improved since the previous study: of the 24 recent Issues, 4 have 50% or more of women authors (vs. 2 issues out of the 33). As the table below shows, female authors still only amount to 30%.

It doesn't seem to be noticeably more difficult for a sole female author to publish a main article than a remark or a squib (27% vs. 22% in general), but the presence of a co-author clearly improves her chances (22% vs. 39%; in this context female co-authors of main articles are doing better than female co-authors of remarks and squibs: co-authored main articles have 48% of women authors, while in general only 39% of authors of co-authored papers are female.

To check the apparent effect of coauthorship, I compared the numbers of female and male authors in co-authored articles, whose authors had the same gender (i.e., all female or all male). There were 22 such articles, 5 all-female  and 17 all-male (i.e., 23% female articles), with 11 female authors and 37 male authors (i.e., 23% female authors). This strongly suggests gender discrimination, and as a result of these data LI has decided to pass to double-blind reviewing in summer 2012.

Compare these ratios to overall results for Women in Linguistics

*Guesses and doubts indicated by "?"