EDITORIAL

Abstract

Their survey reveals that 40 per cent of articles published in these journals during that period were written by women.But this headline percentage conceals considerable variation across the journals selected for the study.Whereas the Journal of Law and Society achieved rough gender parityaround half the articles it published during the period under review were written by womenonly 23 per cent of the authors whose work was published in the C.L.J. were women.The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies is comparable: here, the percentage of articles by women published during the period in question was 32 per cent.These percentages are still more striking when considered against the background factreported by Barnes et al. that in 2018-19 women comprised 57 per cent of academic staff employed within the legal academy in the UK, although only 36 per cent of law professors were women.Moreover, a rough survey of the issues of the C.L.J. published since the conclusion of the survey period is not encouraging.Although 2021the Journal's centenary yearapproached gender parity, in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2025 the percentage of articles written by women authors fell below 20 per cent.Clearly, we have a problem.What is to be done?In Section VI of their article, Barnes et al. offer a number of constructive suggestions.An obvious first step is to institutionalise the informal gender monitoring that we already do.Keeping records of the gender of the members of our editorial board, reviewers and the authors of the books we review, as well as the gender of published authors, may reveal under-representation of women in these roles also.Given the link between visible female role models and female achievement, addressing such under-representationif indeed it is found