Overcoming the Gender Gap in SCM Research

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day. This occasion gives me the opportunity to talk about an imbalance between the number of female and male scholars in our academic discipline. In a recently published analysis, Babbar et al. (2019) identified the top 50 SCM authors world-wide based on a measure of publication score. It turns out that less than 10 out of these top 50 authors are female. What could be done to make the great achievements of our female colleagues more visible? One way could be to explicitly mention the gender of female authors. In the case of multiple authors this could be done by replacing “Lastname et al.” with “Lastname and her coauthors” or “Lastname and her research team”, or in the case of a single author by replacing a neutral “the author” with “she” or “her”. Such linguistic tricks will certainly not solve the problem, but could help to produce role models and thereby inspire female readers to pursue an academic career. Could it be a good idea to include such suggestions in the author guidelines of our leading SCM journals?