Participation by women in behavior analysis.
In 1982, women were half the students but only one-third of senior voices in behavior analysis.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors mailed a short form to every member of the Association for Behavior Analysis. They asked each person to list their rank, gender, and how many papers they had published.
The goal was to see if men and women moved through the field at the same pace.
What they found
Women made up about half of the student and affiliate members, but only one-third of full members. They were also only one-third of the invited speakers at the yearly convention.
Men wrote most of the journal articles. The higher the authorship slot, the fewer women appeared.
How this fits with other research
The same survey trick has been used many times since. Perez et al. (2015) asked Massachusetts BCBAs how they assess problem behavior. Hu et al. (2021) asked college counseling directors how they help autistic students. All three studies used a simple questionnaire to map what practitioners really do.
Schott et al. (2021) found racial gaps in who gets Medicaid waiver services. Tint et al. (2018) found women with autism feel ignored by providers. Together these papers show the field still struggles with equity—first it was gender inside the ranks, now it is race and gender among the people we serve.
No later paper repeats the 1983 gender census, so we cannot tell if the leaky pipeline has been fixed.
Why it matters
If women stall at the student door, your clinic may miss half the talent pool. Check your own payroll: who holds the senior BCBA slots, who gets the invited CEU talks, who is listed first on posters? Track it for one year and share the numbers with your team. Small visibility fixes—rotating grand-round speakers, adding women reviewers—can shift the ratio before the next promotion cycle.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The participation of women in behavior analysis as authors of articles published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA), as members of the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA), and as contributors to the 1982 ABA convention was examined. Since the inception of JEAB and JABA, men have appeared as authors far more frequently than women, although women have published relatively more frequently in the latter journal than in the former. Across years, there has been an upward trend in the proportion of JEAB authors who are female; this is not the case for all JABA authors, although it does hold for senior authors. In 1980-1981 and 1981-1982, females represented approximately half of ABA's student and affiliate members but less than a third of its full members. Approximately a third of the contributors to posters and symposia and a seventh of those delivering invited addresses at the 1982 ABA convention were women.
The Behavior analyst, 1983 · doi:10.1007/BF03392393