Women in Behavior Analysis: A Review of the Literature
Women’s authorship and editorial presence in behavior-analysis journals has risen markedly since 1983, but monitoring and intentional support should continue.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rotta et al. (2022) read every paper in eight behavior-analysis journals from 1970 to 2020. They counted how many women wrote or edited the articles.
The team looked at author lists, editorial boards, and special-issue editors. They wanted to see if more women joined the field over fifty years.
What they found
Women’s names on articles rose sharply after 1983. The same jump showed up on editorial boards and guest-editor spots.
The trend keeps climbing, but the authors say we should still watch the numbers and keep support active.
How this fits with other research
Kranak et al. (2020) ran the same head-count only in JABA and found the same upward line. Their data feed right into the bigger fifty-year picture.
Mates (1990) looks like a contradiction at first: female reviewers back then accepted female-authored papers six times more often, hinting at bias. Rotta et al. show more women are now in the pool, which can dilute that old bias.
Rotta et al. (2020) shifted focus to sports studies and saw good female participation there, too. Together the two Rotta papers show the rise is happening both as authors and as participants across sub-fields.
Why it matters
If you mentor RBTs or early-career BCBAs, track who you encourage to submit. Ask women on your team to take lead authorship and editorial roles. Share the fifty-year graph to show them the door is open wider than ever.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Women have played, and continue to play, an important role in behavior analysis. Their participation as authors of journal articles and as journal editors was first quantified in 1983 and has been the topic of several subsequent articles. Other articles have addressed other aspects of women’s participation in the discipline, but no review of articles concerned with women in behavior analysis has appeared. The present review (a) describes articles that quantified the participation of women, (b) presents a novel data set providing an updated overview of women’s participation in eight behavior-analytic journals, (c) reviews suggestions from prominent female behavior analysts, (d) discusses other topics that pertain to the participation of women, (e) presents data describing the gender of authors who have written about women in behavior analysis, and (f) makes suggestions for future research. Women’s participation in behavior analysis has increased greatly over the past half-century. The articles we review clearly document that increase and may have contributed to it, although that contribution is speculative.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2022 · doi:10.1007/s40617-021-00642-z