Female representation across Copernicus journals

In an effort to assess the representation of women across all Copernicus journals, we assigned the apparent gender to each person serving on Copernicus editorial boards (1089 editors in total). Some people are present in more than one journal and can have different roles within one journal, however, we counted them only once per journal in our analysis. We identified the sex of a person by the typical gender association of their first name and by looking at pictures. We are aware that this approach to identifying biological sex can be limited and that gender identity cannot be inferred from this kind of analysis. Our assessment shows that the proportion of apparent female editors across all journals is between 10% and 57% with lower proportions among larger editorial boards. On average, we identified 27% of all editors to be female. We compare these numbers to the average representation of female scientists during EGU General Assemblies (GAs), which serves as a reference for the general gender distribution within the European geosciences community. Based on the self-reported gender of EGU GA participants, senior women constitute about one-third of the EGU participants, while 40% of the ECS participants identify as female. However, commonly more senior scientists are invited to join editorial boards. Thus, our initial assessment indicates that the estimated number of female scientists on editorial boards of Copernic journals nearly reflects the representation of senior female scientists attending EGU GAs.