Diversity and inclusion leads to better science, as well documented by scholars (Medin and Lee, 2012; Freeman and Huang, 2015; Bear and Williams Woolley, 2011). It is part of our role as publishers to ensure that anyone producing scientifically rigorous work should be assessed independently of their identity, socio-economic or educational background. With the 2018 of Peer Review Week theme being Diversity and Inclusion, we took the decision to thoroughly analyse how we were doing against our aims to be truly impartial and representative in peer review.

A recent paper by Holman, Stuart-Fox and Hauser (2018) discussed the gender gap across the STEM workforce. They found that topics such as physics had the fewest women authors and were showing little signs of growth (figure 1, p6). The authors posit a number of potential reasons for this, including the suggestion that male-dominated fields, such as physics, attract fewer women graduates, and the problems of the “leaky pipeline” (women are more likely than men to leave STEM careers before progressing to senior positions). Nature also reported an under-representation of women as both authors and reviewers in 2018 (Nature, 2018).

We were keen to see how our authorship data compared – would we be ahead of the 17% of female authorship identified by Holman, Stuart-Fox and Hauser (2018) in 2016, and what actions could we take to improve the rates of female representation in the physcial sciences?

Gender wasn’t the only demographic that we were interested in studying. We work with authors, reviewers and Editorial Board Members from all over the world, and previous studies have shown that there is often a positive bias towards research from the US and Europe (Pinholster, 2016; King, 2004; and Espin et al., 2017). We were curious to understand if that was the case on our own journals, and if the reviewers and Editorial Board Members that we were using were representative of the global physics community.

This report explains the current peer-review practices at IOP Publishing and looks at the gender and geographical data on our authors, reviewers and Editorial Board Members. It also provides several recommendations for IOP Publishing and our communities to better represent the diversity and differences that make up the physical sciences.