Gender at the LJIL

Abstract

1. ‘Is there a Problem? What is it?’ Those were the questions raised in our June 2021 Board meeting. At that point in time, our Editorial Board had been – like the rest of the world – grappling with more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling the effects of being suddenly forced to work from home and struggling with care-giving duties, we were concerned with the effects of the pandemic on LJIL authors, especially women.1 In particular, a few of us had the impression from their daily editorial work that there had been a drop in the number of submissions made by women. As an academic journal that aims to provide a platform for new and diverse voices as a way of contributing to the development of international legal debate,2 we hoped that this perceived decline in women’s submissions would prove illusory, or if not that, temporary; and also that our processes and peer-review practices were not only effective in selecting excellent articles, but also fair and non-discriminatory. We therefore set out to determine empirically whether our suspicions were real by going through LJIL data. The first step was to establish data on gender distribution of the LJIL authorship and how our peer-review and decision-making processes could be improved to foster a more diverse publication. In this editorial, I present, on behalf of the LJIL Board, the results of what was initially envisioned as an internal study on the presence of women in LJIL. Our main goal was to determine the share of men and women in LJIL submissions and published articles over time. Collecting the data served a twofold purpose: (i) data on publications shows us LJIL’s current state of affairs in terms of gender representation while (ii) data on submissions help us identify how our current processes for submission and peer-review shape this state of affairs. Before explaining the study and our conclusions, we must draw attention to two points. The first relates to limitations in our study. The results presented below are based on a binary division of gender between men and women that is outdated. Although we do not subscribe to this binary, the limited resources and available information unfortunately did not allow us to ascertain further than the binomial ‘men-women’. Those same limitations have also prevented us from examining the effects of intersectional markers such as ethnicity, race, religion, and other identity markers.