THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN HOSPITALITY JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARDS
Delly M. Chatibura, Nametsegang Motshegwa, Montle, K. C. Siya
DOI: 10.35666/25662880.2018.4.149
UDC: 640.4:[655.3.066.13:070.432-055.2]
ABSTRACT: Despite their proven abilities as leaders, women continue to be marginalized at both local and global levels. Even in the academic field, the issue of gender disparity, which hampers women’s advancement in rank and responsibility, has attracted the interest of several studies for decades. In an effort to study the issue of gender parity, this paper documents the extent of women representation in the editorial boards of ten leading hospitality academic journals, reviewing the functions of women at various editorial levels. The paper builds upon previous research in tourism and hospitality and in the fields of management, marketing, medicine and economics, to name a few. To achieve this, an exploratory research design was used where manual data collection and quantitative analysis was employed. Some of the findings reveal that only 132 (of 624) editorial members were women, holding management, editor and other positions in the board: an important consideration that reflects the issue of gender disparity in hospitality journal editorial boards. The majority of these positions were held at professorial rank and were affiliated with American universities. Their presence on the boards, was mainly influenced by the size of the board, the age of the journal and the women’s research productivity.
Keywords: gender parity, hospitality field, academic journals