Editorial

Brain enters its 141st year of continuous publication with this issue, and its 5th year under the current editorial team. It is tempting to be complacent, and use this editorial to list the metrics that testify to the journal’s continued success. There is, however, an important aspect where the journal does not appear to have moved as far from its 19th century origins as might be hoped. The current Editor is, in common with all 16 of his predecessors, male, as are 7 out of 9 Associate Editors, and 19 out of 24 members of the Editorial Advisory Board. How does this reflect the gender balance of authors publishing in the journal? Authors are not asked to self-identify as male or female upon submission or acceptance of manuscripts, and so the following estimates are predicated on numerous assumptions about how first names relate to gender, taking into account presumed nationality, and in a few cases supplemented by an online search of images. Between 2014 and 2017 (inclusive) first authors of original articles were more likely to be male than female in a 60:40 ratio. Using last authors as a surrogate for seniority, the male:female ratio was 76:24. These ratios have not shown any sign of shifting during the 4-year interval. This analysis has numerous potential flaws, and assumes a ‘gender binarism’ that belongs to a previous century. Nevertheless, the numbers are in line with abundant evidence of attrition of female scientists with increasing seniority in universities and other research environments. The male preponderance is not as marked as at Science, where only 25% of junior and 17% of senior author positions are held by women (Berg, 2017). This is perhaps not surprising, because medicine has a far more balanced intake than some of the physical sciences. There is, of course, not much that can be done by journals to address the imbalance whilst striving for a peer review process that avoids taking into consideration anything other than veracity, novelty and importance. One small area where the editorial team of Brain might be able to nudge the field is in inviting authors of commissioned scientific commentaries. Our efforts to date have however not been successful, as judging by the gender balance of this category of paper: 78% of authors in the last 4 years have been male. The only hint of a re-balancing is found in the Reviews and Updates, some of which are commissioned, and which go through a presubmission enquiry before authors are invited to submit. In this category the male:female ratio is 60:40. Overall, the report card for the last 4 years states, ‘Could try harder’.

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