Lack of racial diversity in language science journals

Numerous studies and reports have pointed out the lack of diversity in scientific spaces (Liu et al., 2023; Singh et al., 2023) which has a direct impact on shaping our research practices, questions, and scientific pursuits in general (Kutlu and Hayes-Harb, 2023). While the lack of diversity in science has been documented widely, there is no report on the diversity of editorial board members of language science journals, who play an integral role in diversifying science. This ongoing study aims to document to what extent language science journals engage with diversity and how diversity is represented in these spaces. To achieve this goal, we looked at 100 language journals and their editorial board members list. We hand-coded the editorial board members’ perceived gender and race. We used multiple sources to check our coding (e.g., Wikipedia, websites, videos). Our preliminary findings suggest that while there is gender balance in editorial spaces, there was a significant lack of racial representation in editorial space (i.e., more White scholars in editorial spaces). Our next step is to collect archival data on editorial board members, document systematic inequalities, and provide suggestions for how racial diversity can be increased in editorial spaces.