LAUSR

As participating board members of the annual CytometryISAC editorial board meeting, we encountered an environment to which we have become accustomed during our service to ISAC and to Cytometry Part A, a board room lined with predominantly male colleagues: 23 men and only 4 women. While our society and our publications are certainly in competent hands, we feel that this leadership imbalance directly contradicts the Society’s mission to provide an international forum for the advancement of cytometry. This imbalance does not seem to reflect the Society’s membership, which is almost equal with respect to gender ratio (1,060 males: 788 females; Supplement file), with an equal number of women and men attending CYTO2018. Our Society’s disparity in leadership is representative of larger systemic inequities in science and scientific publishing. Despite the fact that in the United States, “women earn 57% of Bachelor’s degrees, over 62% of Master’s degrees, and 53% of Doctorate (PhD, MD, DVM, DD, JD) and law degrees, the overall representation of women on editorial boards range from 9 to 27% (1,2) https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/whydiversity-matters-women-on-boards-of-directors/). Women are also ubiquitously underrepresented as authors, editors, and reviewers in academic publishing as a whole (3–6). This trend is both a reflection and a cause of women’s professional disadvantage: men receive the majority of funding (7,8) and “although women received larger R01 awards than men, men had more R01 awards than women at all points in their careers” (9). Consequently, it is more difficult for women to keep pace with their male counterparts in publication, citation, and overall visibility. Furthermore, this disadvantage is not only consequential, it is causal as well; women’s professional success is adversely impacted and the cycle of underrepresentation is perpetuated through this structural machinery (5). As a result, female scientists are perceived as less qualified and therefore less legitimate as scholars and investigators (6). Having greater female representation on our Editorial Board will give women a more balanced review process, leading to a greater publication history, and ultimately resulting in more qualified female editorial board members. Conversations with board member-colleagues suggested an even less positive picture of the experience of women in cytometry. Women-scientists are “concentrated” in core facilities or in publishing houses including our own (Wiley). The fact that these women-scientists have no foreseeable pathway to academic leadership is seen as a choice we females have made rather than a systemic issue. Furthermore, the geographically diverse membership of the Society seems to provide a convenient “excuse” for excluding women from pathways to power rather than an alarm that there is something wrong with a Society whose 47% female membership is represented by 15% of the Board. To build an editorial board that is more resilient and more responsive to the membership, female involvement in its leadership is critical, not only to the women involved, but also to our Society and its Journals. We have elected a female President, Dr. Jonni Moore, giving us an unprecedented access to bringing gender issues to the forefront of our leadership. Women’s representation is not a woman’s issue, it is everyone’s issue. Why is this so important? Perhaps the best illustration why we need diverse, integrated boards comes from an interview