Women and equality in publishing: A study of leading UK law journals
Location:
Teaching Room 02
Old College
Date/time
Wed 19 March 2025
17:00 - 18:00
About the event
This article examines the participation of women as authors in five leading law journals of a generalist nature in the United Kingdom to those of private law journals. For its data points, it takes each author of an article in the Cambridge Law Journal, the Journal of Law and Society, Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. The private law journals in property, equity and family law and they are Child & Family Law Quarterly, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, Conveyancer and Property Lawyer, Trusts and Trustees, and the International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family. The analysis of these results reveals wide discrepancies in women’s participation in legal publishing. It shows that for generalist journals those which publish fewer articles, publish fewer women authors. This is not the case for the specialist journals, where some large journals are entirely bereft of women as authors. The article situates its data in a description of gender patterns within the Academy generally and specifically within the Law School. It draws on the experiences of gender publishing disparity in other disciplines where the debate is more established. It concludes with suggestions for changes in internal process within law journals and a plea for them to improve their external profile to boost women’s participation as the authors of articles.
About the speaker
Dr Victoria Barnes is Reader of Commercial Law. Her research examines contract, commercial and corporate law from transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She unpicks pivotal historic events, such as landmark cases, and places them in context. Her work traces the way organisations, legal principles and doctrines have developed through time. She focusses often on the history of the banking and financial industry and its regulation. Global actors, such as judges, lawyers, and other influential figures, including CEOs, feature heavily in her work as catalysts for socio-legal change. Her work has an empirical bent, especially with its emphasis on quantification and quantitative methods. She has published around 50 journal articles and book chapters on these themes.