Editorial Board Diversity at the Basket of Eight Journals : A Report to the College of Senior Scholars

At the 2019 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the College of Senior Scholars appointed a committee to investigate diversity in the editorial boards of their Basket of Eight journals. Editorial board diversity signals that a journal welcomes and includes all authors. The committee compared the gender, regional and ethnic diversity of the editorial boards to that of AIS members in the Academic membership category. This comparison showed that the editorial boards overall had fewer female members, more members from Region 1, and fewer from Region 3 than one would reasonably expect. Furthermore, there were more editorial board members of Indian ancestry than one would expect, while several other ethnicities appeared on editorial boards in smaller numbers than one would expect, in comparison to AIS Academic members. The individual journals also differed a great deal among themselves with respect to these diversity criteria. Regrettably, every journal fell below what one would reasonably expect with respect to either gender, regional, or ethnic diversity. Based on these findings, we make recommendations for the College of Senior Scholars, editors in chief of the Basket of Eight journals, the AIS Council, and individuals who lead other organizations of IS scholars.