Abstract
I am honored and thrilled to be stepping into the role of the Editor of Gender & Society. This position brings me full circle in my career, as my very first published article was the first article in the first issue of Gender & Society (Risman 1987). My career has spanned the growth and development of this feminist journal, and I feel very lucky to be at the helm for the next four years. I want to thank Jo Reger and her Deputy Editors for their leadership and efforts and for handing over a journal in such good shape.
The editorship of this journal is truly a team effort. And what a team I have! The Deputy Editors who began this journey with me include Irma Mooi-Reci, Mignon Moore, Kristen Myers, Smitha Radhakrishnan, Sheryl Skaggs, and Ann Travers. We have already lost Mignon Moore as she has recently been elected President of Sociologists for Women in Society. We will miss her tremendously, but we are thrilled that she will be at the helm of SWS. We are lucky enough to have a fabulous team of Managing Editors—Seth Behrends, June Macon, and Mary Ann Vega—all graduate students at University of Illinois at Chicago. They are the people whom most of those who submit manuscripts will “meet” as the face of the journal.
Our team will continue to do what the past editorial teams have done: publish the best of feminist scholarship with an intersectional lens. We continue to encourage scholars to submit research that pushes forward gender theory. We also are interested in theoretical articles about gender. We also encourage research that provides important empirical insights into gender stratification. My goal is to continue the efficient practices of those who came before us, ensuring quality feedback with quick turnaround times. I hope to make most decisions after the first revision, sparing authors the pain of multiple revisions with no commitment to publish. We are very interested in publishing research encompassing a variety of methodologies, and we are especially interested in articles that are multi-methodological. With the increasing use of an online appendix, we can publish quantitative articles with more empirical data without concern about page limits.
Our cover picture is artwork by Managing Editor Mary Ann Vega. They took the picture from the rooftop deck of the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where we work. The photo is a reminder that intellectual work includes the labor of real people in a particular geographic place. This is the view from our workplace when we work late at night to take the intellectual labor of our authors and turn it into a finished product, volume 34 of Gender & Society. I appreciate Mary Ann volunteering their artistic talents to our collective project.
We continue to publish blogs written by our authors, and hope to soon begin a more assertive program to bring the important research that we publish into public conversation. Watch for our articles showing up in the news.
Again, it is an honor and a great responsibility to be at the helm of a journal that has feminist goals and uses serious social science research to forward them. Thank you all for your continued support of our journey.
Footnotes
Barbara J. Risman is College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press 2018) and co-editor of The Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (Springer 2018). She writes about gender structure theory, and her current research is on the development of nonbinary identities.