Presence Is Not Parity, Visibility Is Not Credit: Gendered Hierarchies in Platform- Based Academic Publishing

Editorial board research has consistently documented women's underrepresentation in journal leadership, but most studies measure representation through aggregate board composition or editor-in-chief counts alone. This approach conflates participation with stratification: if roles carrying different levels of authority are pooled into a single indicator, opposing distributional patterns can cancel each other out, producing a misleading appearance of parity. This study examines how editorial roles are distributed by gender across a national platform-based journal system. Analyzing 38,241 person–journal observations from 1,549 DergiPark journals, we estimate logistic and proportional-odds regression models to distinguish four role categories—executive, operational, support, and symbolic—and report average marginal effects with individual-level cluster-robust standard errors. Women are significantly less likely to hold executive editorial positions (OR = 0.583, AME = −1.63 pp) and more likely to occupy operational (OR = 1.090, AME = +1.78 pp) and support roles (OR = 1.151, AME = +0.88 pp), conditional on academic rank, disciplinary context, and institutional visibility. When these roles are aggregated into a single gatekeeping indicator, the gender coefficient becomes non-significant—not because stratification is absent, but because opposing effects cancel each other out. Role-disaggregated analysis is therefore a necessary condition for valid inference about editorial gender equity in role-differentiated settings. The findings also demonstrate that platform-standardized editorial metadata enables role-level comparisons that fragmented publisher environments cannot support.