Female academics continue to be under‐represented on the editorial boards of many, but not all, management journals. This variability is intriguing, because it is reasonable to assume that the size of the pool of female faculty available and willing to serve on editorial boards is similar for all management journals. This paper therefore focuses on the characteristics of the journal editors to explain this variability; journal editors or editors‐in‐chief are the most influential people in the selection of editorial board members. The authors draw on social identity and homosocial reproduction theories, and on the gender and careers literature to examine the relationship between an editor's academic performance, professional age and gender, and editorial board gender equality. Longitudinal data are collected at five points in time, using five‐year intervals, from 52 management journals. To account for the nested structure of the data, a three‐level multilevel model was estimated. Overall, it is found that the prospects of board membership improve for women when editors are high‐performing, professionally young or female. The authors discuss these findings and their implications for management journals with low, stagnant or declining representation of women in their boards.