As of January 2024, the journal is led by co-editors Katharine Jenkins, Aidan McGlynn, Simona Capisani, Aness Kim Webster, and Charlotte Knowles.

Philosopher and legal scholar Azizah Y. al-Hibri became the founding editor in 1982, when it was published as a "piggy back" issue of the Women's Studies International Forum.

[5] At the time, according to Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY), president of the Hypatia Inc. board of directors since February 2018,[14] philosophers who wanted to write about gender-related issues were being silenced in a discipline "riven by unabashed bias and vested interest, inflicting its own form of unapologetic mob violence".

[16] Women's Studies International Forum agreed to publish the new journal as an annual "piggy back" issue of its own, which it did for three years,[5] and distributed 10,000 brochures to its mailing list advertising it.

The group led by Al-Hibri decided that submissions would be fully reviewed and that substantive comments would be offered, rather than the usual brief rejection, to help authors improve their work and to contribute to the field's development.

In 1990 Simons stepped down as Editor, after negotiating a contract with Indiana University Press to handle production and subscription fulfillment, thus allowing the editorial office to move easily to another campus.

Sandra Harding (UCLA), who was at the meeting, objected, thinking it awful to name a feminist-philosophy journal after a woman who had been "stoned to death for telling the truth".

More recently, the development of Hypatia clusters (a set of two or more articles on a single theme in an open issue) offers another avenue that might be employed to highlight work that is marginalized in the larger discipline. ...

[23][24] As of October 2019, the board of directors consisted of Linda Martín Alcoff, Talia Mae Bettcher, Ann Garry, Helen Longino, Jacqueline Scott, and Nancy Tuana.

Instead of an editor-in-chief, four co-editors were named, Bonnie J. Mann, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana, and a managing editor, Sarah LaChance Adams.

[25] Previous editors-in-chief were:[26] Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The board of directors announced that a task force would restructure the journal's governance, and that anyone in an editorial or non-board position with Hypatia would be "required to sign a statement of adherence to guidelines issued by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics".

"[43][44][45] The board appointed interim editors, and in November 2017 Sally Haslanger, Serene Khader, and Yannik Thiem were named as the governance task-force co-chairs.

[14] Linda Martín Alcoff and Kim Hall, two of the associate editors who resigned in July,[43] became president of the board of directors and chair of the search committee for the new editorial team, respectively.

The editors emphasized that the hoaxers had manipulated Hypatia's publication and review practices, which were intended to "encourage submissions by younger and marginalized scholars" and "to avoid placing unnecessary hurdles in the way of submitting and revising manuscripts".

[55] Justin Weinberg, Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina, wrote that "if the citations [in the published paper] are legitimate and the descriptions of others' views are accurate ... the editors of Hypatia have nothing to be particularly ashamed of. ...