Abstract
Research shows that gender inequality is still a major issue in academic science, yet academic societies may serve as underappreciated and effective avenues for promoting female leadership. That is, society membership is often self-selective, and board positions are elected (with a high turnover compared to institutions)—these characteristics, among others, may thus create an environment conducive to gender equality. We therefore investigate this potential using an information-theoretic approach to quantify gender equality (male:female ratios) in zoology society boards around the world. We compare alternative models to analyze how society characteristics might predict or correlate with the proportion of female leaders, and find that a cultural model, including society age, size of board and whether or not a society had an outward commitment or statement of equality, was the most informative predictor for the gender ratio of society boards and leadership positions. This model was more informative than alternatives that considered, for instance, geographic location, discipline of study or taxonomic focus. While women were more highly represented in society leadership than in institutional academic leadership, this representation was still far short of equal (~30%): we thus also provide a checklist and recommendations for societies to contribute to global gender equality in science.
Highlights
Gender equity in academic science is yet to be achieved in most institutions and societies worldwide
We further aimed to identify the characteristics of societies that might be correlated with gender equality, as being able to distinguish specific societal traits that are associated with gender equality might help us make targeted recommendations for promoting women in scientific
We investigated a) the proportional representation of women on a society board (FemProp), b) the presence of a woman in the position of society president or equivalent (FemExec), and c) the number of women in leadership positions using an Information-Theoretic approach [17,18,19,20]
Summary
Gender equity in academic science is yet to be achieved in most institutions and societies worldwide. Often considered as a merely tangential part of academic life, scientific societies play a large role in supporting students and researchers through the provision of grants, conferences, and journal publications. They often help to unite geographically distant researchers within a field, provide mentors or role models for early career academics, and have the potential to close gaps between career stages by bringing people together with a common scientific goal. Societies provide opportunities for networking, both formally and informally This is valuable for women academics, since it has been shown that women can often feel excluded or isolated from traditional academic networks [6, 7] while needing to demonstrate higher involvement in such networks in order to achieve promotions [8]. The scientific society remains one facet of academic life that is under studied, but may have the capacity to support women in their careers, as well as promote necessary systemic and intrinsic changes throughout science
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