Abstract
AbstractAlthough gender parity has been reached at the graduate level in the geosciences, women remain a minority in faculty positions. First authorship of peer‐reviewed scholarship is a measure of academic success and is often used to project potential in the hiring process. Given the importance of first author publications for hiring and advancement, we sought to quantify whether women are underrepresented as first authors relative to their representation in the field of geoscience. We compiled first author names across 13 leading geoscience journals from January 2013 to April 2019 (n = 35,183). Using a database of 216,286 names from 79 countries, across 89 languages, we classified the likely gender associated with each author's given (first) name. We also estimated the gender distribution of authors who publish using only initials, which may itself be a strategy employed by some women to preempt perceived (and actual) gender bias in the publication process. Female names represent 13–30% of all first authors in our database and are substantially underrepresented relative to the proportion of women in early career positions (30–50%). The proportion of female‐name first authors varies substantially by subfield, reflecting variation in representation of women across geoscience subdisciplines. In geoscience, the quantification of this first authorship gender gap supports the hypothesis that the publication process—namely, achievement or allocation of first authorship—is biased by social factors, which may modulate career success of women in the sciences.
Highlights
First authorship of papers in peer‐reviewed journals is crucial to academic success, promotion, and competitive research funding (Evans & Houston, 2011; Way et al, 2019)
Abstract gender parity has been reached at the graduate level in the geosciences, women remain a minority in faculty positions
The proportion of female‐name first authors varies substantially by subfield, reflecting variation in representation of women across geoscience subdisciplines. The quantification of this first authorship gender gap supports the hypothesis that the publication process—namely, achievement or allocation of first authorship—is biased by social factors, which may modulate career success of women in the sciences
Summary
First authorship of papers in peer‐reviewed journals is crucial to academic success, promotion, and competitive research funding (Evans & Houston, 2011; Way et al, 2019). Representation of women in academic geoscience drops off substantially at every successive tier, with the greatest discrepancy at the highest ranks. This representation varies by career stage and subfield; 40–50% of Ocean, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences graduate students (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018), 30–36% at the assistant professor level, and only 11.5–13% at the full professor level (Glass, 2015; Macphee & Canetto, 2015) are women. Analysis of authorship imbalances contributes to a stream of recent scholarship quantifying gender inequities in the geosciences at research conferences (Ford et al, 2018; King et al, 2018), in peer review (Lerback & Hanson, 2017), and in recommendation letters (Dutt et al, 2016)
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