Abstract
Diversity and inclusion in science are issues that still need to be addressed and the scientific community should act urgently to overcome disparities especially because women are still underrepresented across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Information about women authoring scientific papers are important data that can help us understand if a specific field is inclusive. We focussed on the area of Myrmecology and we investigated whether first and last authorship is biased in this field. This study showed that although our research focuses on a group dominated by females (ants) in terms of authorship of papers it is still a male dominated society with no significant increases in female representation since 1990 with women representing only 35.59% of first authors and 22.90% of last authors. And despite our data showing promising trends for the last few years (2016-2018) where we see a slight increase in women as first authors however for the last author position there has still been no change. We also compared worldwide results to that of myrmecologists from Brazil, a hub of ant biological research. We conclude our study by proposing several actions that we can all do to overcome this issue and make science more equal and inclusive.
Highlights
Science can help us understand the world around us and improve the quality of life for humanity
The motivation of this study is to evaluate female representation in myrmecology worldwide since 1990 by measuring the number of publications in National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) with women as first and last authors
It is important to highlight that another reason we focused on 1990-2018 publications because the use of alphabetical authorship in scientific publishing has declined in the last several decades (Waltman, 2012)
Summary
Science can help us understand the world around us and improve the quality of life for humanity. It is not what several studies have shown where women are often underrepresented in the workforce and this situation is true across science, technology, engineering, and math, called the STEM fields (Goulden et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2018; Ysseldyk et al, 2019). The Royal Society of Chemistry (2019) report showed that women are less likely to have articles accepted in chemistry journals than men. This gender bias occurs in citations, where women’s papers have fewer citations compared to male authors. Since there is a majority of men composing the editorial members of journals, this may contribute to gender disparity
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