Gender-Age Co-author Networks in the Earth and Space Sciences: Young boys and Old Boys
Abstract
Recent work has shown that implicit bias persists in scholarly publishing and meetings in a variety of ways—from participation as reviewers to selection as invited speakers. Most work is on gender bias, where data are sufficient, but bias likely extends across race, ethnicity, and other underrepresented groups. This is part of a larger culture of bias and harassment in science, documented by the recent NAS report. Addressing these issues is a cultural challenge, and a variety of approaches are necessary. One is to engage more women in leadership positions, which leads to more women reviewers and speakers. Another is to expand awareness broadly. Recent data show the value of both approaches (Ford et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03809-5 and Hanson and Lerback https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO083837). Combining age and gender data is essential to evaluate bias because of the large historic discrimination of women in the sciences.
Data on co-authors for meeting abstracts and publications help explain these effects but also raise concerns. The data, representing more than 500,000 unique interactions, show that women tend to have co-authors according to the expected age-gender distribution of the AGU membership. For example, the co-authors aged 20-29 of other women (of all ages) are, on average, 45% women and 55% men, close to the membership distribution. Most men regardless of age interact more predominantly with other men. Thus the benefit of including women in leadership roles can be explained partly as a network effect. However, as the bias persists with younger scientists, the data warn that the cultural challenges are persisting-"young boys" will become "old boys." Engaging younger scientists with each other in research settings may help. AGU is expanding further its ethics and diversity programs and starting an ethics center that will provide further resources to address these issues across the sciences.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.U53A..02H
- Keywords:
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- 0855 Diversity;
- EDUCATIONDE: 6630 Workforce;
- PUBLIC ISSUES