Towards assessing gender authorship in aquaculture publications

Abstract

While gender disparities are decreasing in some areas of academia, studies have shown that gender inequities in scholarly literature still persist. A review of more than eight million papers across disciplines found that men predominate in the first and last author positions and women are underrepresented in single-authored papers.The present study applies the vetted methodology of assigning authorship gender in peer-reviewed literature, according to the U.S. Social Security Database of names, to the broad discipline of aquaculture in peer-reviewed journals in the complete JSTOR database archive, and compares these results to authorship by gender in the International Aquaculture Curated Database (IACD). The International Aquaculture Curated Database (IACD) is a compilation of over 500 peer-reviewed publications supported by four international aquaculture programs developed by Oregon State University researchers. Preliminary findings reveal that the percentage of women authors was similar to that for the JSTOR aquaculture journals subsample (13.8 %) and the journals in the IACD (15.7 %). Women, therefore, are not well represented in either database. The next steps for this work include comparing and contrasting the proportion of women authors in aquaculture journals to women working in the aquaculture discipline and to women graduates in the discipline. Learning how gender authorship has changed in the aquaculture discipline is a critical component for promoting gender equity in the academic discipline and broader field of aquaculture.