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Gender inequities in herpetology: the case of the Argentine community

Authors:
  • Fundación de Historia Natural "Félix de Azara"
  • National Scientific and Technical Research Council IBS - Instituto de Biología Subtropical
  • Unidad Ejecutora Lillo (CONICET - FML) Tucumán - Argentina

Abstract and Figures

Women in scientific fields have achieved meaningful gains in terms of participation, and they even reached gender parity in Argentina. However, in spite of several documented attempts to close the gender gap, inequalities still remain in different academic areas. Considering that disciplines have developed under different historical contexts and institutional settings, it is relevant to describe gender equality indicators for them. This could also lead us to a better understanding of the mechanisms modelling global patterns of gender bias. Here we present a detailed analysis on gender proportion in different roles that researchers perform in the Argentine herpetological community. We gathered data on gender composition of the director boards and active members of the Argentine Association of Herpetology, and the organizing committees and participants of the Argentine Congress of Herpetology. We also performed a survey on gender topics to the attendants to the 20th Argentine Congress of Herpetology. Our main results pointed out a low number of women in the highest positions of the community hierarchy, such as chair positions in the AHA and conferences and symposia in congress. This leads to a lesser visibility of women in contrast to men, and is a potential reason for the low number of female herpetologists as role models. Furthermore, we detected low numbers of female herpetologists with long academic paths, depicting a major drop out of women along their careers. Gender bias in science has a strong hierarchical component and this pattern was recovered in different scientific activities within herpetology. In this sense, directed actions and targeted policies are required to guarantee the access of women to power positions and for the promotion or retention for senior female researchers. Identifying the weakest points in terms of gender equality, and the areas where gender biases are historically established is necessary to build a more egalitarian community.
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Cuadernos de
HERPETOLOGÍA
VOLUMEN 35 - NUMERO 2 - SEPTIEMBRE 2021
ppct.caicyt.gov.ar/index.php/cuadherpetol/
ISSN 1852 - 5768 (en línea)
Revista de la
Asociación Herpetológica Argentina
Cuadernos de
HERPETOLOGÍA
Revista de la Asociación Herpetológica Argentina
Volumen 35 - Número 2 - Septiembre 2021
Trabajo
195
Author for correspondence: marianachp@yahoo.com.ar
Gender inequities in herpetology: the case of the Argentine
community
Mariana Chuliver1, Jimena Grosso2,3,4, Gabriela Fontanarrosa5, Jessica Fratani4, Daiana Paola
Ferraro6, Ana Sofía Duport-Bru4,5, Rosío Gabriela Schneider7,8, María Dolores Casagranda4, Laura
Pereyra9, Natalin Vicente4, María José Salica9, Regina Gabriela Medina5,10,11, Carla Adriana Bessa12,
Romina Semhan4, Miriam Corina Vera8
1 Instituto de Bio y Geociencias del NOA (CONICET-UNSA). Rosario de Lerma, Salta, Argentina.
2 Instituto de Ciencias Marinas y Limnológicas, Universidad Austral de Chile. Valdivia, Chile.
3 Centro de Humedales Río Cruces (UACh), Valdivia, Chile.
4 Unidad Ejecutora Lillo (CONICET-FML). San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina.
5 Instituto de Biodiversidad Neotropical (CONICET-UNT). Yerba Buena, Tucumán, Argentina.
6 División Herpetología, Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” (CONI-
CET). Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
7 Instituto de Diversidad y Evolución Austral (CONICET). Puerto Madryn, Chubut, Argentina.
8 Laboratorio de Genética Evolutiva, Instituto de Biología Subtropical (CONICET). Posadas, Mi-
siones, Argentina.
9 Instituto de Ecorregiones Andinas (CONICET- UNJu). San Salvador de Jujuy, Jujuy, Argentina.
10 Cátedra de Biología Animal, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales (UNT). San Miguel de Tucumán,
Tucumán, Argentina.
11 Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Ponticia Universidad Católica de
Chile. Santiago de Chile, Chile.
12 Instituto Nacional de Limnología (CONICET- UNL). Santa Fe, Santa Fe, Argentina.
Cuad. herpetol. 35 (2): 195-205 (2021)
Recibido: 01 Mayo 2021
Revisado: 12 Agosto 2021
Aceptado: 10 Septiembre 2021
Editor Asociado: S. Quinzio
doi: 10.31017/CdH.2021.(2021-029)
ABSTRACT
Women in scientic elds have achieved meaningful gains in terms of participation, and they
even reached gender parity in Argentina. However, in spite of several documented attempts
to close the gender gap, inequalities still remain in dierent academic areas. Considering that
disciplines have developed under dierent historical contexts and institutional settings, it is
relevant to describe gender equality indicators for them. is could also lead us to a better
understanding of the mechanisms modelling global patterns of gender bias. Here we present
a detailed analysis on gender proportion in dierent roles that researchers perform in the Ar-
gentine herpetological community. We gathered data on gender composition of the director
boards and active members of the Argentine Association of Herpetology, and the organizing
committees and participants of the Argentine Congress of Herpetology. We also performed a
survey on gender topics to the attendants to the 20th Argentine Congress of Herpetology. Our
main results pointed out a low number of women in the highest positions of the community
hierarchy, such as chair positions in the AHA and conferences and symposia in congress. is
leads to a lesser visibility of women in contrast to men, and is a potential reason for the low
number of female herpetologists as role models. Furthermore, we detected low numbers of
female herpetologists with long academic paths, depicting a major drop out of women along
their careers. Gender bias in science has a strong hierarchical component and this pattern was
recovered in dierent scientic activities within herpetology. In this sense, directed actions and
targeted policies are required to guarantee the access of women to power positions and for the
promotion or retention for senior female researchers. Identifying the weakest points in terms
of gender equality, and the areas where gender biases are historically established is necessary
to build a more egalitarian community.
Key Words: Gender Gap; Science; Female Representation; AHA; Congress Participation.
196
M. Chuliver et al. - Gender inequities in Argentine herpetology
roles that researchers develop.
One important aspect of the scientic career is
the visibility of the researchers within their discipline
or respective community (Martin, 2014). Conference
attendance, presentations, and plenary talks are re-
levant instances for researchers to achieve visibility,
which lately inuence their perceived quality and
peer-recognition (Schroeder et al., 2013; Jones et
al., 2014). In addition, scientic societies play a large
role in visibilization of their members, providing
opportunities for networking both formally and
informally (Potvin et al., 2018). As a consequence,
scientic societies and all the events or activities
promoted by them may have the capacity to prompt
women in their careers, as well as to promote changes
throughout science to achieve gender equality.
Female participation in science has increased
considerably during the last decades, and Argentina
has been recently pointed out as one of the countries
In recent years, a process of self-evaluation related to
the gender gap has been triggered within the scien-
tic community (de Kleijn et al., 2020; Huang et al.,
2020). us, to measure gender inequities, several
indicators have been dened and implemented at
dierent scales (O’Brien et al., 2019; Huang et al.,
2020). Various studies assessed gender gap in terms
of disparities in authorship, productivity, citations,
or access to funding in almost all disciplines and
countries (e.g., Hill et al., 2010; Larivière et al., 2013;
Shen, 2013; Holman et al., 2018; de Kleijn et al., 2020;
Huang et al., 2020). However, gender inequity is a
multidimensional problem rooted in a historical
gender imbalance that impacts the success rate of
women in academia, therefore, any single indicator is
oen not capable of including all its relevant dimen-
sions (Astegiano et al., 2019; O’Brien et al., 2019).
is highlights the need of evaluating gender bias
in an integrative way and considering the multiple
RESUMEN
Las mujeres han logrado avances signicativos en cuanto a su participación en el campo
cientíco y en Argentina incluso han alcanzado la paridad de género. Sin embargo, a
pesar de varios intentos documentados de cerrar la brecha de género, las desigualda-
des aún persisten en varias áreas académicas. Considerando que distintas disciplinas
se han desarrollado bajo diferentes contextos históricos y escenarios institucionales,
resulta relevante describir los indicadores de equidad para las mismas. Esto además
puede conducir a una mejor comprensión de los mecanismos que modelan los patrones
globales de sesgo de género. En el presente trabajo presentamos un análisis detallado
sobre la proporción de género en diferentes roles que desempeñan los/las investigadores/
as en la comunidad herpetológica argentina. Recogimos datos sobre la composición
por género de las comisiones y los miembros activos de la Asociación Herpetológica
Argentina, y de los comités organizadores y los participantes del Congreso Argentino de
Herpetología. Además, realizamos una encuesta sobre temas de género a los asistentes
al XX Congreso Argentino de Herpetología. Nuestros principales resultados señalaron
un bajo número de mujeres en los puestos de mayor jerarquía dentro de la comunidad,
tales como presidencias en la AHA y participación en conferencias y simposios en
congresos. Esto conduce a una menor visibilidad de las mujeres en comparación con
los cientícos varones y es una posible razón del número comparativamente bajo de
herpetólogas como mentoras o modelos a seguir. Además, detectamos un bajo número
de herpetólogas con trayectorias de larga duración, lo que indicaría una importante
deserción a lo largo de sus carreras. El sesgo de género en ciencia presenta un fuerte
componente jerárquico y este patrón se recuperó en diferentes actividades cientícas
dentro del campo de la herpetología. En este sentido, se requieren acciones dirigidas
y políticas focalizadas para garantizar el acceso de las mujeres a puestos de toma de
decisiones/mayor exposición y para la promoción o retención de investigadoras senior.
Identicar los puntos más débiles en términos de igualdad de género y las áreas donde
los prejuicios de género están históricamente establecidos es necesario para construir
una comunidad más igualitaria.
Palabras claves: Brecha de Género; Ciencia; Representación Femenina; AHA; Parti-
cipación en Congresos.
Introduction
197
Cuad. herpetol. 35 (2): 195-206 (2021)
that reached overall gender parity (de Kleijn et al.,
2020). As such, women represent 61% of the total
tenure researchers, and 53% considering only Life
Sciences (https://cifras.conicet.gov.ar/publica/) in
the main research institution of the country (CO-
NICET). In spite of this rising number of women,
a recent big data analysis including the career path
length of researchers across the world showed a
widening gender gap for certain indicators, such as
productivity and impact (Huang et al., 2020). Studies
like this emphasize the relevance of weighing the
imbalanced access to opportunities faced by women,
even from early career and varying according to geo-
graphic region or discipline (Ceci et al., 2014; Maas
et al., 2020). In this sense, a disaggregated analysis
of indicators and activities for specic scientic
disciplines in Argentina is relevant since it could
reveal a growing gender gap therein.
In Herpetology, particularly, gender disparities
have been indicated regarding female participation
in dierent academic roles, in authorship positions,
and organizing and speaking in symposia or confe-
rences (Parenti and Wake, 2016; Sardelis and Drew,
2016; Salerno et al., 2019; Rock et al., 2021). Recently,
Grosso et al. (2021) found a pattern of male preferen-
tial connections (male homophily) in herpetological
publications that marginalizes women, both at re-
gional and global scales. In addition, a low number
of women in the highest hierarchies in academia,
fewer women than men publishing papers, and a
lack of incentives for women were pointed out in
the Brazilian herpetological community (Carnaval,
2016; Benício and Fonseca, 2019; Werneck et al.,
2019; Slobodian et al., 2021).
The Argentine Herpetological Association
(AHA) is the oldest herpetological society in South
America, holding annual meetings (Argentine Con-
gress of Herpetology) since 1983, and publishing
its own journal (Cuadernos de Herpetología) for
36 years. Up to now, there is only one study about
gender bias in the dynamics of the publication pro-
cess in the Argentine herpetological community
(Grosso et al., 2021). erefore, the aim of this work
is to evaluate the gender proportion at complemen-
tary academic roles that researchers develop, such
as participation in the AHA and the Argentine
Congress of Herpetology. In addition, we tested the
hypothesis that under an unbiased gender scenario,
the proportion of women in top hierarchical or high
exposure positions reects the observed proportion
of female members of the AHA with long career
paths. Finally, we performed a survey to characterize
the general perception of the Argentine herpeto-
logical community on gender topics and to detect
other barriers excluded by the quantitative data. e
analyses presented herein are necessary to identify
the weakest points in terms of gender equality, to
establish which are the areas where gender biases
are historically established, and to propose actions
that may help to close the gender gap.
Materials and methods
We built a gender-database for director boards of
the AHA, its active members, the organizing com-
mittees of the Argentine Congress of Herpetology,
and the congress participants. e gender of the
researchers (assigned as male/female) was identi-
ed using their rst names and following the free
database of Gender Checker (https://genderchecker.
com). Alternatively, gender was determined by visual
inspection of ResearchGate proles or images found
in Google when the author’s name was ambiguous.
e gender approach used here was binary, and
those individuals that could not be categorized as
male or female were excluded from the analyses.
Considering that these were just a few cases, this
removal did not aect the overall sample-size nor
the relevance of the conclusions. We are aware that
the author's self-perceived gender could mismatch
with the gender assigned here, and that the binary
approach excludes other identities that may be pre-
sent in the community. However, we were unable to
consider additional identities due to analytical and
operational limitations.
We gathered information about the gender
composition of the director boards of the AHA by
hierarchies (i.e., chair and board members) during
the 1982–2021 period. We also recorded the gender
of the active members of the association during the
2019–2021 period, and calculated the length of their
academic paths as years from her/his rst published
paper up to 2021. e list of members was collected
from http://aha.org.ar/socios-activos/ and the year
of the publication of their papers was collected
from CONICET webpage, ResearchGate or Google
Scholar (full datasets are available in Supplementary
Table S1).
e gender composition of the Argentine her-
petological community through time was estimated
using the gender proportion of attendants to the
congress spanning the 1999–2019 period. We also
198
M. Chuliver et al. - Gender inequities in Argentine herpetology
org/10.6084/m9.gshare.16530618).
Results
The analyzed data showed only one woman as
chair member of the AHA, throughout 38 years
(1982–2020 period). Aer the election of authori-
ties in 2020 a change was observed and both chair
positions were occupied by women (raising up the
percentage of women to 7.5% for the whole period;
Fig. 1A). Until 1990, female participation on the
director boards was lower than 40% but since 1991
the female proportion has increased, resulting in
more than half of the board occupied by women at
the present (54%; Fig. 1A).
During the 2019–2021 period, women re-
presented 52% of the active members of the AHA.
When analyzing the length of members' academic
paths, women were the majority of the researchers
with short careers paths (i.e., 0 to 14 years), but men
were more represented among long career paths (i.e.,
≥ 15 years; Fig. 1B).
Our results showed that in the last 20 years
of the Argentine Congress of Herpetology wo-
men constituted on average 52% of the organizing
committees and 45% of the authors attending the
event (Fig. 1C–E). Although the overall gender
participation of authors was balanced over the years,
dierences were noticeable when comparing the
gender proportion of invited speakers and regular
exhibitors (Fig. 1F–G). Of the 724 invited speakers,
38% were women (Fig. 1F). For main conferences,
35 women and 86 men were invited, summing up
26.25 h and 64.50 h of exposition, respectively. For
young herpetologists’ conferences, 13 women and
9 men participated during the nine years in which
this event was held. For symposia, 581 authors
participated, 38% of them were women, and female
participation was higher than male only in two years
(Fig. 1F). Opposite to what occurred in the category
of invited speakers, in regular presentations female
participation climbed to 46%, and they even were
majority in some years (Fig. 1G).
e baseline of researchers used to perform
the simulations was composed by 40% of female
herpetologists. e simulations found that the pro-
bability to obtain the observed number of women as
chair members of the AHA (observed proportion: 1
woman out of 46) was 0.001%, while the probability
of being invited as a speaker in main conferences
(observed proportion: 35 women out of 121) was
evaluated gender participation in the Argentine
Congress of Herpetology from 1999 to 2019. We
compiled data of organizing committees and of
authors in the dierent types of presentations (data-
set available in Supplementary Table S2). e authors
were grouped into two main categories: regular
exhibitors and invited speakers. Regular exhibitors
are those presenting short oral communications
and posters. Invited speakers are peer-selected,
commonly funded by the congress organizers, and
their presentations comprise main conferences,
conferences of young herpetologists and symposia.
ese are usually long-lasting lectures, carried out at
the prime-time slot of the congresses. e total time
of exposition for main conferences was calculated for
male and female speakers (considering 45 minutes
each talk). Data of the attendants/authors gender
and the composition of the organizing committees
were obtained from the books of abstracts of each
congress.
We aimed to evaluate if the observed number
of women in hierarchical/high exposure positions
through years was the expected by chance, or if, on
the contrary, existed an underlying process shaping
the gender distribution. In order to do this, we per-
formed 1.000.000 simulations of random gender
assignment to chair members in the AHA and to
speakers in main conferences, calculated the propor-
tion of women in these positions under this neutral
gender scenario, and then compared them with the
observed values. ese simulations were performed
in R (version 3.6.3, R Core Team 2020), and using as
baseline the observed number of active members of
the AHA with long academic paths (i.e., ≥ 15 years).
Finally, we performed a survey among the attendants
to the 20th Argentine Congress of Herpetology in
2019 (dataset available in Supplementary Table S3).
We asked them to respond to a six-point question-
naire about self-gender biases, caregiving tasks, and
career challenges. e questions were: A) K. Smith
recently published a paper. Which do you suppose
is the rst name of this author, Kevin or Karen?, B)
Give the full name of three authors that have inuen-
ced your career, C) Do you have/had to take care of
other people? e.g. children, elder parents, D) If you
do, how does/did aect/ed your professional life?,
E) Do you agree that maternity/paternity leave in
Argentina is enough?, and F) Write a short paragraph
that summarizes the biggest obstacles in your ca reer.
All supplementary les were shared as data-
sets uploaded to gshare repository (https://doi.
199
Cuad. herpetol. 35 (2): 195-206 (2021)
Figure 1. Gender distribution in Argentine Herpetology. (a) Director boards during the 39 years of the Argentine
Herpetological Association (AHA). (b) Career path lengths of active members of the AHA during 2019–2021 period.
(c–g) Gender participation in the Argentine Congress of Herpetology from 1999 to 2019. (c–e) Organizing committees
of the congresses and overall participation among the ve dierent types of presentations. (f) Percentages of partici-
pation of invited speakers. (g) Percentages of participation of regular exhibitors. White numbers on the histograms
represent absolute values of women. Abbreviations: MC = main conferences; YH = young herpetologists conference;
SY = symposia; OR = oral presentations; PO = posters.
200
M. Chuliver et al. - Gender inequities in Argentine herpetology
0.007% (see Supplementary Information Fig. S1).
e survey was answered by 84 congress at-
tendees of dierent academic status, from which
68% were women (Fig. 2). When asked to complete
the rst name of an author given the initial letter
of the name, most of the surveyed thought in a
man (87.5%; Fig. 2A). e same occurred when
the surveyed attendants were asked to mention the
three most inuential researchers in their careers,
the majority named a man as a reference (68%; Fig.
2 B). e survey also revealed that 47% of women
researchers were involved in caregiving tasks and
that most of them felt overwhelmed when balancing
work and life duties (Fig. 2 C–D). Most participants
(94%) answered that leaves for childbirth in Ar-
gentina are too short, especially for fathers (46%;
currently two days aer childbirth; Fig. 2E). Men
and women diered when recognizing the biggest
obstacles in their careers (Fig. 3). Women's answers
pointed primarily to the family burden since the
words that popped out mostly were “children” and
“family”, while money-related issues like “resources”,
economy”, and “funding” were in second place (Fig.
3A). In contrast, men's most signicant concerns
were related to money, since the word that popped
out mostly was “funding”, and items non-related to
academic activities like “family” or “bureaucracy”
appeared in second place (Fig. 3B).
Discussion
According to our results, women in Argentine her-
petology have almost equal representation as men
in several academic roles—as board members of the
association, members of the organizing committees,
and authors in congresses. However, gender disparity
is evidenced when analyzing women participation
in top hierarchical/high exposure positions—as
chair members of the association, and speakers at
main conferences and congress symposia. Moreover,
through the performed simulations we showed that
about 99% of the simulated cases resulted in a better
scenario for women than portrayed by the real data.
In other words, this depicted a signicantly lower
representation of women in those positions than
expected in an unbiased gender scenario.
An increasing number of women have been
incorporated in scientic disciplines during the last
decade (de Kleijn et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020).
Nevertheless, Potvin et al. (2018) pointed out that
women fullling leadership roles represent only 9%
within zoological societies in South America. is
gender mismatch at the hierarchical levels reveals a
widespread phenomenon known as “glass ceiling”,
which was described as the intangible barriers—like
peer-recognition, unequal family burden, gender
stereotypes, among others—that prevent the promo-
tion of highly qualied women to power positions
(Akpinar-Sposito, 2013). In Argentina, the AHA
has incorporated two women as chair members
during the election of authorities in 2020, raising
the proportion of women in this academic role.
Further participation of women in decision making
positions has also been reported recently for some
Brazilian professional associations, since they had
incorporated women as presidents, directorships
and board members (Slobodian et al., 2021). e
increase in the representation of women in power
positions is meaningful in a historical gender-
unbalanced scientic landscape (Astegiano et al.,
2019), but considering that research is constructed
in a collaborative fashion, the hierarchical structure
of academia should be under debate as well.
We found two contrasting distribution patterns
among the active members of the AHA. ere are
more women than men among researchers with
short career paths; on the contrary, men are the
majority among researchers with long career paths
(Fig. 1B). is occurs in spite of the recruitment of
female herpetologists has been constant and similar
to that of men since 1999. us, low proportions of
women with long academic paths do not seem to
be the result of low recruitment in the past, but the
consequence of the “leaky pipeline. is phenome-
non describes the higher dropout rate of women
compared to men´s at all stages of their academic
trajectory (Alper, 1993; Goulden et al., 2011; Shaw
and Stanton, 2012), and was documented in several
scientic elds (e.g., Luckenbill-Edds, 2002; Holmes
et al., 2008; Martin, 2012; Valentova et al., 2017;
Jadidi et al., 2018; Huang et al., 2020).
Multiple factors may lead women to leave
research in sciences, but according to the surveyed
information, caregiving tasks and motherhood could
be the most signicant within the herpetological
community. ese results are reinforced by previous
studies showing that women are more prone than
men to resign labor activities in favor of domestic
life (e.g., Holmes et al., 2008; McGuire et al., 2012;
Cerrato and Cifre, 2018; Lione, 2018), and that
motherhood seems to be a breakthrough event in
201
Cuad. herpetol. 35 (2): 195-206 (2021)
women's academic careers (e.g., Kyvik and Teigen,
1996; Stack, 2004; Fox, 2005; Hunter and Leahey,
2010; Ceci and Williams, 2011; Cech and Blair-Loy,
2019). In the Argentine academic eld—a popula-
tion with high levels of education and a strong pre-
sence of paid work—women spend more time than
Figure 2. Summary of the survey answered by 84 attendees of the 20th Argentine Congress of Herpetology in 2019. (a–e) Questions
with their summarized responses. Color codes in (a), (b) and (e) correspond to the gender referred in the answer.
202
M. Chuliver et al. - Gender inequities in Argentine herpetology
Figure 3. Word cloud constructed from gender-dierentiated responses of the survey released by 84 participants of the 20th Argentine
Congress of Herpetology in 2019.
men in domestic labors and caregiving tasks (Lione,
2018; Andreozzi et al., 2019). However, such choices
might be constrained by gender stereotypes of the
society where female researchers are educated and
develop their scientic careers (Ceci and Williams,
2011).
e performed survey also showed that most
herpetologists thought of a man when asked to
name inuencer scientists in their elds (Fig. 2),
highlighting the low number of women constituting
role models. is is possibly related to the homophi-
lic dynamics and the consequent marginalization
of women described for the publication process in
Herpetology (Grosso et al., 2021). Also, this may be
an outcome of the overall low proportion of women
occupying high exposure positions in this eld. In
203
Cuad. herpetol. 35 (2): 195-206 (2021)
this regard, we found a signicant low number of
women as invited speakers in the Argentine Con-
gress of Herpetology (Fig. 1F), which leads to a lesser
visibility and may inuence their peer-recognition.
Our results agree with previous analyses of gender
participation in congresses for other biological
disciplines, where women were signicantly under-
represented among invited speakers (Schroeder et
al., 2013; Kalejta and Palmenberg, 2017) or had
reduced exposure compared to men (Isbell et al.,
2012; Jones et al., 2014). When analyzing the causes
of these biases, the imbalanced gender proportion of
the organizers has been pointed as responsible for
the low numbers of invited women (Isbell et al., 2012;
Casadevall and Handelsman, 2014; Sardelis and
Drew, 2016; Débarre et al., 2018). is was not the
case in the organizing committees of the Argentine
herpetological congresses, where women's propor-
tions were high (Fig. 1C). us, further studies are
needed to elucidate the factors driving gender bias
in speaker selection.
Achieving gender parity within the scientic
community, does not ensure that women will “break
the glass ceiling” and will occupy high exposure and
decision-making positions, currently occupied by
their male counterparts (McGuire et al., 2012; Shaw
and Stanton, 2012; Holman et al., 2018). Directed
actions and targeted policies are needed to guarantee
promotion and retention of female herpetologists,
particularly of those with more than 15 years of
career path length (Holman et al., 2018; Huang et
al., 2020). Accordingly, since 2016 CONICET has
given funding and institutional endorsement to
those meetings reaching gender parity, in order to
prompt visibility of female scientists and improve
access of young women to role models and mentors.
In this sense, more women in power positions not
only encourages equity, but also enriches profes-
sional relationships and leads to a higher quality of
science (Woolley et al., 2010; Campbell et al., 2013;
Nielsen et al., 2018).
We are aware that deep systemic and intrinsic
changes are required and, in the words of Harding
(1996), the transformation of the very foundations
of science and of the culture that gives its value are
needed. Nevertheless, questioning the practices that
perpetuate gender inequities is a rst step necessary
to build a more egalitarian scientic system.
Acknowledgments
We thank all the colleagues that helped us to check
data related to the author's names. We are very
thankful to Dr. Andrea Torricella (Instituto de
Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales - CONICET) for
contributing with ideas and discussions regarding
the topics of our project. is paper also beneted
from Dr. Julia Astegiano and an anonymous re-
viewer, whose helpful comments greatly improved
the manuscript. We are also grateful for the nancial
support received from the following grants: PICT
2015-820 (DPF), PICT 2017-2437 (JG), PIP 0389,
and PICT 2016- 2772 (GF, JF, MCV), FONDECYT
Postdoctorado 2020 Nº 3200665 (RGM) and Nº
3200490 (JG). Lastly, we want to especially thank
all essential workers whose eort allowed us to
continue our academic work within the context of
the global lockdown in which most of the writing
of this manuscript was performed.
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Women have long been underrepresented in the sciences, and their contributions are often overlooked. Previous work has demonstrated a significant productivity gap between men and women when investigating vascular plant authorities and the naming of plant taxa. No study has directly investigated gender inequity, as depicted through authority identity, in the field of lichenology. Our research goal was to describe patterns in gender identity and country of origin for authors of North American lichens. We compiled and analyzed information from the North American Lichen Checklist (including U.S.A. and Canada but not Mexico), independent research, and a gender API to identify the full name, suspected gender, birth year, and country of origin of 889 authors (i.e., people listed as authorities of North American lichen taxa). Of the total 4,895 unique lichen taxa in North America, only 3.2% species were named by a woman. Even standardized by co-authors, men authors contributed significantly more than women authors in this field. We also noted that most authors originated from Europe or the United States. This work suggests that the field of lichenology could provide more support systems for American or Canadian women to contribute naming of new taxa or combinations. While our work focused only on authoring new species as a contribution, we recognize that women may be contributing in other notable ways to lichenology in North America.
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Colombia is one of the most diverse countries regarding crocodylians in the world. However, the spatial ecology of Crocodylus acutus (American crocodile) and Caiman crocodilus (Spectacled caiman) in the wild is largely unknown. To date, no studies have been carried out in the country to understand the spatial dynamics of these species and their relationship with the environment through radiotelemetry. We evaluated the spatial ecology of C. acutus and C. crocodilus in the eastern sector of Tayrona National Natural Park (Arrecifes and Cañaveral) using VHF transmitters during February through July 2021. We collected 275 records from six monitored individuals with age ranges of juvenile and adult for C. acutus and subadults for C. crocodilus. Specifically, two males and one female were monitored for each species with an error rate of 12.69% and frequency of records per day of 1.02±0.56 and 0.61±0.37 respectively. The home range was determined with Minimum Convex Polygon (MCP), Local Convex hull (LoCoH), and the kernel density estimation (KDE) with isopleths at 100%, 95%, and 50%, finding in this method a maximum range for C. acutus of 0.189 km2 and 0.042 km2 for C. crocodilus, with LoCoH being the most accurate method. Only two individuals showed significant spatial autocorrelation (I-Moran z-score:2.65, p-value:0.08e-01 and z-score:2.23, p-value:0.26e-01) corresponding to a clustered distribution with confidence greater than 97%. However, all individuals had mean distances traveled (DMR) <1km in a period of five months (Feb-Jul), with an extended dry season in the field from 2021. It was checked that C. acutus presented significantly greater movements than C. crocodilus (p-value = 3.82e-06, p-value = 1.53e-05, respectively). On the other hand, with the onset of rains in July, the weekly DMR of C. acutus increased, a positive effect was found with the average precipitation (PP) (z-value: 2.04, p-value: 0.04, 95% confidence) , through generalized linear regressions based on binomial negative distributions. In contrast, the weekly DMRs of C. crocodilus were affected by more environmental co-variables: solar radiation, PP, mean and minimum temperature (z-value: 2.12, p- value: 0.33e-01; z-value: -2.01, p-value: 0.45e-01; z value: -2.42, p-value:0.16e-01, respectively). The most robust model obtained for C. crocodilus has an explanatory power of 87.76%, compared to 31.41% for C. acutus. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the number of individuals and monitoring time, as well as to explore more abiotic and biotic variables that may be influencing the DMR of the study species. Finally, these spatial data provide valuable information for management plans and future research inside and outside the protected area for the conservation and management of crocodylians and associated ecosystems.
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As the scientific environment is hierarchical and meritocratic, greater dedication will lead to higher performance. Consequently, scientists with caregiving responsibilities will suffer downfalls in performance. Caregivers are mainly women so their career is more affected than their male counterparts’. Based on a self-perception survey among Argentinean ecologists, we studied the distribution of caregiving responsibilities, uninterrupted time dedicated to work, career paths, perception of researchers’ own work and that of others in relation to gender, and reciprocal effect between family and work. We found that a larger percentage of women carry caregiving duties, dedicate less uninterrupted time to work, and more to non-work-related tasks, especially when working from home. We found no effect of caregiving on age at promotion, although women tend to start earlier stages of their careers younger than men, while the trend reverts in later categories. Women tend to value their own work more poorly than men, and both female and male researchers tend to choose male over female referents and advisers, especially among older generations. The interaction between family and work is perceived negatively by women in early career stages. In general, women and men felt supported by their advisers with respect to family-related issues. Caregiving duties must be considered when evaluating a researcher’s performance, especially for women. Public policies must help relieve women from heavy caregiving tasks and facilitate leaving their home space to detach from not-work-related tasks. Greater peer recognition of women’s research should increase their participation as advisers and referents, as well as their own perception of their work and those of other women. We must actively propose policies that will turn academy into a fairer and more equitable working environment for women.
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The growing number of gender studies encourages more refined analyzes and greater conceptualization of the underlying processes of gender gap in science. In Herpetology, previous studies have described gender disparities and a scrutiny of individual interactions may help revealing the mechanisms modelling the global pattern. In this contribution we modeled a co-authorship network, a previously unexplored methodology for gender studies in this discipline, in addition to a broad and classic bibliometric analysis of the discipline. Co-authorship networks were modelled for two South American journals, because this geo-political location is considered to present the best gender balance within general scientific communities. However, we found a pattern of male preferential connections (male homophily) that marginalizes women and maintains the gender gap, at both regional and global scales. This interpretation arises from results coming from multiple analyses, such as high homophily index in collaboration networks, lower female representation in articles than expected in a non-gender biased environment, the decrease of female co-authors when the article leader is a man, and the extreme masculinization of the editorial boards. The homophilic dynamics of the publication process reveals that academic activity is pervasive to unbalanced power relationships. Personal interactions shape the collective experience, tracing back to the Feminist Theory’s axiom: “the personal is political”.
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The global scientific community has become increasingly diverse over recent decades, but is this ongoing development also reflected among top‐publishing authors and potential scientific leaders? We surveyed 13 leading journals in ecology, evolution, and conservation to investigate the diversity of the 100 top‐publishing authors in each journal between 1945 and 2019. Out of 1051 individual top‐publishing authors, only 11% are women. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Canada account for more than 75% of top‐publishing authors, while countries of the Global South (as well as Russia, Japan, and South Korea) were strikingly underrepresented. The number of top‐publishing authors who are women and/or are from the Global South is increasing only slowly over time. We outline transformative actions that scientific communities can take to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion at author, leadership, and society level. The resulting promotion of scientific innovation and productivity is essential for the development of global solutions in conservation science.
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Significance Empirical evidence suggests significant gender differences in the total productivity and impact of academic careers across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Paradoxically, the increase in the number of women academics over the past 60 years has increased these gender differences. Yet, we find that men and women publish a comparable number of papers per year and have equivalent career-wise impact for the same total number of publications. This suggests the productivity and impact of gender differences are explained by different publishing career lengths and dropout rates. This comprehensive picture of gender inequality in academic publishing can help rephrase the conversation around the sustainability of women’s careers in academia, with important consequences for institutions and policy makers.
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Representation of women in science drops substantially at each career stage, from early student to senior investigator. Disparities in opportunities for women to contribute to research metrics, such as distinguished speaker events and authorship, have been reported in many fields in the U.S.A. and Europe. However, whether female representation in scientific contributions differs in other regions, such as Latin America, is not well understood. In this study, in order to determine whether female authorship is influenced by gender or institutional location of the last (senior) author or by subfield within ecology, we gathered author information from 6849 articles in ten ecological and zoological journals that publish research articles either in or out of Latin America. We found that female authorship has risen marginally since 2002 (27 to 31%), and varies among Latin American countries, but not between Latin America and other regions. Last author gender predicted female co-authorship across all journals and regions, as research groups led by women published with over 60% female co-authors whereas those led by men published with less than 20% female co-authors. Our findings suggest that implicit biases and stereotype threats that women face in male-led laboratories could be sources of female withdrawal and leaky pipelines in ecology and zoology. Accordingly, we encourage every PI to self-evaluate their lifetime percentage of female co-authors. Female role models and cultural shifts–especially by male senior authors–are crucial for female retention and unbiased participation in science.
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Women underrepresentation in science has frequently been associated with women being less productive than men (i.e. the gender productivity gap), which may be explained by women having lower success rates, producing science of lower impact and/or suffering gender bias. By performing global meta-analyses, we show that there is a gender productivity gap mostly supported by a larger scientific production ascribed to men. However, women and men show similar success rates when the researchers' work is directly evaluated (i.e. publishing articles). Men's success rate is higher only in productivity proxies involving peer recognition (e.g. evaluation committees, academic positions). Men's articles showed a tendency to have higher global impact but only if studies include self-citations. We detected gender bias against women in research fields where women are underrepresented (i.e. those different from Psychology). Historical numerical unbalance, socio-psychological aspects and cultural factors may influence differences in success rate, science impact and gender bias. Thus, the maintenance of a women-unfriendly academic and non-academic environment may perpetuate the gender productivity gap. New policies to build a more egalitarian and heterogeneous scientific community and society are needed to close the gender gap in science.
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Significance Why are women still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs? Social processes beyond individual preferences may shape the STEM employment trajectories of new mothers and new fathers differently. Using representative US longitudinal survey data, we followed full-time STEM professionals after the birth or adoption of their first child. We found substantial attrition of new parents; nearly one-half of new mothers and nearly one-quarter of new fathers leave full-time STEM employment after having children. Thus, parenthood is an important driver of gender imbalance in STEM employment, and both mothers and fathers appear to encounter difficulties reconciling caregiving with STEM careers. These findings have implications for the vitality of the US science and engineering workforce.
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Why do inequalities persist between male and female scientists, when the causes are well-researched and widely condemned? In part, because equality has many dimensions. Presenting eight definitions of gender equality, we show each is important but incomplete. Rigid application of any single equality indicator can therefore have perverse outcomes.