A revision with gender perspective about women participation in Earth Sciences in San Luis

Abstract

Statistics about gender composition in Earth Sciences in Argentina indicate parity between women and men in our country (2018). According to the Universidad de Buenos Aires census (2011), student composition at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales is constituted by 52.9% of men and 47.1% of women. Even though parity is not reached, the gender gap is not as big as in other Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines. Our goal is to present a bibliometric analysis of gender composition of the academic Earth Sciences community of San Luis province and external collaborators (researchers with affiliations in other provinces or countries), and contextualize it within the Earth Sciences situation of our country. We analyzed 259 studies covering the time lapse from 1895 to 2020, involving fossil remains of San Luis province outcrops, such as scientific papers, doctoral and bachelor dissertations, book chapters and abstracts using descriptive statistic. Gender analysis was binary since there is no record of other gender identities in co-authorships. Our results show that the community is composed of 55.6% men and 44.3% women, but first authors are mostly women (60.2%), an unexpected result that doesn’t reflect the composition of the national community. Nevertheless, analyzing work group gender composition revealed that when the leader was a woman, there was more participation of men in the collaborations, but when men where leaders less women contributed, highlighting the fact that men formed more frequently men-men working networks, excluding women. Regarding subdisciplines within Paleontology, women are a majority in fossil flora and vertebrate studies, and a minority in fossil invertebrate studies. We hypothesize that the partially atypical trends of our results are grounded in a historical and importance-tradition of study site components. The results obtained are contrasting with the general context in Argentina, in which Geology shows a tendency to parity since 2018 and Paleontology presents more women graduates. This could lead to the false illusion that equity exists. However, in both disciplines, later in their academic careers women are a minority in leadership positions. This analysis shows that we are not beyond parity; and that to empower and ensure that women thrive in academia in the Earth Sciences, is necessary to open leadership positions in this field.