Age, Gender, and International Author Networks in the Earth and Space
Sciences: Implications for Addressing Implicit Bias
Abstract
Author networks play a key role in doing science. Developing networks is
critical for career advancement in a wide variety of ways, and
differences in networks may be a core reason for persistence of implicit
gender bias. Combining the AGU Fall Meeting abstracts from 2014-2018
with self-identified AGU member data on birth year and gender provides a
large database of more than 400,000 unique co-author interactions that
we use to examine author networks by age, gender, and country. Age data
are necessary to disambiguate the effect that a historic lack of women
in the Earth and space science. The data show that women’s networks are
closer to those expected from the age-gender distribution of the overall
membership; whereas networks of men include more men than expected,
although women are also interacting with men of similar age more than
expected from the membership. Women’s networks are also less
international than their male colleagues in most age cohorts. These
differences start in the youngest age cohort. These data indicate that
addressing implicit bias requires efforts at encouraging and developing
more balanced author networks, particularly in early-career scientists.
Recent work suggest that this will also improve science outputs.