A celebration and reflection on the equity trend between women and men in wildlife publishing

Abstract

An inequity persists between women and men in nearly all scientific fields. A clear indicator of this bias is the disparity between women and men in authorship of scientific papers, as publications are a critical part of a researcher's career. Our objective was to describe gender equity (sensu women, men) in wildlife-related publishing in recent decades. We reviewed all research articles published in The Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM) from 1999 through 2020 and collected author names, affiliated institutions, and study species taxa from each paper. To help understand representation by gender in publishing, we classified the gender of each author using the online tool Genderize.io. We then calculated the women-to-men ratio in publishing as first- and co-authors across time. We further investigated whether there were biases by country, institution, and taxon of study species. Our results revealed that authorships were dominated by men 22 years ago, with 14 and 12 women/100 men for first- and co-authorships, respectively, in 1999. Since then, apart from year-to-year fluctuations, the overall gap between women and men gradually narrowed until the mid-2010s, reaching approximately 60 and 30 women/100 men for first- and co-authorship, respectively. The percentage of women increased across institutions, taxa, and countries during the study; however, the percentages of women associated with each institution type and most wildlife taxa were lower than the percentages of men. Although it is encouraging to see the improvement in equity in publishing since 1999, there are still substantially more men publishing than women, which indicates there is still a need to remedy known barriers and identify additional barriers that contribute to publication inequity.