WOMEN PARTICIPATION IN HERPETOLOGY: A SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS

SCHENIDER, ROSÍO GABRIELA; FONTANARROSA, GABRIELA; SALICA, MARIA JOSÉ; CASAGRANDA, DOLORES; MEDINA, REGINA; GROSSO, JIMENA; DUPORT BRU, ANA; CHULIVER PEREYRA, MARIANA; VERA, MIRIAM; PEREYRA, LAURA; FRATANI, JESSICA; FERRARO, DAIANA PAOLA; VICENTE, NATALIN; SEMHAN, ROMINA; BESSA, CARLA

Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; 1st Congress of Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science Latin America; 2020

Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science

In the last decades, women participation in science has increased significantly, even reaching parity in some countries as Argentina. However, gender inequalities still persist, with female representation declining at each academic level and in leadership or decision-making positions. In this work, we analyzed the women representativity and visibility in Herpetology, discipline that studies reptiles and amphibians. We examined the female participation in research activities: (i) articles authorship, (ii) participation as chairs and editorial boards in herpetological journals, (iii) and participation in scientific societies and meetings. We aplieddescriptive statistics and network analyses. Our results showed women represented 30.3% of all authors in journals of herpetology. Also, in one of four articles women were the latest author, a position usually occupied by lab-leaders. Female representation in editorial boards was only 19%. The co-authorship networks analyses carried out for two South American journals (Cuadernos de Herpetología and South American Journal of Herpetology) showed that female authors were below of equal representation (46.8% and 36.2%, respectively) and the gender of the first author had a significant influence on the number of authors of a scientifi paper. In the Argentine Association of Herpetology, although female members are the majority, only one woman had presided in the 38 years of this society. In the annual congresses organized by this association, women had equal participation than men, but are 2.4 times less invited than them to speak in main conferences. The results found in this work support the existence of female underrepresentation in leadership and decision-making positions in Herpetology, being this gender bias widely documented across scientific areas. These analyses reveal the inside situation in specific areas, allowing to highlight the self-biases and to propose actions and policies directed towards all the dimensions of inequalities.