Which author is which? Gender Authorship Position in Aquaculture Literature

Examining authorship position in aquaculture facilitates an improved understanding of status of women in the discipline, as authorship is a critical factor in professional success. In a review of more than eight million papers in the JSTOR Corpus across disciplines, West et al. 2013 found that men predominate in the first and last author positions and women are underrepresented in single-authored papers. Other studies have assessed women authorship, and found that a gender gap in published literature persists. This study applies the large sample size and methodology of West et al. 2013 to the broad discipline of aquaculture, and compares these results to gender authorship in the International Aquaculture Curated Database (IACD) – a compilation of 543 peer-reviewed publications supported by four international aquaculture programs headquartered at Oregon State University -- and two curated databases in the JSTOR in the Web of Science. Results reveal that the percentage of women authors (13.8%) was similar for the JSTOR aquaculture subsample and the IACD (15.7%), yet significantly lower for that of the Web of Science database (3.7%). Women are not well represented any of the databases, and remain underrepresented as authors in any position in aquaculture journals. To contextualize our findings, we examined the number of women graduates in agricultural, biological, natural, and social sciences who earned degrees in the U.S. from 1991-2015. Results from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and the percent of female graduates in the IACD show that the percent of women graduates each year has increased with women representing more than 50% of graduates, providing contextualization for the proportion of women in the discipline. Learning how authorship has changed in the aquaculture discipline over the recent decades is critical for promoting gender equity for future aquaculture scholarship and the sustainability of the professional discipline.