WHICH AUTHOR IS WHICH GENDER AUTHORSHIP POSITION AS A PROXY FOR THE STATUS OF GENDER 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 academia and beyond. In a review of more than eight million papers in the JSTOR Corpus across disciplines in natural and social sciences and humanities, 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 in other disciplines such as law and medicine, and found that a gender gap in published literature still 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 long-term international aquaculture programs headquartered at Oregon State University and a curated database of aquaculture journals 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 with the percentage of women graduating in the field, we examined the number of women graduates in agricultural, biological, natural, and social sciences who earned Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD's in the U.S. from 1991-2015. Results from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percent of women graduates each year has increased with women representing more than 50% of graduates in 2015. While this does not represent international graduates, it still provides some contextualization for the proportion of women in the discipline. Learning how authorship has changed in the aquaculture discipline over the last few decades is critical for promoting gender equity for future aquaculture scholarship and the sustainability of the professional discipline.