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Collaboration between women helps close the gender gap in ice core science

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 1088–1091 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Within ice core science, woman-led studies contain 20% more women co-authors than man-led studies, and exceed the estimated proportion of women within the community by nearly 10%. We conclude that collaboration with other women is a key factor in closing gender gaps in science.

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Fig. 1: Trends in women authorship in ice core science.
Fig. 2: Divergences across woman- versus man-led ice core studies.
Fig. 3: Shifting co-author networks of junior versus senior men and women in ice core science.

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Data availability

All underlying data are publicly available via GitHub at: https://github.com/mattosman/Ice-core-gender.

Code availability

All of the supporting code is publicly available via GitHub at: https://github.com/mattosman/Ice-core-gender.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the 2022 Ice Core Early-Career Researchers’ Workshop (ICECReW), which had support from the US National Science Foundation, for inspiring this effort. We appreciate critical feedback from D. Verhoeven and H. Ewing, which strengthened and clarified the manuscript. We also thank M. Seag, who provided historical context on the US and British Antarctic programmes.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Bess G. Koffman, Matthew B. Osman.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology, Colby College, Waterville, ME, USA

    Bess G. Koffman

  2. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Matthew B. Osman

  3. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Alison S. Criscitiello & Sofia Guest

Authors
  1. Bess G. Koffman
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  2. Matthew B. Osman
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  3. Alison S. Criscitiello
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  4. Sofia Guest
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Contributions

B.G.K., M.O. and A.C. conceptualized the project. All authors contributed to data curation. M.O. developed the software, conducted the data analysis and visualized the data with input from B.G.K. B.G.K. and M.O. wrote the original draft, and all authors contributed to reviewing and editing the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bess G. Koffman.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Tamara Pico and Suzanne O’Connell for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Patterns in citation rate, coauthorship, and internationality by gender.

Distributions of women coauthors per study (top panel), citation rate per study (top middle), and number of unique nations per study (bottom middle) for man vs. woman-led studies, comparing the most recent decade of data (2012–2021) to the preceding ~four decades (1969–2011). The total number of studies analyzed for each grouping is also displayed in the bottom panel. Violin plots are shown as described in Fig. 2.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Proportion of studies led by women across leading ice core journals.

Dashed lines at left indicate gender parity (gray), and the estimated average community proportion of women during 1969–2011 (salmon) and 2012–2021 (red). Error bars indicate 95% confidence ranges based on Monte Carlo resampling (Methods). The top 21 journals that publish ice core research (which encapsulate approximately 90% of ice core contributions each year) are shown, listed from highest Impact Factor (top) to lowest Impact Factor (bottom). In the past decade, the proportion of woman-led studies in all top-21 journals has met or exceeded the estimated proportion of women in ice core science within 95% confidence, except for Science and Nature.

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Koffman, B.G., Osman, M.B., Criscitiello, A.S. et al. Collaboration between women helps close the gender gap in ice core science. Nat. Geosci. 16, 1088–1091 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01315-y

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