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Closed ranks in oceanography

Nature Geoscience volume 4, pages 211–212 (2011)Cite this article

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Between 2001 and 2005, women earned 28% of awarded PhDs at the 17 US institutions with physical oceanography graduate programmes, yet only one out of eight talks was given by a female presenter in many of the relevant sessions at the February 2010 American Geophysical Union 'Ocean Sciences' meeting. An analysis of the type of jobs held by physical oceanography PhDs in the United States reveals that for those who earned PhDs from 1980 to 1995, the chances of attaining a tenure-track position were almost equal between men and women. Since then, the situation has deteriorated: for those who earned their PhD between 1996 and 2009, the fraction of women in the tenure track was only about a third of the fraction of men who passed that hurdle.

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Figure 1: The gender gap in physical oceanography.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank L. Gerber and L. Sindlinger for help with data collection and S. Lozier for discussions that improved the manuscript. The Office of Naval Research provided some of the funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195, Washington, USA

    LuAnne Thompson

  2. University of Miami, Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, 33149, Florida, USA

    Renellys C. Perez

  3. Departments of Geography and Earth Science, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Amelia E. Shevenell

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  1. LuAnne Thompson
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  2. Renellys C. Perez
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  3. Amelia E. Shevenell
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Correspondence to LuAnne Thompson.

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Thompson, L., Perez, R. & Shevenell, A. Closed ranks in oceanography. Nature Geosci 4, 211–212 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1113

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