Age, Gender, and International Author Networks in the Earth and Space Sciences: Implications for Addressing Implicit Bias

Abstract

Abstract Author networks play a key role in doing science. Developing networks is critical for career advancement in a variety of ways, and differences in networks may be a core reason for persistence of implicit bias, particularly with regards to gender. Combining the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting abstracts from 2014–2018 with self‐identified AGU member data on birth year and gender provides a large database of more than 400,000 unique coauthor interactions that we use to examine author networks by age, gender, and country. Age data are necessary to disambiguate the effect of a historic lack of women in the Earth and Space Science. The data show that women's networks are closer to those expected from the age–gender distribution of the overall membership; whereas, networks of men include more men than expected. Women also have more male coauthors within their age cohort than expected from the membership distribution. Women's networks are also less international than their male colleagues in most age cohorts. These differences start in the youngest age cohort. These data indicate that addressing implicit bias requires efforts at purposefully encouraging and developing more balanced author networks, particularly in early‐career scientists. Recent work suggests that this will also improve science outputs.