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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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.
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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.
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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. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01315-y
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Received: 11 April 2023
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Accepted: 03 October 2023
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Published: 27 November 2023
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01315-y