A Look at International Gender Equity in Soil Science
Dr. eric c. Brevik1, dra. Laura Bertha Reyes-Sánchez2, & Dr. Lorna Dawson3
1Professor, Southern Illinois University, USA; 2Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico; 3Professor, The James Hutton Institute, UK
Figure 1. Percentage of female and male keynote speakers at the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) and World Congress of Soil Science (IUSS) meetings over the last few years (Source: Dawson et al., 2021 Figure 2).
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is important to provide a wide range of perspectives in all fields, including soil science. This is because maximizing our investigations into the opportunities and challenges in our discipline requires us to include people from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. However, soil science has traditionally been a male-dominated field, and data on gender equity issues for soil science are rare. Therefore, we decided to investigate the international gender equity situation. We used gender data for membership in national soil science societies, women as keynote speakers at major soil science conferences, and female membership on soil science journal editorial boards.
We found that only 32% of the overall membership of the 44 national soil science societies who responded to our request for data were women, and men outnumbered women in 37 of the 44 societies. Female membership in individual national societies was as high as 69% but was also as low as 0%. There were indications that younger scientist membership was often more strongly female than the older membership within a given national society, which provides some cautious optimism for the future. Only 20% of the soil science society presidents were female, indicating an under representation of women in leadership positions. Data for our study was collected in 2020. In 2021 27% of the soil science societies we have data on have female presidents, so this is another point that provides some optimism for gender equity in the future.
Figure 2. The percentage of female editors at nine soil science journals investigated by this study. EJSS, European Journal of Soil Science; SBB, Soil Biology and Biochemistry; BFS, Biology and Fertility of Soils; ASE, Applied Soil Ecology; EJSB, European Journal of Soil Biology; SSSAJ, Soil Science Society of America Journal (Source: Dawson et al., 2021 Figure 2).
Women have traditionally been underrepresented as keynote speakers at major conferences, often making up less than 20% of the keynotes for the Soil Science Society of America’s annual meetings and for the World Congresses of Soil Science over the last 15-20 years (Figure 1). There have been promising signs of progress in recent years as the number of female keynote speakers at these conferences have moved much closer to equality. There are even more female keynote speakers than males planned for the 2021 Eurosoil Conference, to be held in August. Opportunities such as keynote presentations are critical to provide exposure and validation to the work being carried out by our female scientists.
Only 30% of the editorial board members for the nine soil science journals we investigated were female (Figure 2), and the percentage of female editors decreased to 19% at the Editor-in-Chief level. While the 30% is quite similar to the percentage of women membership in the national soil science societies, the 19% at the editor-in-chief level again indicated that women are underrepresented in soil science leadership positions. We also found some indications that the number of women on soil science journal editorial boards has increased some in recent years.
Increasing gender equity in soil science is crucial in providing more diverse perspectives on the wide range of issues that soil scientists address. This study is a first attempt to quantify the current international gender equity situation globally. Now more detailed national-level studies should be conducted, and we need to investigate ways to attract and retain more women in the soil science profession. There is also an urgent need to look at other aspects of DEI within the soil science profession.
This blog is based on the paper Dawson et al., 2021:
Dawson, L., E. C. Brevik, and L. B. Reyes-Sánchez. 2021. International gender equity in soil science. European Journal of Soil Science. DOI: 10.1111/ejss.13118