Where Are We With Gender Parity in Academia and Professional Societies? A Multinational Look at Women in Soil Science

Abstract

Issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), including gender equity, have gained increasing recognition at the beginning of the 21st century. As an academic discipline, soil science has been late in addressing gender equity, but several peer-reviewed studies have been published in the last 5 years. This study investigated gender equity in the soil science university faculty/academic staff (f/as) and soil professional societies in Canada, Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States of America (USA) using data publicly available on the Internet and anonymized data from soil science professional societies. We found that women still lagged behind men among our soil science f/as by considerable margins (69.2% men vs. 30.8% women for pooled data for all six countries in this study), and that the percentage of women in soil science f/as positions are similar to those for f/as women in many other scientific fields. There are differences in gender equity by soil science subdiscipline that vary by country. In countries where data are available to make comparisons, over the last 6–8 years, the gender gap has closed to some degree, both overall and for sub-disciplines. Women also often hold leadership positions in numbers that are lower than their representation among the f/as and membership in professional societies. In addition, women are recognised with awards such as society fellowship in numbers lower than their overall representation would suggest. This study concludes that progress has been made on several fronts in the last 6–8 years, but there is still much work to be done to achieve gender equity in soil science academia and professional societies. It is recommended that soil science societies collect, analyse and compare data on gender in the discipline so that progress can be evidenced, tracked and encouraged.