Percentage of Female Faculty Working within Geoscience Research Fields

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Date updated: 2019-01-08
Data Brief 2019-001
Written and compiled by Carolyn E. Wilson for AGI, January 2019

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The overall percentage of women in geoscience faculty positions at four-year institutions continues to slowly increase from 17% in 2015 to 20% in 2017. AGI has been tracking the changes in the representation of women by rank at four-year institutions for a few years, and recently, a question was posed to us to investigate the representation of women within the major categories of geoscience research fields.

Using the annual self-reported data collected from departments for the Directory of Geoscience Departments, the percentage of female faculty were calculated for each category of geoscience research fields. The figure below displays these categories with the percentage of men and women that identified a field within that category as their primary research field. Women represent more than 20% of the faculty within most of the research categories, except for Atmospheric Sciences, Economic Geology, Engineering Geology, Geophysics, and Soil Science. The highest percentages of women can be found within Earth Science Education (46%), General Earth Sciences (32%), and Geoscience and Society (29%).

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