The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating information graphic on the representation of women in academic publications, extending from 1665 to 2010. The graphic is based on work by Jennifer Jacquet, Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom using an index of articles and authors compiled by JSTOR. The results, not surprisingly, are that women have made dramatic gains in many fields over the past several decades but are still underrepresented as authors, lead authors and final authors, with considerable variation from subfield to subfield.
The graphic is somewhat confusingly divided into fields and subfields, but Anthropology and Physical Anthropology have their own entries. The three intervals listed are 1665-1970, 1971-1990, and 1991-2010, with the volume of authors approximately doubling with each successive time interval. Anthropology moves from 14.9% to 36.7% female authorship from beginning to end, making it one of the leading fields for women. Physical Anthropology moves from 8.9% to 27.2%. Based on the population of students and researchers at major conferences (i.e. the AAPA and AAA meetings), I imagine the numbers in both fields will jump dramatically in the next two decades. Even before arriving at Wellesley, the composition of the Anthropology classes I taught at the University of Michigan were in the 70-80% range. I would guess (and it is really a guess) that AAA attendance is near that range, as well. Representation of women at AAPAs is less, though amongst graduate students I think women are in the majority. The differences by sub-field are particularly noticeable in the AAPA, with sub-fields like primatology and human behavioral ecology seemingly having a high percentage of women, with women less represented in functional morphology and (maybe) genetics. “Human origins,” the subfield that seems to most closely match “paleoanthropology” is listed as having 26% female authorship from 1991-2010. Again, I think this significantly underestimates the current composition of the field (and not just because my most recent field school, Dmanisi 2011, was entirely female). At the senior level, of course, this is not the case. There is a temporal scale to academic training, careers and publication, creating a lag between the composition of the field at a graduate training level and the distribution of publications.
More gender equity in the field is a good thing. We live in highly gendered societies and in the attempt to achieve objectivity in research it is extraordinarily difficult to escape that reality. Having a more balanced representation in publication makes our bias less of an issue.
Differences in the composition of undergraduate and graduate classes is not the only factor impacting publication rates, however. My wife, who is a 17th century French lit scholar, is currently working on a piece for a volume on women in academia. Again, the gendered nature of society puts a lot of roadblocks, drags, etc. on women in the field.
