Towards women-inclusive ecology: Representation, behavior, and perception of women at an international conference

SIBECOL_gender_inequality

This repository contains the code for the statistical analyses in "Towards women-inclusive Ecology: Representation, behavior, and perception of women at an international conference".

Authors: Anna Lupon¹, Pablo Rodríguez-Lozano^2,3, Mireia Bartrons⁴, Alba Anadon-Rosell^5,6, Meritxell Batalla⁶, Susana Bernal¹, Andrea G. Bravo⁷, Pol Capdevila^8,9, Miguel Cañedo-Argüelles¹⁰, Núria Catalán¹¹, Ana Genua-Olmedo¹², Cayetano Gutiérrez-Cánovas¹³, Maria João Feio¹⁴, Federica Lucati^1,15,16, Gabriela Onandia^17,18, Sílvia Poblador¹⁹, Roser Rotchés-Ribalta⁶, Anna Sala-Bubaré²⁰, María Mar Sánchez-Montoya^21,22, Marta Sebastián⁷, Aitziber Zufiaurre^6,23, Ada Pastor²⁴

¹Integrative Freshwater Ecology Group, Centre d'Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CEAB-CSIC), Blanes, Spain

²Department of Geography, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain

³Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

⁴Aquatic Ecology Group, University of Vic—Central University of Catalonia (Uvic-UCC), Vic, Spain

⁵Landscape Ecology and Ecosystem Dynamics, Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

⁶CREAF, E08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Catalonia, Spain

⁷Department of Marine Biology and Oceanography, Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain

⁸School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

⁹Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3SZ, UK

¹⁰FEHM-Lab, Departament de Biologia Evolutiva, Ecologia i Ciències Ambientals, Institut de Recerca de l'Aigua (IdRA), Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

¹¹Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, LSCE, CNRS-UMR 8212, Gif Sur Yvette, France

¹²Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM), Department of Biology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

¹³Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain

¹⁴Department of Life Sciences, MARE-Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

¹⁵Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

¹⁶Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain

¹⁷Research Platform Data Analysis and Simulation, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Germany

¹⁸Berlin-Brandenburg Institute of Advanced Biodiversity Research (BBIB), Berlin, Germany

¹⁹Plants and Ecosystems (PLECO), Biology Department, University of Antwerp, Wilkrijk, Belgium

²⁰Faculty of Psychology, Education and Sports Sciences Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain

²¹Department of Ecology and Hydrology, International Excellence Campus for Higher Education and Research of the University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

²²Department of Biodiversity, Ecology, and Evolution, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

²³Área de Biodiversidad, Gestión Ambiental de Navarra-Nafarroako Ingurumen kudeaketa (GAN-NIK), Pamplona-Iruñea, Navarra.

²⁴Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Contact: diversity@sibecol.org

Aim

In this work, we explored women participation in ecology conferences by using the 1st Meeting of the Iberian Society of Ecology (SIBECOL, www.sibecol.org) as a testing ground. Specifically, we aimed to assess if women and men were equally represented, participative and visible, and if not, to what extent these differences were due to demographic inertia or to other non-recognized aspects. To answer these questions, we analyzed: (i) the participation of women in the attendance, speakers and organization panels, (ii) the audience behavior during Q&A times, and (iii) the perception of the attendees on women participation and visibility, gender barriers, and conference environment.

Data

To answer the abovementioned questions we used three different datasets:

• Data_Block1.csv: contains information of the contributions to the conference, such as type of contribution (e.g. oral, poster), presenters gender, presenters career stage.
• Data_Block2.csv: contains information about each of the sessions, such as speaker and gender (see Appendix S1 in the main manuscript).
• Data_Block3.txt: contains answers to the questionnaire about the perception of the attendants to the conference (see Appendix S2 in the main manuscript).

All the data used in this study is anonymous and respected the privacy of the participants at the conference.

Code

To answer the abovementioned questions, we compiled and analized data in three main blocks using three independent R scripts:

• Rcode_Block1.R: to analyze the contributions to the conference.
• Rcode_Block2.R: to analyze the attendance, gender bias in sessions and behavior during Q&A times.
• Rcode_Block3.R: to analyze the perception of the attendees on women participation and visibility, gender barriers, and conference environment.

For a detailed explanation of the methods, please see the methods section of the main manuscript.

Software

R version 3.6.1 or greater

To download R, go to https://www.r-project.org and for RStudio, go to https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ .