Encyclopedia of Inland Waters, Second Edition– The Gender Gap: Women as Authors and Leaders in International Publications in Fisheries Science

The management and conservation of inland waters involves working with diverse groups of people and partners across a wide array of fisheries and aquatic resources. Here, we extracted historical authorship information (2006–2020) from published articles in 18 fish-related international journals to understand the productivity and impact of women investigators relative to men. There was a great variability in both the participation of women as lead authors and number of citations across journals. However, we found that 30% of the articles were led by women, which is relatively proportional to their representation in the fisheries profession (Arismendi and Penaluna, 2016). This suggests that, at least superficially, there is not a “productivity gap” in outputs for women in fisheries. Instead, we found that publications led by women consistently had fewer citations compared to men. Collectively, we propose that a gender gap in fisheries is related to impact, as well as recruiting and retaining women into research-related and leadership positions. The persistent gender disparities in fisheries may call for action to achieve gender equity, which will ultimately transform the lives of women and girls for the benefit of all.