A presença feminina em Paleontologia: um estudo de caso da Revista Brasileira de Paleontologia

Abstract

In the last few decades there has been a growth of studies focused on the participation of women in different sectors. In science, studies of this nature seek, among other aspects, to investigate the gender gap in different fields of knowledge, as well its possible causes and ways to reduce it. Based on this scenario, the present work investigates the participation of women in Brazilian Palaeontology, a traditionally male dominated field. To do so, the analysis focuses on the authorship data of the Revista Brasileira de Paleontologia (RBP), the first and only national magazine dedicated exclusively to the field and which is indexed on national and international databases. For this investigation, information from 386 articles, published between 2001 and 2015, were manually extracted from the RBP website and were analyzed using the Microsoft Excel program. It was observed that 42 articles (10.9%) are of single authorship and 344 (89.1%) of multiple authorship. In the first group, 19 articles (45%) are of female authorship and 23 (55%) of male authorship. In the second group, we were able to identify the gender of the authors in 340 articles. Of those, 221 articles had mixed authorship (65%), 87 had male authorship only (25.6%) and 39 had female authorship only (9.4%). In terms of single authorship, it is possible to observe equity between men and women. In the articles with multiple authorship, the highest proportion of mixed authorship indicates a greater preference for collaboration with the opposite sex. It is important to highlight that, among the 1,117 authors who participate in the 340 works of shared authorship, 683 are men (61.2%) and 434 are women (38.8%). A ratio of 0.64: 1, that is, practically for each male author there is half of a female author. These data reinforce the predominance of male authors in the field of paleontology in Brazil, but on the other hand, shows that there is a significant collaboration between male and female professionals. Even preliminary, the results put Brazil in a status of greater gender equity compared to other countries in Latin America. It is intended, with this work, to contribute to the debate on gender disparity and performance in research in Paleontology, a matter that still lacks discussions.