Tools for Determining Equitable Representation of Women in LIS Publications

Abstract

Librarianship has long been viewed as a “pink collar” profession, meaning a predominantly female profession. Such a gendered distinction still holds true when it is broken down into sub-fields such as academic and public librarianship. However, the stark gender differences do lessen in the field of academic librarianship when compared to public librarianship, similar to k-12 education and higher education. A 2017 article “Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science” inspired this current study because we wanted to know if there was a similar gender gap in publication in this female dominated profession as there was in a male dominated profession. At a technical level, we show how data can be pulled from a database using an API, and cleaned and transformed into a usable tabular format, using open source tools. More broadly, we show how data can be obtained from published sources and extrapolated to fill in gaps which would not otherwise be obtainable, such as demographic data, which can then be assessed and analyzed. The results show women authorship is not proportional to the gender make-up of the profession as whole. But if overall, if equity in representation is the goal, more women need to be published in these journals, and potentially LIS research publishing as a whole.