Analysis: the lack of diversity in climate-science research

Armenteras adds that collaborations between developed and developing countries can lead to “asymmetries of power” that are “really dangerous” — allowing researchers from rich countries to “take advantage of inequality”.

For example, Armenteras explains that funding for research usually comes from countries in the global north, giving researchers from the global north more “power” over the direction that the study takes. Tensions in academic collaborations can be compounded by misconceptions about the quality of research that researchers in the global south are capable of, she adds: “They put you down and think your science must not be good…They don’t associate Colombia as a place where science can be done and often think, ‘I have to be the saviour and do the science for you’.”

Armenteras recounts one collaboration with an academic from an institution from the global north, during which she worked as hard as her fellow principal investigators from the global north, but without the funding and assistance that they assigned themselves.

“We are not slaves,” Armenteras tells Carbon Brief, “we don’t want to work for free”. She ended up quitting the project.

“Researchers in the global south are considered to be kind of like assistants. Even if they’re very much engaged in collaborations, they don’t get authorship [on papers],” Schipper adds.

Mwampamba elaborates on this dynamic, explaining the thought process of some researchers from the global north when they conduct research in poorer countries: “The northern scientist often brings his or her own grad students from the North, and they tend to view their local partners as facilitators — logistic, cultural, language, admin — rather than science collaborators. “It’s like: ‘You’re here as local partners so you make everything accessible to me and make my life easier when I’m here in this foreign country. You will interpret the cultural part, and I will do the science’.”

Another issue with cross-country scientific collaborations is the mindset of some scientists from the global north who seek to extract resources and data from developing countries without contributing to local infrastructure or science capacity — a practise known as “colonial”, “parachute”, or “helicopter” science.

Dr Fernande Adame is a researcher at the Australian Rivers Institute of Griffith University. She conducted research in Mexico for much of her life and has experienced parachute science first hand. “It’s just plain unfair,” she tells Carbon Brief. In a career column in Nature, Adame wrote: “I saw foreign scientists come to our laboratory carrying high-tech instruments that we didn’t have access to. We took the scientists to our field sites and taught them about the unique ecology of the mangroves. Sometimes they used our small laboratory to store or analyse their samples. Neither I nor anyone else on the team was ever asked to contribute to the papers that were published.”

Adame tells Carbon Brief that “a lot of scientists in places like the US still have this tradition of having the old male professor deciding who can or cannot be an author”. This process can lead to authors from developing countries being under-represented, she adds. 

Armenteras tells Carbon Brief that in Colombia — a country that she calls “paradise” for collecting data on biodiversity — local researchers want their names on a paper with “the big white guy” from a northern country. So, she says, they often “kneel down to people from overseas and collect data for them, or give their [own] data away”.

While this may allow local researchers to get their names on the paper, it “doesn’t build scientific capacity in the country”, she laments. This mindset of extracting resources without contributing to local capacity extends as far as people, according to Armenteras, who recounts times when researchers from the global north asked her to send promising Colombian students to be trained.

This “brain drain” of promising researchers leaving their country to seek better prospects abroad can have a negative impact on research and development in developing countries and it stands to reason that this will have a knock-on impact on paper publications. 

Publish or perish

Once academics have completed their research, there are still multiple barriers to contend with before it is published. The process of writing and publishing papers is laborious, highly competitive and can take years — even for researchers from well-established institutions from the global north.

Academics must first choose a journal whose “scope” fits well with their paper and submit a first manuscript to them. The editors of the journal can either reject the manuscript outright (known as a “desk rejection”) or send it to other scientists in the field to be “peer reviewed”.

The reviewers are asked to suggest changes to the paper — ranging from minor grammar changes to instructions to change the direction of the paper entirely. There are often multiple rounds of editing in this way before the paper is finally published. As such, it is not only the quality of the research, but also the quality of the writing that is important when submitting to a journal.

The specific format required for writing papers is defined by “the academic culture of western universities”, according to Dr Marton Demeter — a researcher at the National University of Public Service in Budapest with a specialism in “publication networks”. He tells Carbon Brief: “Global south authors are not necessarily familiar with these norms and top-tier journals are far from being inclusive in this sense: if you don’t write the paper exactly the same way as your colleagues from Harvard, your research will be considered of low quality.”

The process of writing papers can be complex, so well-funded universities often offer their students training on how to write papers and assistance to guide them through the publishing process. In contrast, academics in developing countries often do not receive the training and support that their counterparts from the global north benefit from, Schipper tells Carbon Brief: “There is a huge discrepancy between the capacity, training, skills and opportunities available for scholars in developing countries to learn how to write peer review, high quality academic journal articles [and that of scholars in developed countries].”

Schipper is on the editorial board of the journal Climate and Development. She tells Carbon Brief that she often receives submissions that are “really interesting”, but in which the author “doesn’t quite know how to write an academic paper”. Schipper notes that some journals, including hers, offer help to the authors of such manuscripts, but that this is not common practice: “If you don’t have a lot of experience in writing [papers] and you don’t know what a paper is supposed to look like, you won’t write a good abstract or introduction and the editor will say ‘forget it — it’s just not worth it, this is not a good piece of work’.”

Pathak is another editor on the same journal and explains that this lack of knowledge around how to write and publish papers does not only apply to early career researchers, but also to mid-career professionals: “I think it’s quite challenging for a  developing country author from a small country to be able to publish in these journals. I know mid-career professors who are at a loss of where to start — of how to publish. But it’s not like they are less competent.”

The inaccessibility of scientific literature is also a problem for publishing. “One of the biggest issues is that people can’t access literature that they can cite,” Schipper tells Carbon Brief. She adds that when she receives a paper submission, one of the first things she looks at is how old the references are. “I think the problem of climate change is that it’s moving so rapidly…and it’s really expensive”, she says.

Pathak says that this also poses a problem for getting papers cited: “Suppose someone [from a developing country] does manage to publish a paper in a top category journal. Their developing country colleagues cannot access that paper, so the paper would likely get fewer citations from within the region.”

Conversely, researchers from well-funded universities that can afford to pay journal subscription charges and, therefore, “have access to a huge library of resources and can access everything”, Pathak adds.

To solve this problem, some journals have begun publishing “open access” articles that anyone can view. For example, Nature recently launched an open-access service, for which authors can pay a €9,500 fee to make their paper available for free.

Demeter sees open-access journals as an issue for academics from the global south. He conducted a study that concludes: “[The study] reinforces our concerns that hybrid open-access models are likely to perpetuate inequalities in knowledge production.” He tells Carbon Brief: “If open access in journals with article processing charges (APCs) become the mainstream way of publication, then global-south scholars’ chances to publish in leading journals will be even lower than today, as they wont be able to pay the high APCs — which will be easily paid by researchers working at sourceful western universities or researchers that are funded by international grants.”

Mwampamba also sees open-access publishing as “a huge barrier” for academics from low-income countries due to the cost. She notes that waivers are sometimes an option for authors from developing countries, but tells Carbon Brief that “you really have to search for them. There are all these rules that are not very explicit.”

For example, she tells Carbon Brief that often, waivers are only granted if all authors on a paper are from an institute in a developing country — not just the lead or corresponding author.

Even if academics write a high-quality paper with solid citations — and have the money to publish it — research shows that academic journals are biased in favour of “authors from the US, English-speaking countries outside the US, and prestigious academic institutions”.

Vuong tells Carbon Brief that “many top-tier journals still remain a type of ‘old-boys club’ and are not quite open to voices from the developing world”. He relays experience from is own research group that demonstrates this: “In some cases, we propose useful and worthwhile ideas and analyses, which may be rejected outright for vague reasons…But some time after those decisions, we found publications with very similar ideas, with no better technical treatments and no superior quality, published in those journals. The difference is that the authors usually came from very well-known research institutes or faculty of top-tier universities in the US, Germany, UK, etc. I can say that the playing field is unlevel.”

Part of the issue is in the peer-review process. Peer reviewers, alongside journal editors, are “gatekeepers” of science — deciding which studies are shared with the rest of the scientific community, and which are not. However, there is a well-documented bias in the system, Demeter tells Carbon Brief: “There is empirical evidence showing that both editors and reviewers found submitted manuscripts better if they think that they were submitted by professors from elite western universities.”

Pathak laments that many of her experienced colleagues will “never get a paper in a Nature journal”, because breaking into the world of academic publishing is so difficult for researchers from the global south: “All the papers that make it into major climate change journals would keep on getting cited which drives more funding and international collaborations. So for young authors from developing countries, breaking into that upper league just gets harder.”

The language barrier

For non-English-speaking academics there is also a language barrier to contend with. English is widely regarded as the “lingua franca of science” and research has shown that articles published in English are more likely to be highly cited than those published in other languages. 

“We cannot deny the fact that top-tier journals are being published in English,” Vuong tells Carbon Brief. Mwampamba adds that English-language journals are universally considered the best: “There’s a clear ranking —both in universities and research institutes — that if you publish in English to an international audience your science is considered better and it boosts your CV and promotions considerably.”

 Mwampamba also tells Carbon Brief that, while many of her colleagues can read in English, writing and speaking are “more challenging skills to master”. Similarly, Vuong tells Carbon Brief that even if scientists have reasonable skill in speaking English as a second language, the language barrier can still be a problem, as “writing clearly in a second language is still a hard skill to master”.

“We cannot ignore” the language barrier, Pathak tells Carbon Brief. She has been publishing in English for years, but notes that in the early days of her research career, her papers were often sent back from peer review with the comment, “extensive language edit needed”.

“In Africa, academic writing is weak compared to writing elsewhere because competition to publish topical issues remains very high,” Chitsamatanga tells Carbon Brief. As such, she says that the rejection rate for manuscripts submitted to English language journals is “very high”. To overcome these problems, many academics are forced to turn to translation services, which can be expensive.

On top of this is the issue of writing style. Mwampamba highlights that different cultures have different ways of expressing themselves which is — to some extent — also reflected in writing styles. For example, she notes that the western style of writing papers is “short and snappy”, while the Spanish style tends to be “more verbose and expressive”. She tells Carbon Brief that this presents yet another barrier to publication: “Even if someone writes the paper in Spanish and gets it translated — and the translation is perfect — the journal might still want a whole different style. This is a lack of flexibility on the part of journals and reviewers. They want to keep things in the Northern style. “Reviewers are supposed to look at the quality of the science or the arguments. But they are to some extent gatekeepers of style. I think it is a real pity that style diversity is smothered in formal communication of science. I know it contributes a lot to why I find a lot of papers so boring to read, difficult to recommend to non-academic colleagues and why so many of us just skip the intros and discussions!”

For scientists who do not speak English, committing to writing a paper in their first language still does not solve the issue. When writing the “introduction” of a research paper, scientists are expected to conduct a thorough review of existing literature and explain how their research builds on this. Without access to or understanding of English language papers — which make up the majority of existing science literature — this can be tricky.

Academic culture

Finally, there is the less-discussed issue of academic culture. In many countries in the global south, academia is less of a priority than in the global north, Schipper tells Carbon Brief: “In a lot of global-south universities, most of the task is to teach and there’s not as much emphasis on research because research funding is not available as much… Because the salaries are so bad, they often take on a lot of consulting work — like UNDP or other kinds of organisations — so they don’t really have time to do research. They do other kinds of work to supplement their incomes.”

When the Reuters “hot” list was published, it triggered a backlash across the climate science community for its lack of diversity. Schipper tells Carbon Brief that a serious issue with the list is its presentation of the scientists as the most “influential” in climate science. This “influence” is calculated using a western approach and does not take into consideration the different roles of climate scientists in developing countries, she tells Carbon Brief. She adds: “I would even argue that a lot of global-south scholars might have a much better relationship with policymakers because there’s fewer of them. The policymakers are looking for scientific advice…So if you spend seven days every month working with your minister of environment, or sitting in meetings at the ministry, then you’re not writing a paper, but also you might have a much stronger influence on what happens.”

This is an example of how a northern approach to quantifying academic performance can underestimate or miss out contributions from the global south.

The gender gap

In addition to the north-south divide, there is a well-documented gender bias in academic publishing. Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that only 22 per cent of authors from the Top 100 most-cited climate science papers over 2016-20 are female.

The plot below shows the number of male (purple) and female (orange) authors in this analysis from each continent.

The number of male (purple) and female (orange) authors in the Top 100 most-cited climate science papers during 2016-20, shown by continent. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.

Female authors account for less than half of the total authors in every continent analysed in this study. In Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia, the total percentage of female authors is 20 per cent, 35 per cent, 29 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively. 

Past research has suggested that publication rates for women are lower in developing countries. However, percentages for Africa and South America are not given here, as the total number of authors from these continents is low. More data would be needed to confirm this. 

The gender imbalance becomes more evident when focusing on lead authors — as women make up only 12 of the 100 lead authors in this analysis. Similarly, another study on first-author gender biases in the geosciences, found that female lead authors represent between 13-30 per cent of all first authors in the papers tested.

Barriers to female scientists

Women in STEM

An obvious explanation for the low level of female authorship in climate-science papers is the low proportion of women in science. Fewer than 30 per cent of the world’s scientific researchers are women, and the tendency of women to leave academia sooner than their male counterparts — known as the “leaky pipeline” — means that female academics are less likely to reach senior positions.

The leaky pipeline is, in part, due to the inflexibility of academica, Schipper tells Carbon Brief: “The clear thing is this leaky pipeline where women — and also often anybody who’s not a white, cis man — tend to ‘fall out’ because of all because barriers that are in the system — and lack of flexibility is one of the biggest ones.”

Progress is being made in improving the gender balance of women in science within some countries and sectors. However, there are still barriers facing women within the world of academia — driven in part by stereotypes and unconscious biases. 

There is extensive literature disproving the misconceptions and stereotypes about women in science — such as “women are worse at maths” and “women are not analytical enough for science”. However, despite having been proven untrue time and time again, these assertions — introduced to girls at a young age — can affect their performance and confidence.

Pathak tells Carbon Brief that from an early age she was exposed to stereotypes about the ability of women in science compared to that of men. “They just don’t think you can think. They don’t think you are intelligent,” Armenteras adds.

Upon reaching the male-dominated field of scientific academia, the environment can be hostile for women, who are judged more harshly, earn less money, are less likely to have their work cited and face a “motherhood penalty” long before they actually have children. Women are then more likely to leave academia upon having their first child than their male counterparts.

Women who choose a scientific career path are less likely to choose natural sciences — such as maths, physics and engineering — than social sciences. This also has implications for the gender balance in climate-science research, Schipper and Pathak pointed out in their response to the Reuters Hot List: “Natural sciences receive 770 per cent more research funding on climate change than social sciences, which generates large differences in the sort of publications being produced. Related to this, gender biases in funding are significantly more explicit in the physical sciences than in social sciences and there are more men in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] subjects than women.”

Schipper points out that “traditionally, STEM subjects like physics where you would learn to model are overwhelmingly male”. She adds that climate-modelling studies are typically published in higher-impact journals, and are often faster to write and publish than social science papers, allowing authors in this field to accumulate more publications and citations.

Pathak tells Carbon Brief: “You’ll see a lot of [quantitative] climate-science papers attracting more citations. But there’s also this very important branch of social and behavioural science where the journals are not often that highly ranked and, therefore, sometimes women who are not in those quantitative fields get underrepresented. I have colleagues in the social sciences who don’t even get a fraction of the funding that [more technical] science gets.”

The dominance of “economics-and engineering-based” backgrounds within climate science is highlighted in a 2015 study, which analyses the authorship of the working group III part of the fifth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It found that 56 per cent of the authors analysed had an economics or engineering background, while social scientists represented 22 per cent of the authors and humanities only 2 per cent.

Meanwhile, a survey of more than 100 female authors of IPCC reports found that “41 per cent of women saw gender as a barrier to their success, and 43 per cent believed that female climate researchers are not well represented in the climate community”.

The dominance of “economics-and engineering-based” backgrounds within climate science is highlighted in a 2015 study, which analyses the authorship of the working group III part of the fifth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It found that 56 per cent of the authors analysed had an economics or engineering background, while social scientists represented 22 per cent of the authors and humanities only 2 per cent.

Meanwhile, a survey of more than 100 female authors of IPCC reports found that “41 per cent of women saw gender as a barrier to their success, and 43 per cent believed that female climate researchers are not well represented in the climate community”.

Cultural norms and gender roles

Cultural norms and gender roles play a notable part in the experiences of women entering academia.

There is sometimes an expectation that academics need to work beyond the typical 9-5 hours kept in many other professions. However, women are traditionally the care-givers for young and elderly relatives and tend to take on more household responsibilities than their partners, which takes up their time and energy.

Chitsamatanga tells Carbon Brief that her schedule is “hectic” and leaves limited time for her work as an academic: “My day begins at 4:30am getting the kids ready to go to school. By 3:30pm I have to rush back home to collect the kids and we have to start preparing for tomorrow. There’s laundry to do. There’s cooking to do… The duty of being a mom, of being a wife, of being a daughter-in-law comes first…in most cases, when you get home, you have to train yourself to say ‘when the kids go to bed, then I will try and do one hour or two hours of work’.”

Chitsamatanga says that female academics in Africa have to “put on a lot of hats” and juggle their limited time between many different responsibilities. However, this is usually not the case for men, she adds: “It’s an issue of tradition and cultural beliefs and the way that you are brought up. For African men, it’s easier to say, ‘I don’t want to be disturbed’. We have been brought up to give them that space. Then you [women] have to make sure that you are keeping the kids quiet, you’re entertaining them. But, if it’s me that has a deadline, I have to find a way to meet it, even if it means I just have to spend that whole night working… We have to stretch that 24-hour day to 72 hours.”

She also tells Carbon Brief about cultural and traditional beliefs in Africa that require women to refrain from loudly voicing their opinions or challenging others. This can prevent female academics from putting themselves forward, for fear that they will be called “wayward”, Chitsamatanga says. There are also potential issues in interactions between male and female academics, she adds: “There are few male academics that want to mentor female academics. There is the insinuation that if the two people are working closely together, then there must be something going on between the two of them — that kind of thing. The female academics themselves tend to be uncomfortable at being mentored by a male.”

Armenteras also notes the danger of appearing “bossy” or “overbearing” as a woman in science trying to make their case. And Mwampamba tells Carbon Brief that she often enjoys the atmosphere when working with mostly women: “It’s usually less competitive. It’s just an environment that’s so much more pleasant to work with. I am usually consciously aware of how enjoyable and effortless it is and how everyone’s defensive barriers are mostly down. But when working with male academics I find myself turning on the ‘you are now working with men’ switch. Basically mentally and emotionally preparing myself to be ‘harder’, i.e., not to accept to be the note taker, to volunteer much less, to have to repeat my ideas several times, to be more stoic.”

However, even when there are no overt systems separating men and women, peoples’ perceptions and unconscious biases can still play a huge role in hindering women. 

Armenteras tells Carbon Brief that “sexism is still in science everywhere”. For example, she describes discussions with colleagues in which her ideas were “dismissed many times”, but where the same ideas were accepted when proposed by a man.

“We women have so much information that we want to share — about our research, our work, our perspectives of the field we are contributing to,” Mwampamba says.

Women from the global south face (at least) two barriers — gender and race. This “intersectionality”, in which a single person faces multiple overlapping systems of discrimination, comes with its own challenges, Mwampamba adds: “You are never sure whether access to something is denied because of your colour, because of your gender, or because of your nationality. You’re always questioning that. And I think the opposite is true as well — you aren’t sure whether you were invited to something because they truly value your work or if they were trying to fulfill some diversity criteria.”

‘Decolonising’ academia

For many countries in the global north, the history of scientific progress is closely entangled with that of colonialism . This history is still clearly embedded in many aspects of science and academia. As such, there is a growing movement to “decolonise” academia, by working to recognise the colonial context of modern-day science and — as one article explains — to “eliminate, or at least mitigate, the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education”.

Biased science

Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that women and researchers from the global south are significantly underrepresented in climate-science literature. 

Mwampamba tells Carbon Brief that the lack of diversity means we are “missing a whole set of brains that can contribute to science”, as well as ignoring the opportunity to try “a whole new type of science — a science that is a lot more inclusive of other ways of doing things, other ways of generating knowledge”.

She adds that important data is also being overlooked by limiting the scope of international science to English-language journals.

Demeter stresses that diversity increases the quality of science: “Diverse communities, including academic communities, can provide more creative work. Research shows that the contributions of diverse research groups are generally better than those of their less diverse counterparts.” 

And Pathak emphasises that negotiations and decisions around climate action will need global contributions: “Climate change is a global problem. If we want wider participation in decision-making, we need to understand all the available solutions and which ones are going to be accepted. It is therefore important to get wider views — from indigenous communities, non-English speakers, communities who are never invited or consulted. We won’t know what local solutions are available if we never consult them.”

This story was published with permission from Carbon Brief.