Diversity and Demographics of Zooarchaeologists: Results from a Digital Survey
Abstract
Nearly 25 years ago, a “Zooarchaeology Practitioner Survey” was distributed via conventional mail to individuals in the USA and Canada and received 122 responses over a period of several months in 1991. Now, a revised “Demographics in Zooarchaeology Survey” provides an update to those data and assesses the current state of the field. The 2014 survey remained open for 3 months and received 288 responses from practitioners worldwide. Global participation was made possible by hosting the survey online. Key findings of the 1991 survey included disparities in employment rank for women despite similar levels of degree level attainment as men, a point which the 2014 survey sought to investigate. This trend appears to persist for those without the PhD and at the highest levels of income for those holding a PhD. In addition, the recent survey asked participants about their racial or ethnic identity in order to evaluate the demographic diversity of the discipline beyond sex, age, and nationality. Data regarding topical and geographic research area were also collected and reflect a subtle bias towards working with mammals and a focus on research questions grounded in prehistory in Europe and North America, followed by Australia and Southwest Asia. Results are compared with those of the earlier survey and membership information from the International Council for Archaeozoology.
References
Aitchison, K., and D. Rocks-Macqueen. 2013. Archaeology Labour Market Intelligence: Profiling the Profession 2012-13. Landward Research. Available at: http://www.landward.eu/2013/10/archaeology-labour-market-intelligence-profiling-the-profession-2012-13.html.
American Association of University Women (AAUW). 2015. The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap. American Association of University Women. Available at: http://www.aauw.org/resource/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/.
American Anthropological Association. 2015. 2015-2016 AnthroGuide. Available at: http://new.aaanet.org/publications/guide.cfm.
Association Research, Inc. 2005. 2005 Salary Survey. Society for American Archaeology. Available at: http://www.saa.org/Careers/2005SalarySurvey/tabid/253/Default.aspx.
Gero, J. M. 1985. Socio-Politics and the Woman-at-Home Ideology. American Antiquity 50:342-350.
Gifford-Gonzalez, D. 1993. Report on the Zooarchaeology Practitioner Survey. Zooarchaeology Research News 12:3-15.
Gifford-Gonzalez, D. 1994. Women in Zooarchaeology. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 5:155-171.
Lazar, I., T. Kompare, H. van Londen, and T. Schenk. 2014. The Archaeologist of the Future is Likely to be a Woman: Age and Gender Patterns in European Archaeology. Archaeologies 10:257-280.
National Science Foundation. 2015. Survey of Earned Doctorates. Available at: https://ncses.norc.org/NSFTabEngine/#WELCOME.
Ulm, S., S. Nichols, and C. Dalley. 2005. Mapping the Shape of Contemporary Australian Archaeology: Implications for Archaeology Teaching and Learning. Australian Archaeology 61:11-23.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2013. Race. Available at: http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.
Zeder, M. 1997. The American Archaeologist: A Profile. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek. CA.
Copyright (c) 2015 Ethnobiology Letters
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content and grant Ethnobiology Letters (the “Journal”) and the Society of Ethnobiology right of first publication. Authors and the Journal agree that Ethnobiology Letters will publish the article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits others to use, distribute, and reproduce the work non-commercially, provided the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal are properly cited.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
For any reuse or redistribution of a work, users must make clear the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
In publishing with Ethnobiology Letters corresponding authors certify that they are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements. They warrant, on behalf of themselves and their co-authors, that the content is original, has not been formally published, is not under consideration, and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights. They further warrant that the material contains no matter that is scandalous, obscene, libelous, or otherwise contrary to the law.
Corresponding authors will be given an opportunity to read and correct edited proofs, but if they fail to return such corrections by the date set by the editors, production and publication may proceed without the authors’ approval of the edited proofs.
