Inequalities persist in the geosciences. White women and people of color remain under-represented at all levels of academic faculty, including positions of power such as departmental and institutional leadership. While the proportion of women among geoscience faculty has been catalogued previously, new programs and initiatives aimed at improving diversity, focused on institutional factors that affect equity in the geosciences, necessitate an updated study and a new metric for quantifying the biases that result in under-representation . We compile a dataset of 2,531 tenured and tenure-track geoscience faculty from 62 universities in the United States to evaluate the proportion of women by rank and discipline. We find that 27% of faculty are women. The fraction of women in the faculty pool decreases with rank, as women comprise 46% of assistant professors, 34% of associate professors, and 19% of full professors. We quantify the attrition of women in terms of a fractionation factor, which describes the rate of loss of women along the tenure track and allows us to move away from the metaphor of the ‘leaky pipeline’. Efforts to address inequities in institutional culture and biases in promotion and hiring practices over the past few years may provide insight into the recent positive shifts in fractionation factor. Our results suggest a need for 1:1 hiring between men and women to reach gender parity. Due to significant disparities in race, this work is most applicable to white women, and our use of the gender binary does not represent gender diversity in the geosciences.

Most of the mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet occurs through glaciers and ice streams, where fast-flow is partially controlled by rapid ice deformation in the margins. Deformation drives thermomechanical and recrystallization processes that influence further deformation, a feedback which may destabilize glaciers. However, few models account for the feedback between deformation and recrystallization. We derive an idealized model for ice temperature and grain-size that partitions deformational work into dissipated heat and changes in strain and surface energy, all of which drive dynamic recrystallization. Under conditions common in glacier shear margins, we show that a large portion of deformational work is stored as elastic energy, with the remainder dissipated as heat. This result revises our current picture of the amount of heat generated in glacier shear margins and suggests that changes in internal strain through dynamic recrystallization of ice likely play an important role in facilitating fast-flowing glacial ice.