GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE RESILIENCE ENGINEERING SCIENTIFIC FIELD - Proceedings of the 7th International Safety-II-In-Practice Workshop 2025

Resilience Engineering (RE) has emerged over the past two decades as a novel and interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding how complex systems can adapt and sustain operations in the face of unexpected disruptions. Originating at the intersection of systems engineering, human factors, safety science, and organizational studies, RE offers a transformative perspective on how to design, manage, and evaluate systems to be not only safe but also flexible and robust. Despite its growing influence in critical sectors such as aviation, healthcare, energy, and transportation, the internal structure of the RE research landscape remains largely unexplored. As the field matures, it becomes increasingly important to map its discipline boundaries and to uncover the subfields and thematic clusters that have emerged over time [1]. Doing so can help us understand how resilience is conceptualized (i.e., how the term is defined and framed), operationalized (i.e., how resilience is implemented and measured in practical settings), and prioritized (i.e., the extent to which resilience is emphasized relative to other concerns such as efficiency or compliance, whether in academic research agendas, policy directives, funding allocations, or real-world implementation). This can also reveal the evolving dynamics of the community that produces this knowledge consisting of academic papers Concurrently, there is growing recognition of persistent gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These disparities manifest not only in terms of participation and representation but also in authorship, recognition, and influence within academic communities. While several studies have examined gender gaps in established STEM fields [2][3], there remains a gap in our understanding of how these dynamics play out within emerging interdisciplinary areas such as Resilience Engineering. This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap through a two-fold objective. First, we aim to unveil the structure of the Resilience Engineering research community by identifying and characterizing its subfields. This involves analyzing publication trends, conferences and workshops, and thematic patterns that illustrate how the field has evolved. Second, we focus on conducting a gender-based analysis of these subfields, investigating the degree of gender representation and potential disparities across different areas of RE research. In doing so, we aim to contribute both to the ongoing development of the RE domain and to broader efforts aimed at fostering equity and inclusivity within this scientific discipline.