Who shapes Resilience Engineering? Gendered epistemic asymmetries in a socio-technical knowledge community

Abstract

Resilience engineering is concerned with modelling adaptive capacity and performance variability in complex systems. As such, it constitutes a body of research and a knowledge community whose epistemic configuration may shape theoretical development primarily in ergonomics and socio-technical systems design. This study investigates whether the structure of knowledge production in resilience engineering exhibits gendered epistemic asymmetries beyond differences in numerical representation. A combined bibliometric and social network analysis was conducted on 991 Scopus-indexed publications (2005–2025) and 533 conference records, covering 1,918 authors in the scientific literature and 747 in grey literature. Data were retrieved in May 2025. Gender was inferred using a fairness-calibrated name-based procedure with manual validation. Collaboration networks were analysed through centrality and brokerage measures, and semantic indicators were used to assess novelty and combinational creativity. Results revealed a gender imbalance (65.8% men; 30.6% women) and structural asymmetries in epistemic positioning. Within the retrieved corpus, men more frequently occupied brokerage roles and exhibited higher creativity indices, whereas women achieved higher citation impact despite lower productivity. These findings suggest that influence, knowledge recombination, and agenda-setting capacity are unevenly distributed within this socio-technical knowledge community, with implications for theoretical evolution of resilience engineering and development of modelling assumptions in ergonomics.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2026 · DOI ↗