2019 has seen an increased focus on the ways in which different national and international research systems function and how they can be improved. This post brings together some of the top posts on the theme of research on research that have featured on the LSE Impact Blog during 2019. Pushing research to the limit – Who innovates in social […]
Category: gender bias
Is who you know as important as what you know? Mapping the invisible colleges supporting academic prestige
A core principle of modern research culture according to the sociologist Robert Merton was ‘universalism’, the idea that the validity of ideas was independent of the status of the person making them. However, as a number of recent studies have shown in practice academia can also be exclusionary. In this post, Margath Walker shows how academic networks – invisible colleges […]
Giving Credit: Gender and the hidden labour behind academic prestige
In recent months, a number of high profile cases have focused attention on how credit is attributed to the creation of academic research and in particular the way in which the role of women is often diminished or effaced as part of this process. In this post Donica Belisle and Kiera Mitchell highlight the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis […]
Gender and the ‘impact’ agenda: the costs of public engagement to female academics
Engaging in public discussion is a crucial aspect of academia. At the same time, female academics often encounter sexist abuse as a result of such engagement. Heather Savigny draws on interview data to argue that while women may seek to actively build impact and public engagement in to their research agendas, the site of interaction between media and academia is gendered and […]
Measuring Inequality – Creating an indicator to assess gender bias in universities
Higher education and research institutions are increasingly coming to terms with the issue of gender inequality. However, efforts to move in this direction are often isolated and difficult to compare and benchmark against each other. In this post, Caroline Wagner presents a new initiative from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden (CWTS), to assess gender inequality in […]
Book Review: Gender and Precarious Research Careers: A Comparative Analysis edited by Annalisa Murgia and Barbara Poggio
In Gender and Precarious Research Careers: A Comparative Analysis – available to download here open access – editors Annalisa Murgia and Barbara Poggio bring together contributors to offer an essential interrogation of the neoliberal restructuring of universities and the particular impact this has on women in the early stages of their research careers. This is a powerful account of the ways in which gender and precarity are intertwined in […]
The careers of carers – A numerical adjustment cannot level the playing field for researchers who take time off to care for children
Quantitative measures of the effect of caring for children on research outputs (published papers and citations) have been used by some universities as a tool to address gender bias in academic grant and job applications. In this post Adrian Barnett argues that these adjustments fail to capture the real impacts of caring for children and should be replaced with contextual […]
Gender over Race? Equity and inclusion in higher education
While universities are focusing on addressing gender inequality, Kalwant Bhopal and Holly Henderson find that there is little imperative to also address race and racism in the academy. They summarise the findings of a new study on the experiences of higher education staff working towards the Athena SWAN Charter and the Race Equality Charter. This post originally appeared on the LSE British Politics […]
Gender bias in peer review – Opening up the black box II
In their previous post, Alex Holmes and Sally Hardy examined the results of research undertaken by the Regional Studies Association on the relationship between author gender and peer review outcomes in their flagship journal Regional Studies. Digging deeper into these findings, in this post, they assess the effect of gender on naming order in journals, peer reviewing and editorial processes. […]
Book Review: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard
In Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Meredith Broussard adds to the growing literature exploring the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) and techno-solutionism, furthermore showing how its socially-constructed nature replicates existing structural inequalities. Calling for greater racial and gender diversity in tech, the book offers a timely, accessible and often entertaining account that sets the record straight on what current approaches to […]