Coronavirus has had a global impact and has affected every aspect of academic and university life. Chris Smith and Deirdre Watchorn have surveyed 3,200 scholarly authors across 80 countries. They found that the impacts of changes to working conditions might not be experienced equally – and this inequality was divided along gender lines. De Gruyter is an international, independent academic … Continued
Category: Women in Academia
Impact a-gender? Calling out the gendered nature of research impact and assessment
Discussions about research impact are often littered with particular language that serves to demonstrate how different forms of impact are valued, promoted and sustained. Drawing on evidence from qualitative datasets, comprising interviews with researchers and research impact evaluators, Jennifer Chubb and Gemma Derrick argue that the language of research impact and assessment is frequently structured … Continued
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 […]
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 […]
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 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. […]
Differences in men’s and women’s academic productivity persist and are most pronounced for publications in top journals
Sabrina Mayer & Justus Rathmann present statistical evidence indicating a persistent difference in research productivity between male and female professors in psychology. Examining the publication records of full psychology professors in Germany, they reveal that female professors are less likely to publish in top ranked journals and are more likely to adopt publication strategies that are focused on producing book […]
Differences in men’s and women’s academic productivity persist and are most pronounced for publications in top journals
Sabrina Mayer & Justus Rathmann present statistical evidence indicating a persistent difference in research productivity between male and female professors in psychology. Examining the publication records of full psychology professors in Germany, they reveal that female professors are less likely to publish in top ranked journals and are more likely to adopt publication strategies that are focused on producing book […]
2018 in review: round-up of our top posts on the role of gender in academia
Male authors outnumber their female counterparts on international relations course reading lists by more than five to one Do scholars produce and reproduce a biased representation of the academy when compiling their taught course reading lists? Following a year-long mapping exercise of the university’s entire international relations curriculum by a group of PhD students at the LSE, Gustav Meibauer, Kiran Phull and Gokhan Ciflikli found […]
Gender and advancement in higher education’s prestige economy
What does it take to climb the career ladder in UK academia? And who gets to the top? Camille B. Kandiko Howson reports on research that highlights the role of prestige and “indicators of esteem” in hiring and promotion decisions. Prestige is found to be a gendered concept, with the indicators of esteem – publication rates, first author status, keynote […]