ScienceGeist

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

Rare effort to track wages reveals inconsistencies and a gender pay gap.

A two-year study by the University on the status of women and underrepresented minority faculty at Columbia has resulted in a set of proposals on ways to close salary gaps, spur academic advancement and improve the overall work environment.

Research puts a number on the proportion of people leaving full-time careers in science after the birth of their first child.

From bias in peer review and unfair allocation of grant funding to sexual harassment and a gender pay gap, the scientific community certainly has a lot of work to do.

Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields.

According to a study of 628 awards given over five decades, men still win the most prestigious scientific prizes.

February 11 was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This year, it was marked by a joint statement celebrating women’s achievements in science from Europe’s eight EIROforum laboratories.

February 11th was International Women and Girls in Science Day, but despite the best efforts of many parents, teachers, and policymakers over the last two decades the numbers are still dismal.

 Selected content, organised by theme and published across the Lancet family of journals, on issues related to gender equity and the advancement of women in science, medicine, and global health.

Those surveyed said they were systematically overlooked for promotion and mistaken for clerical staff

An analysis of papers in which two or more authors shared first-author position found that male authors were more likely than female authors to appear first in the author list.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes spotlight female researchers who discovered elements and their properties.

There is the accumulated evidence from multiple studies of the disadvantage women in science suffer, with specific reference to the fields of anthropology, ecology and evolution

International University of Sarajevo (IUS) is the only university in the West Balkans that created and is implementing a Gender Equality Plan in higher education.

The gender gap in research productivity varies widely from study to study. This paper looks at how (and why) measuring productivity in different ways provides different pictures of the gender gap.

Men produce twice as many scientific publications as women. At least that's the long-held assumption. But Lynn Nygaard, a special adviser and doctoral research fellow at PRIO, challenges this widespread belief in her recent article.

A new analysis of biomedical awards over five decades shows men receive more cash and more respect for their research than women do, report Brian Uzzi and colleagues.

A new analysis of biomedical awards over five decades shows men receive more cash and more respect for their research than women do.

Leading scientist Patricia Falcone speaks with podcast host Margaret Koval about the importance of college mathematics, early research experience and clear communications.

The field has plenty of talented women, but to reach leadership roles they must have visible and recognizable roles within medicine and in the public

For the last 12 years, I have had the pleasure and privilege to serve as the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and as a professor at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH) Zurich and Lausanne (EPFL). My affiliations have afforded me a rare opportunity to observe the structure and governance of academic institutions and to reflect on my own experience in institutional leadership. I have attempted to place my experience in the context of the literature on leadership, particularly that relating to women and academia. On the basis of my experience and reading, I make some recommendations for women faculty, for women in positions of institutional leadership in academia, and for academic institutions. I am deeply convinced that greater participation by women (and members of other under-represented groups) in institutional leadership is needed if academia is to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the huge challenges that face humanity.

#MeToo has not much altered the science professions, and it likely won't until the culture of science is dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

Women researchers are underrepresented in almost all research fields. There are disciplinary differences in the phase in which they tend to quit their academic career: in the natural and technical sciences (STEM), it is in the postdoctoral phase, whereas in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) it is during the doctoral phase.

Young women and girls look to Hollywood for inspiration and guidance, but how can we be sure movies and TV are positively representing women in STEM?

We asked dozens of women about gender and power on campus. Here’s what they told us.

To date, the majority of authors on scientific publications have been men. While much of this gender bias can be explained by historic sexism and discrimination, there is concern that women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers' unconscious biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other's identities and genders. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews, we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published in 5 different journals with different peer review processes (double-blind vs. single blind) and subject matter (birds vs. behavioral ecology) from 2010-2018 (n = 4865 papers). While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total, the double-blind journal Behavioral Ecology did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (Behavioral Ecology and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology) than in the ornithology journals (Auk, Condor, Ibis), for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here. We conclude, at least for these journals, that double-blind review does not benefit female authors and may, in the long run, be detrimental.

In 1856, Eunice Foote had to listen to a man present her paper because of her sex. In 2019, women undoubtedly have greater access to academic training, support, and mentorship than in the mid-19th century. But the ultimate and fundamental sex equality that Foote and her colleagues called for in 1848 has yet to be achieved in medicine, nursing, public health, and the sciences.

Mansplaining is the tip of the iceberg Many of the experiences of women in the workforce are so patterned and commonplace they have spawned an emerging vocabulary, which includes terms like mansplaining (explaining something in a condescending or patronising way, typically to a woman), bropropriation (when a man takes credit for a woman's idea), manel (a panel of speakers populated entirely by men), and himpathy (the "inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide, and other misogynistic behavior"). Here, we propose a number of additions to the vernacular, which are likely to remain relevant for the foreseeable future.