ScienceGeist

A study suggests that the productivity and impact of gender differences are explained by different publishing career lengths and dropout rates. This inequality in academic publishing has important consequences for institutions and policy makers.

Our largest encyclopedia overwhelmingly recognises the achievements of white men. For physicist Jess Wade, fighting this bias has been an uphill battle to ensure that the scientific contributions made by women and other under-represented communities aren’t lost to posterity.

A physicist from Imperial College London is on a mission to bust what she calls the "big misconception" about scientists. Dr Jess Wade started to create and edit Wikipedia pages at the beginning of 2018 to "better represent women and people of colour" on the online encyclopedia. She's now amassed a portfolio of more than 900 new pages but says the project is about more than the numbers. Speaking to ITV News on International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Dr Wade said: "Something magical can happen if you stumble across a profile that looks a bit like you. "You realise you could be like that too".

New research finds male college students are more likely to ask for grade changes.

The measurements used to make the original argument made very little sense.

The government is being told to act over a "lack of visible role models for girls" in science. Here's a whole array they could use.

Where are the white guys when we talk about changing the way Ph.D.s are advised and trained?

Gender quotas have improved female representation on internal panels, but researchers have highlighted that the loss of research time slows career progression.

As AI gets more talkative, designers need to consider the ethics of gendering not just voices, but the finer nuances of speech patterns.

Do men and women differ in how positively they frame their research findings and is the positive framing of research is associated with higher downstream citations?

A physicist has become embroiled in a sexism row with Wikipedia after profiles she created for female scientists were removed because they were "not notable enough".

Proportions of female students and those from under-represented ethnic groups are rising, yet parity is a way off.

"No matter how much I did or how good my work was, it was never going to be enough."

Centuries of female exclusion has meant women's diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery.

Analysis finds female-led papers are more likely to be rejected, and less likely to be cited, than those with male corresponding authors.

A study of 104 children from ages 3 to 10 found similar patterns of brain activity in boys and girls as they engaged in basic math tasks, researchers reported.

In this article, potentially high-impact policy changesare outlined that build upon existing mechanisms for research funding and governance and that can be rapidly implemented to counteract barriers facing women in science. These approaches must be coupled to vigorous and continuous outcomes-based monitoring, so that the most successful strategies can be disseminated and widely implemented.

One of the major causes of the gender pay gap, according to experts, is the "motherhood penalty," where women are penalized in various ways in the job market after having children. One solution to the gap is emerging among researchers: non-transferable paternity leave for men.

The story of the first female spacewalk doubles as a metaphor for what it's like to be a woman full of ambition in 2019.

Engineering remains the least gender diverse of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Chemical engineering (ChE) and electrical engineering (EE) are exemplars of relatively high and low gender diversity, respectively. Here, we investigate departmental, institutional, and regional factors associated with gender diversity among BS graduates within the US, 2010-2016. For both fields, gender diversity was significantly higher at private institutions (p < 1x10-6) and at historically black institutions (p < 1x10-5). No significant association was observed with gender diversity among tenure-track faculty, PhD-granting status, and variations in departmental name beyond the standard "chemical engineering" or "electrical engineering". Gender diversity among EE graduates was significantly decreased (p = 8x10-5) when a distinct degree in computer engineering was available; no such association was observed between ChE gender diversity and the presence of biology-associated degrees. States with a highly gender diverse ChE workforce had a significantly higher degree of gender diversity among BS graduates (p = 3x10-5), but a significant association was not observed for EE. State variation in funding of support services for K-12 pupils significantly impacted gender diversity of graduates in both fields (p < 1x10-3), particularly in regards to instructional staff support (p < 5x10-4). Nationwide, gender diversity could not be concluded to be either significantly increasing or significantly decreasing for either field.

After the euphoria of 2018, this year's Nobel prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics have again all been awarded to men. Here are three ways to encourage change.

Are fewer women named Nobel laureates just because there have been fewer women scientists?

The metaphor can have an especially negative impact on women and underrepresented groups, argues Wendy L. Hill.

Data from a four-year study of institutional 'report cards' undertaken as part of the New York Stem Cell Foundation's (NYSCF) Initiative on Women in Science and Engineering (IWISE) suggest that although a growing number of women are training in the sciences, efforts to promote and maintain women in more senior scientific roles are still largely inadequate. The study is being reported Sept. 5 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

GENDERACTION developed specific “criteria of good practice” which can be used to assess national ERA Roadmaps and individual gender equality policies.

This blog post highlights the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis and the unrecognised impact she had on her husband Harold Adams Innis’ career and suggests that the social sciences and humanities would benefit from a wider interpretation of scholarly attribution than is currently practiced.

Whatever you find when you google depends on the people who have developed the algorithms. American researcher fears enhanced sexism and racism unless the IT sector begins to promote diversity.

The number of women climbing the career ladder in science remains "disappointingly low", says a new study.

Implicit bias - the presence of prejudices and stereotypes in the workplace - has been a topic of discussion both within and outside academia. Does this lead to a focus on the individual that masks embedded structures inhibiting gender equality?

The outcomes of a 4-year pilot phase which gathered information from over 500 institutions are discussed, outlining future directions for efforts to promote gender equity in STEM.