• Journée des droits des femmes : #visibilité des #femmes_scientifiques sur Wikipédia

    En marge de la Journée internationale des droits des femmes du 8 mars, La Casemate et le Quai des Savoirs ont organisé un #éditathon sur les femmes et la science sur Wikipédia, l’encyclopédie libre et collaborative. Ce marathon d’édition vise à augmenter le nombre de biographies de femmes scientifiques et rendre leurs travaux plus visibles : les femmes représentent seulement 8 à 10% des biographies de femmes scientifiques sur Wikipédia.

    C’est Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary qui a proposé de participer à l’événement pour les femmes géographes, événement auquel l’UMR TREE s’est joint.

    Au final, durant quatre jours, 12 pages de femmes géographes ont été créées ou enrichies sur Wikipédia ainsi que de très nombreuses fiches sur Wikidata, le volet bases de données du projet collaboratif. Les membres de Pacte se sont saisi également de l’initiative en lançant l’enrichissement chaque semaine d’une page de géographe via le compte Twitter de la Commission de géographie Féministe du CNFG.

    Explorer le bilan pour le laboratoire : https://twitter.com/UMR_TREE/status/1371186612428812291

    Découvrir toutes les fiches de femmes scientifiques créées ou modifiées durant l’éditathon : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Editathon_Femmes_%26_Sciences_2021#Bilan_de_l'%C3%A9ditathon_20

    https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/actualites/journee-des-droits-des-femmes-visibilite-des-femmes-scientifiques-sur
    #wikipedia #gender_gap #femmes #visibilisation #géographie #géographes #femmes_géographes

  • Gender Gap in #Wikimedia projects

    Denelezh provides statistics about the gender gap in the content of Wikimedia projects.

    For example, as of September 21, 2020, only 18.6 % of biographies in the English Wikipedia are about women.

    Denelezh allows you to explore the gender gap by several dimensions:

    – Gender Gap by year of birth
    - Gender Gap by country of citizenship
    - Gender Gap by occupation
    – Gender Gap by Wikimedia project

    You can mix these four dimensions, for example to gather data about the biographies in the German Wikipedia about French politicians born in the 19th century.

    Last but not least, Denelezh allows you to track the evolution of gender gap in Wikimedia projects since the beginning of 2017.

    You can learn more about Denelezh and how it works by reading its documentation.

    https://denelezh.wmcloud.org

    #gender_gap #wikipedia #femmes #genre #inégalités #wiki #statistiques #chiffres

  • Are women publishing less during the pandemic? Here’s what the data say

    Early analyses suggest that female academics are posting fewer preprints and starting fewer research projects than their male peers.
    Quarantined with a six-year-old child underfoot, Megan Frederickson wondered how academics were managing to write papers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns implemented to stem coronavirus spread meant that, overnight, many households worldwide had become an intersection of work, school and home life. Conversations on Twitter seemed to confirm Frederickson’s suspicions about the consequences: female academics, taking up increased childcare responsibilities, were falling behind their male peers at work.

    But Frederickson, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, wanted to see what the data said. So, she looked at preprint servers to investigate whether women were posting fewer studies than they were before lockdowns began. The analysis — and several others — suggests that, across disciplines, women’s publishing rate has fallen relative to men’s amid the pandemic.

    The results are consistent with the literature on the division of childcare between men and women, says Molly King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University in California. Evidence suggests that male academics are more likely to have a partner who does not work outside the home; their female colleagues, especially those in the natural sciences, are more likely to have a partner who is also an academic. Even in those dual-academic households, the evidence shows that women perform more household labour than men do, she says. King suspects the same holds true for childcare.

    Preprint analysis

    In her analysis, Frederickson focused on the two preprint servers that she uses: the physical-sciences repository arXiv, and bioRxiv for the life sciences. To determine the gender of more than 73,000 author names on 36,529 preprints, she compared the names with those in the US Social Security Administration’s baby-name database, which registers the names and genders of children born in the United States.

    Frederickson looked at arXiv studies posted between 15 March and 15 April in 2019 and in 2020. The number of women who authored preprints grew by 2.7% from 2019 to 2020 — but the number of male authors increased by 6.4% over that period. The increase in male authorship of bioRxiv preprints also outstripped that of female authorship, although by a smaller margin (see ‘Preprint drop-off’). (The two servers are not directly comparable in Frederickson’s analysis because the program that she used pulled the names of only corresponding authors from bioRxiv, whereas all arXiv authors were included.)

    “The differences are modest, but they’re there,” Frederickson says. She notes that the lockdowns so far have been relatively short compared with the usual research timeline, so the long-term implications for women’s careers are still unclear.

    The limitations of these types of name-based analysis are well-known. Using names to predict gender can exclude non-binary people, and can misgender others. They are more likely to exclude authors with non-Western names. And between disciplines, their utility can vary because of naming conventions — such as the use of initials instead of given names, as is common in astrophysics. Still, says Frederickson, over a large sample size, they can provide valuable insights into gender disparities in academia.
    Fresh projects

    Other researchers are finding similar trends. Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University Bloomington who studies gender disparities in research, conducted a separate analysis of author gender on nine popular preprint servers. Methodological differences meant that the two analyses are not directly comparable, but Frederickson’s work “converges with what we’re seeing”, says Sugimoto.

    Sugimoto points out that the preprints being published even now probably rely on labour that was performed many months ago. “The scientific publication process doesn’t lend itself to timely analyses,” she says. So her study also included databases that log registered reports, which indicate the initiation of new research projects.

    In 2 of the 3 registered-report repositories, covering more than 14,000 reports with authors whose genders could be matched, Sugimoto’s team found a decrease in the proportion of submissions by female principal investigators from March and April of 2019 to the same months in 2020, when lockdowns started. They also saw a declining proportion of women publishing on several preprint servers, including EarthArXiv and medRxiv. These differences were more pronounced when looking at first authors, who are usually early-career researchers, than at last authors, who are often the most senior faculty members on a study.

    “This is what’s the most worrying to me, because those consequences are long-term,” Sugimoto says. “The best predictor of a publication is a previous publication.”
    Early-career bias

    In economics, too, there are indications that the pandemic is disproportionately affecting younger researchers, says Noriko Amano-Patiño, an economist at the University of Cambridge, UK. Taken as a whole, there aren’t clear discrepancies in the overall number of working papers — a preprint-like publication format in economics — that have been submitted to three major repositories and invited commentaries submitted to a fourth site that publishes research-based policy analyses.

    She and her collaborators also examined who was working on pandemic-related research questions using a COVID-19-specific repository. Although women have consistently authored about 20% of working papers since 2015, they make up only 12% of the authors of new COVID-19-related research. Amano-Patiño suspects that, in addition to their childcare responsibilities, early- and mid-career researchers, especially women, might be more risk-averse and thus less likely to jump into a new field of research. “Mostly senior economists are taking their bite into these new areas,” says Amano-Patiño. “And junior women are the ones that seem to be missing out the most.”

    “Unfortunately, these findings are not surprising,” says Olga Shurchkov, an economist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Shurchkov came to similar conclusions in a separate analysis of economists’ productivity during the pandemic. And a preprint posted to arXiv on 13 May1 shows the same trends in pandemic-related medical literature (see ‘COVID-19 effect’). Compared with the proportion of women among authors of nearly 40,000 articles published in US medical journals in 2019, the proportion of female authors on COVID-19 papers has dropped by 16%.

    Academic responsibilities

    Increased childcare responsibility is one issue. In addition, women are more likely to take care of ailing relatives, says Rosario Rogel-Salazar, a sociologist at the Autonomous University of Mexico State in Toluca. These effects are probably exacerbated in the global south, she notes, because women there have more children on average than do their counterparts in the global north.

    And women face other barriers to productivity. Female faculty, on average, shoulder more teaching responsibilities, so the sudden shift to online teaching — and the curriculum adjustments that it requires — disproportionately affects women, King says. And because many institutions are shut owing to the pandemic, non-research university commitments — such as participation in hiring and curriculum committees — are probably taking up less time. These are often dominated by senior faculty members — more of whom are men. As a result, men could find themselves with more time to write papers while women experience the opposite.

    Because these effects will compound as lockdowns persist, universities and funders should take steps to mitigate gender disparities as quickly as possible, Shurchkov says. “They point to a problem that, if left unaddressed, can potentially have grave consequences for diversity in academia.”

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01294-9

    #femmes #publications #coronavirus #confinement #inégalités #hommes #genre #recherche #projets_de_recherche #gender_gap

    • And because many institutions are shut owing to the pandemic, non-research university commitments — such as participation in hiring and curriculum committees — are probably taking up less time. These are often dominated by senior faculty members — more of whom are men. As a result, men could find themselves with more time to write papers while women experience the opposite

      Eh oui cest bien connu cest les vieux seniors qui écrivent les articles et pas les doctorants ou postdoc..

      "The differences are modest, but they’re there,” Frederickson says.

      Franchement les différences sont tellement minimes sur les chiffres quils montrent que je vois meme pas comment on peut les utiliser.. prendre des chiffres et leur faire dire ce qu on veut.
      Je suis convaincu que les femmes ont plus de charges ménagères que les hommes mais cet article ne le démontre absolument pas.

    • Pandemic lockdown holding back female academics, data show

      Unequal childcare burden blamed for fall in share of published research by women since schools shut, but funding bodies look to alleviate career impact

      Female academics have been hit particularly hard by coronavirus lockdowns, according to data that show that women’s publishing success dropped after the pandemic shut schools.

      The results are some of the first to show that lockdowns may be taking a toll on women’s career-critical publication records, building on other studies demonstrating that the pandemic has also set back female researchers at the preprint and journal submission stage.

      With lockdowns shutting schools the world over and forcing academics to look after children at home, it is feared that female scholars have borne a heavier childcare and housework burden than their male counterparts, prompting questions about how universities and funding bodies should respond.

      “Universities will need to account for the pandemic’s gendered effects on research when making decisions about hiring, tenure, promotion, merit pay and so on,” said Megan Frederickson, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto, who has also found that the pandemic has skewed research along gender lines in a separate analysis.

      The latest data were compiled by Digital Science, a London-based company specialising in research analysis tools, using its Dimensions publication database to analyse more than 60,000 journals across all disciplines for Times Higher Education.

      The analysis shows that the proportion of accepted papers with a female first author dipped below the historical trend for submissions made in March, April and May.

      The decline in the share of papers by female first authors was particularly pronounced in April, when it fell by more than two percentage points to 31.2 per cent, and May, which saw a collapse of seven points to 26.8 per cent.

      A more granular week-by-week analysis shows that the number of female first-author acceptances started to slip in mid-March and has dropped more steeply since late April.

      School closures became mandatory in most countries around mid-March and are still fully or partially in place across most of the world.

      There are caveats to the study. Because of the time lag between submission of a paper to a journal and acceptance, much of the data are not yet in, particularly for May, meaning the picture is still a partial one.

      But at the same point last year, similarly incomplete data did not lead to female under-representation, Digital Science said, making the falls in female success less likely to be an artefact of data collection.

      In addition, following the lockdown, the proportion of published papers in medical and health sciences disciplines has shot up as researchers scramble to understand the novel coronavirus and disseminate their results.

      Women are better represented in these fields than they are in most others – representing 37.6 per cent of first authors over the past five years – meaning that, if anything, female publication success during the pandemic should have grown, not shrunk.

      Worries in the research community about the lockdowns’ impact on women have been growing since mid-April, when several journal editors observed that submissions had become far more male-skewed since the imposition of lockdowns. Several studies looking at preprints have confirmed this.

      This latest data from Digital Science, which has performed previous analyses on the gender split in research, reveal that the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on women is filtering through into published papers – the currency of academic careers.

      That conclusion is “certainly in line with what I’m seeing” from other results, said Molly King, an assistant professor of sociology at Santa Clara University in California, who has studied inequalities in academic publishing.

      The theory is that as lockdowns have increased domestic workloads – not just childcare, but homeschooling, shopping, cleaning and caring for elderly relatives – women have been landed with more tasks than men, and this has cut into their research time and exacerbated existing career hurdles.

      Professor King pointed to survey data from the American Association of University Professors showing that even in normal times, female scientists do twice as much cooking, cleaning and laundry as male scientists, amounting to an extra five hours a week. Even in dual academic couples, women do more. “My hypothesis is that it would be the same with childcare,” she said.

      One complementary explanation is that female academics, having only recently broken into some disciplines, are younger and so more likely to have small children. “So even if childcare duties are evenly spread within families with young children, there will be more men with older or adult children to skew the gender balance,” said Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and one of the first to notice that women were submitting fewer papers.

      This hypothesis is supported by a survey of about 4,500 principal investigators in the US and Europe in mid-April, which found that having a child under five was the biggest factor associated with a drop in research hours. Women were more likely than men to have young children, partly explaining why they reported a larger drop in research time, according to “Quantifying the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists”, a preprint posted to arXiv.

      The question now is what universities can do to correct the blow to female productivity during the pandemic.

      Professor King said universities should “explicitly not require any teaching evaluations from this spring as part of hiring materials” and should perhaps “recalibrate expectations” for publishing records during lockdown.

      One difficulty, however, is that although female academics have been disadvantaged on average, this could hide all kinds of individual stories.

      “I think universities (and funding agencies) will probably need to ask researchers to self-report how the pandemic has affected their research and make decisions on a case-by-case basis, but such a system will likely be imperfect,” said Professor Frederickson.

      Meanwhile, some funding bodies have already begun working on a policy response.

      In the Netherlands, the Dutch Research Council is in discussion with several female researcher groups to assess the impact of lockdown and has relaxed its funding rules to allow affected academics a second shot at applying for grants next year if, for example, childcare overwhelmed them at home.

      A gender equality unit within Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation has also started looking into the pandemic’s impact on women’s research careers and has suggested that “compensatory measures” might be needed.

      https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pandemic-lockdown-holding-back-female-academics-data-show
      #statistiques #chiffres

  • Le più istruite, le meno occupate: perché la questione femminile è la vera grande vergogna italiana

    Secondo i dati del World Economic Forum, siamo primi al mondo per iscrizioni di donne all’università, ultimi in Occidente per partecipazione femminile al mercato del lavoro. In altre parole: stiamo buttando via la componente più istruita della popolazione. E poi ci chiediamo perché non si cresce

    https://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2018/12/27/le-piu-istruite-le-meno-occupate-perche-la-questione-femminile-e-la-ve/40547
    #femmes #discriminations #inégalités #Italie #éducation #travail #marché_du_travail #genre #gender_gap
    via @albertocampiphoto

    • Tiré de :
      Global Gender Gap Report 2017

      Gender parity is fundamental to whether and how economies and societies thrive. Ensuring the full development and appropriate deployment of half of the world’s total talent pool has a vast bearing on the growth, competitiveness and future-readiness of economies and businesses worldwide. This year’s edition of the report dives into the dynamics of gender gaps across industry talent pools and occupations. The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks 144 countries on their progress towards gender parity across four thematic dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

      http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2017

      #statistiques #2017 #chiffres #rapport #base_de_données

  • Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Course - Issue 32 : Space
    http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/men-are-better-at-maps-until-women-take-this-course

    Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University, was used to getting A’s. For as long as she could remember, she found academics a breeze. She excelled in math and science in particular, but “I never thought there was a subject I couldn’t do,” she says matter-of-factly. So when she started engineering school, she was surprised to struggle in a course most of her counterparts considered easy: Engineering graphics. It’s a first-year course that sounds a bit like a glorified drawing class to a non-engineer. The hardest part is orthogonal projection, a fundamental engineering task. Given a top, front, and side view of an object, engineers must be able to mentally synthesize two-dimensional representations into a three-dimensional object. It’s easy—if you’re good at (...)