Gender equity in academia and research

The share of women recipients of professional awards in Social and Personality Psychology has increased between 1968 and 2021. Yet, this increase is partially explained by women receiving proportionally more service and teaching awards, whereas research awards are given to men.

In an analysis of 130,000+ abstracts, promotional language predicted more citations, views, and higher Altmetric scores, benefiting male authors more than female authors and reinforcing the gender gap in science.

The study shows a significant gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on Twitter, finding that women are about 28% less likely to promote their own academic papers compared to men, a disparity which is even more pronounced among highly productive women at prestigious institutions. Women’s self-promotion efforts tend to yield fewer overall mentions and visibility online compared to men, highlighting systematic gender biases in digital scholarly communication.

Academic freedom is increasingly threatened by homophobic legislation. Stella Nyanzi describes how this affects queer African scholars, and calls for resistance.

Algorithmic gender and race/ethnicity inference tools based on author names have very high error rates in marginalized communities. This may result in misleading results in many computational social science and sociology projects.