Cornell University: Researchers prefer same-gender co-authors, study confirms. “Researchers are more likely to pen scientific papers with co-authors of the same gender, a pattern that cannot be simply explained by the varying gender representation across scientific disciplines and time, according to joint research from Cornell and the University of Washington.”
Nature: Computer algorithms infer gender, race and ethnicity. Here’s how to avoid their pitfalls. “Publications don’t usually include demographic data such as the gender, race and ethnicity of their authors; researchers impute them from people’s names using algorithms: ‘Molly’ is probably a woman, ‘Jeff’ is probably a man, and so on. Outside academia, these algorithms are widely used as well, to study harassment in online forums and infer the demographics of political donors, for instance. But what do these algorithms really do? And how reliable are they? We take a deep dive into this technology and its limitations in an article that we published in April in Nature Human Behaviour.”
Stanford Law School: Who counts as an inventor?. “New research, undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of Stanford Law and Stanford Medicine students, looks at the overlap between biomedical research paper authors and those authors who go on to be named inventors of their research on patents. Among the findings is a gender discrepancy between male and female authors, with male authors receiving patents more frequently. The team created a comprehensive patent-to-publication citation map that includes 430,000 biomedical inventor-research teams.”
Northeastern Global News: Are fairy tales fair? AI helps find gender bias in children’s storybooks. “Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty have more in common than their origins as classic fairy tale figures and, now, part of Disney’s famous roster of characters. Their fairy tales are also full of gender bias and stereotypes, according to literature scholars––and now AI.”
Out in Perth: New website provides support for parents of gender diverse children. “Transforming Families – a Telethon Kids Institute-led collaboration with local and national community organisations – is a dedicated website offering resources and guidance to parents, friends and carers of gender diverse children and young people to better understand and help their loved ones.” I looked at the site briefly. The “Get Support” section is Australia-oriented, but the “Research” and “Resources” question seemed suitable for anyone no matter what their location.
Stanford University: Is That Self-Driving Car a Boy or a Girl?. “In her latest researchopen in new window, conducted with Malia Masonopen in new window of Columbia University, [Professor Ashley] Martin looks at how people respond when real or imagined products are assigned a gender — or no gender. One of their studies analyzed Amazon.com reviews to see how shoppers reacted to the anthropomorphizing and gendering of robotic vacuums.”
Washington State University: Gender gap found in research grant award amounts, re‑applications. “Women researchers received substantially less funding in grant awards than men — an average of about $342,000 compared to men’s $659,000, according to a large meta-analysis of studies on the topic. Women were also less likely to receive second grants to continue their research.”
Wall Street Journal: Data Scientists Grapple With How to Ask, ‘What’s Your Gender?’. “Adults under age 30 are especially likely to say they’re transgender—as high as 3-5% in recent surveys from Gallup Inc. and the Pew Research Center. But with many surveys only giving the options of male or female, such individuals might answer incorrectly, or not at all. That means the data might be inaccurate, and those individuals’ needs go underserved.”
Notre Dame News: Gender-diverse teams produce more novel, higher-impact scientific discoveries, study shows. “New research from the University of Notre Dame examines about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and reveals that a team’s gender balance is an under-recognized, yet powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.”
NewsWise: Gender Plays Key Role in Influencer Call-Outs. ” Social media influencers stake their claim in the pop culture landscape by crafting aspirational personas and sharing intimate details of their lives with online audiences. … But in addition to their loyal fans, there is a legion of equally passionate ‘anti-fans,’ whose self-appointed mission is to hold these influential people accountable by calling out inauthenticity, unrealistic portrayals of ‘real life,’ and outright deception. Anti-fandom can serve a social function by allowing people to critique norm transgressions, but it can also be a destructive force, a Cornell-led research team proposes.”
MIT Technology Review: Social media filters are helping people explore their gender identity. “Oliver Haimson, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who studies transgender identity and experiences online, says that for trans, gender-nonconforming, or gender-curious folk, filters can be a way to play with gender expression without the investment and skill that makeup requires or the time, hormones, and luck it takes to grow facial hair. He explains that filters are an important and widely used tool for identity exploration.”
Penn Today: Bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap, one article at a time. “A new study co-authored by Isabelle Langrock, a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Annenberg associate professor Sandra González-Bailón evaluates the work of two prominent feminist movements, finding that while these movements have been effective in adding a large volume of biographical content about women to Wikipedia, such content remains more difficult to find due to structural biases.”
PsyPost: Deceptive self-presentation on social media differs between men and women – and is related to gender equality. “Deceptive self-presentation refers to impression-management behaviors that aim to enhance one’s image to others through intentional, incorrect disclosures that can occur through any form – such as, text, images, videos, or location tags. In this work, Dasha Kolesnyk and colleagues explore 1) the extent to which men and women differ in deceptive self-presentation on social media in the domains of physical attractiveness and personal achievement, and 2) how gender equality in a given society influences such practices, and whether gender differences in deceptive self-presentation depend on gender equality.”
University of Washington: Google’s ‘CEO’ image search gender bias hasn’t really been fixed. “The researchers showed that for four major search engines from around the world, including Google, this bias is only partially fixed, according to a paper presented in February at the AAAI Conference of Artificial Intelligence. A search for an occupation, such as ‘CEO,’ yielded results with a ratio of cis-male and cis-female presenting people that matches the current statistics. But when the team added another search term — for example, ‘CEO + United States’ — the image search returned fewer photos of cis-female presenting people. In the paper, the researchers propose three potential solutions to this issue.”
ABA Journal: New database tracks gender-based violence sentencing decisions in the Pacific. “Among the data compiled for each country, the TrackGBV Dashboard highlights contentious factors in gender-based violence cases that could discriminate against survivors when used in mitigation by the court. These include gender stereotyping; customary practices, such as forgiveness ceremonies; and other factors, such as a perpetrator’s religious activities.” The database currently contains information about Samoa, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea. Other Pacific nations will be added in the future.
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.