Thesis supervisor: Orsolya Vásárhelyi
Location of studies (in Hungarian): CUB Abbreviation of location of studies: BCE
Description of the research topic:
While recent years have shown growth in research and conversations about the underlying factors of gender and ethnic minorities' under-representation in science, progress has been slow. Although in most developed countries, women make up approximately 50% of the academic workforce, they still encounter a glass ceiling in career advancement. For example, in Hungary, only 6% of the members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were women in 2019. In the United States, only 35% of full professors were women, and merely 8% were non-white women in 2020. This striking under-representation of non-white women is especially harmful when considering recent scientific findings that argue that teams with higher gender and ethnic diversity drive innovation, produce higher quality, and less biased research.
Intersectionality frameworks study how privileges are present in various aspects of society, creating accumulated disadvantages for those who belong to multiple minoritized groups. The interconnected nature of social categorizations, such as race, class, ethnicity, and gender, tends to create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. Even though intersectionality has been researched in seminal work on the experiences of African American women, relatively few recent studies aim to understand how the interaction of sexism and racism reinforces and perpetuates inequality in academia.
Unbiased science dissemination has the potential to alleviate some of the known inequalities that underrepresented minorities face in academia by exposing their work to other scientists and the public. Although social media has the potential to help under-represented scholars promote their work and gain visibility, it is far from equitable: it is male-dominated and values self-promotion, which minorities may avoid due to societal double standards. Studies have also found that social media tools often reproduce similar visibility issues as traditional publishing, such as men and native English speakers having an advantage, and scholars from emerging countries being almost invisible. In previous related work within our research group, we found that online sharing of scientific articles positively affects citations in Computer Science, Social Sciences, and Engineering, but online science dissemination perpetuates offline existing disadvantage that female scientists face in all research fields.
Research Goals
Here, we propose a research agenda that adopts an intersectional perspective to gain a deeper understanding of the role of online science dissemination in the scientific success of teams of co-authors who are diverse based on gender and ethnicity. The candidate will have access to a unique dataset that combines data from Altmetric.com on how scientific articles are shared online, the number of citations these papers receive from the Web of Science. The candidate is highly encouraged to develop their own interests related to the topic and/or participate in ongoing research covering a wide range of issues related to intersectionality, diversity and online visibility in science.
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