Our IGEN Project Quarterly Newsletter highlights the work being done by our alliance members and partners.
Featured in this issue:
- 2021 IGEN National Meeting Save The Date! & program planning.
- Launch of IGEN's new website
- Opportunities to Learn: Equity in Graduate Education Virtual Journal Clubs
- Bridge Program News
Bridging Physics Talent: Discovering lost capability, building an inclusive landscape [in STEM fields through the establishment of bridge programs in higher education].
A monthly column written by Leonard Cassuto, staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, who explores the ins and outs of doctoral training, with advice for both graduate students and their faculty mentors.
In 2013, the University of Texas at Austin’s computer science department began using a machine-learning system called GRADE to help make decisions about who gets into its Ph.D. program -- and who doesn’t. This year, the department abandoned it.
In this series from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, you’ll hear personal stories about mentorship experiences from STEMM leaders, in their own words, to help you learn how evidence-based mentorship practices can help you develop the skills to engage in the most effective mentoring relationships possible.
This slide, taken from IGEN's Reverse Site Visit 2020 presentation, highlights individual disciplinary society's progress made in year 2 towards project goals.
[RSV Presentation Part 2, slide 6]
A standardized exam is under fire amid claims that it perpetuates bias and exclusion.
Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap may identify fields that will not reach parity without intervention, reveal underappreciated biases, and inform benchmarks for gender balance among conference speakers, editors, and hiring committees. Using the PubMed and arXiv databases, we estimated the gender of 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals, covering most STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years, and made a web app allowing easy access to the data (https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/). Despite recent progress, the gender gap appears likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics, and maths. The gap is especially large in authorship positions associated with seniority, and prestigious journals have fewer women authors. Additionally, we estimate that men are invited by journals to submit papers at approximately double the rate of women. Wealthy countries, notably Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, had fewer women authors than poorer ones. We conclude that the STEMM gender gap will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing.
This visualization allows one to view the past, present, and (estimated) future gender ratio of authors on academic publications listed on PubMed. The four buttons at the top allow subsetting of the data by journal, research discipline, the author's country of affiliation, and position in the author list (where 'overall' includes all authors).
Theodore Hodapp, Director of the NSF INCLUDES: IGEN Project presents the hard facts which show the disparities of equity in graduate programs across STEM disciplines. Hodapp hares how IGEN and its disciplinary society parters and bridge program institutions are tackling this issue and making a difference in increasing equity in graduate STEM education through a bridge program model offered at partner institutions.
