Women in science. Research collaboration in Italian Academia from a gender perspective.

Speaker:  Elisa Bellotti, Manchester University

Abstract

The paper analyses the position and outcome of female scientists in the local system of public funding to academic disciplines in Italy. In specific, we look at 10 years (2001 – 2010) of the Italian Ministry of University and Research funding of Projects of National Interest (Prin) in all the disciplinary areas: in this dataset we observe the percentage of women funded in each discipline, their role in the grants and in the academia, their tendency to collaborate across gender compared to their male counterpart, and the total amount of funding they receive in the ten years under analysis. We then select the top funded people across all disciplines, and look at how their personal networks of collaborations have changed in time. The goal is to see if women adopt different network strategies to their male counterparts. While results presented here are preliminary, they suggest that women are still under-represented in Italian Academia, they occupy less prestigious roles and overall receive less money than male scientists. Successful women do not always tend to collaborate more with men than women, questioning the previous finding that claimed the advantage of heterophilous ties in hierarchical networks. Differences across disciplinary areas are discussed, and used to inform a future research agenda on the role of gender in scientific research.

Light lunch in the same room at 12:30.

And the dates of future statistics seminars/events:

2 March (1pm): Sara Wade, Warwick
7 June (10-5pm): Workshop on Statistical Network Science. The webpage is now up and you can register (for free) at: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/mathematics/news-and-events/events/fors/Workshop-on-Statistical-Network-Science.