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Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and...
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Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities

A special issue of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 29010

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Georgiana Turculet

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Guest Editor
Department of Law, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Interests: Immigration; citizenship; public policy; gender
Dr. Alesia Zuccala

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Guest Editor
Department of Communication, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Interests: scholarly communication; research evaluation; bibliometrics
Dr. Gemma Derrick

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Interests: peer review; research policy; research evaluation studies; Impact (societal, scientific, and cultural); meta-research; innovation studies; gender and research dynamics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Read the latest reports surrounding COVID-19 and its effect on scientific research worldwide, and we find that gender inequality and the representation of women has worsened. With more women needed at home, traditional social contracts have become exaggerated, and power dynamics intensified. Gender equality has always been an issue in academia, but this setback due to the pandemic calls for new research.  

The advancement of women can never be fully accounted for in terms of performance, preferences, or values. Statistics concerning the career trajectories and productivity rates of female academics “whirl around like a broken record”. In fact, the more accounting we do concerning performance, the less we understand the legacy of underlying gender biases or schemas. In the social sciences, and in psychology in particular, schemas surrounding inequality are referred to as “confounding” influences. Humanists, on the other hand, often recognize “concepts of intersectionality”. It is therefore valuable to look at gender research at the nexus of these fields, not only because of how their vocabularies conceptualize gender issues, but also because of how women contribute to them in general.

It is widely understood that women are underrepresented in STEM. In fact, there has always been a concern about advancing more women towards disciplines like engineering, physics, and computer science. Research evaluation systems value STEM disciplines due to their impacts on society, thus we need women who can contribute significantly to new medical, technological, and scientific solutions to societal problems. However, this aim should not be distinguished from the social sciences and humanities. It is well known, for instance, that women still tend to be underrepresented in the field of philosophy. Note also that in 1971, Gloria Steinem delivered one of the most thought-provoking guest speeches about "Why Harvard Law School Needs Women. More Than Women Need It". The advancement of women is not just about choices, pre-dispositions, or values attached to impact frameworks; it is also a matter of humanity and social justice.

This Issue welcomes contributions that address the following:

  • Gender disparities in academia and COVID-19.
  • Conceptions of gender, gender stereotyping, choices, and systems of self-belief.
  • Gender and mobility.
  • Gender and diversity.
  • Hostile sexism and the rise of #MeToo.
  • Sociopolitics and underlying gender schemas.
  • Gender myths, biases and stereotypes.
  • Policies and/or affirmative action.
  • Gendered career trajectories—e.g., bottlenecks, glass ceilings; hiring practices; tokenism; gender pay gaps.
  • Gender and the morality of discrimination.
  • Feminism and intersectional justice.

All methodological approaches are welcome. Case studies and proof-of-concept studies should present new and unique findings and highlight future research possibilities and developments. Opinion pieces will not be considered for the Special Issue.

Dr. Georgiana Turculet
Dr. Alesia Zuccala
Dr. Gemma Derrick
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Publications is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this Special Issue will be fully waived. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Gender inequality
  • Gender disparities
  • Advancement of women in STEM and SSH
  • Gender and research

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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24 pages, 3495 KiB  
Article
Mapping Gendered Communications, Film, and Media Studies: Seven Author Clusters and Two Discursive Communities
by Kim Britt Pijselman and Miklós Sükösd
Publications 2023, 11(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11010015 - 6 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2759
Abstract
This study examined and mapped the extent to which gender became incorporated into the intersecting research fields of communications, film, and media studies. A total of 8054 academic publications from these disciplines, indexed in the Web of Science between 1975 and 2022 ( [...] Read more.
This study examined and mapped the extent to which gender became incorporated into the intersecting research fields of communications, film, and media studies. A total of 8054 academic publications from these disciplines, indexed in the Web of Science between 1975 and 2022 (ndocs = 8054), were extracted to create two types of bibliometric maps: (a) an author co-citation map, and (b) a co-occurrence map of key terms (taken from keyword lists, titles, and abstracts of publications). Our results revealed a pattern of seven distinct clusters of 995 authors (nauthors = 995) in the field. Additional research is needed to analyze the internal structure of these seven clusters, and label them accordingly. The key terms in the same authors’ works, however, show a distinctively different pattern, namely a divided, dichotomous, polarized structure (nterms = 720). Judging from this, we hypothesize that gender is discussed in two main ways: either as a critical concept concerning discourses, representations, and other social and cultural constructs, or as a variable in more formal sociological and psychological research designs. The conceptual framework and results of the present study lay the foundation for further research regarding the diverse academic agendas of the seven author clusters, the split nature of their discursive communities, as well as the key difference between the two patterns. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
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18 pages, 3374 KiB  
Article
Changing the Academic Gender Narrative through Open Access
by Katie Wilson, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Rebecca N. Handcock, Alkim Ozaygen and Aniek Roelofs
Publications 2022, 10(3), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10030022 - 4 Jul 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 5873
Abstract
In this article, we ask whether dominant narratives of gender and performance within academic institutions are masking stories that may be both more complex and potentially more hopeful than those which are often told using publication-related data. Influenced by world university rankings, institutions [...] Read more.
In this article, we ask whether dominant narratives of gender and performance within academic institutions are masking stories that may be both more complex and potentially more hopeful than those which are often told using publication-related data. Influenced by world university rankings, institutions emphasise so-called ‘excellent’ research practices: publish in ‘high impact’, elite subscription journals indexed by the commercial bibliographic databases that inform the various ranking systems. In particular, we ask whether data relating to institutional demographics and open access publications could support a different story about the roles that women are playing as pioneers and practitioners of open scholarship. We review gender bias in scholarly publications and discuss examples of open access research publications that highlight a positive advantage for women. Using analysis of workforce demographics and open research data from our Open Knowledge Initiative project, we explore relationships and correlations between academic gender and open access research output from universities in Australia and the United Kingdom. This opens a conversation about different possibilities and models for exploring research output by gender and changing the dominant narrative of deficit in academic publishing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
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13 pages, 272 KiB  
Article
Was This Supposed to Be on the Test? Academic Leadership, Gender and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Denmark, Hungary, Romania, and United Kingdom
by Sorana-Alexandra Constantinescu and Maria-Henriete Pozsar
Publications 2022, 10(2), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10020016 - 1 Apr 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3626
Abstract
Recent developments in workplace dynamics have made us even more aware of the importance of gender representation in all work-related decisions. Working from home during the pandemic, a decision that was generally the norm for European universities, forced us to rethink what are [...] Read more.
Recent developments in workplace dynamics have made us even more aware of the importance of gender representation in all work-related decisions. Working from home during the pandemic, a decision that was generally the norm for European universities, forced us to rethink what are the main priorities when addressing the different needs of academic workers. The present paper tackles this overall issue from the perspective of gender representation, looking at the gender composition of the leadership structures of universities and their policy responses to employee needs. All the state-accredited universities in the following countries were included in the analysis: Romania, Denmark, Hungary and UK. These countries were chosen for the diversity in the state of their gender politics and in their overall quality of higher education. Primary results show not only that gender equality within academic leadership lags behind, but also that this lag may be associated with a poorer policy response to challenges typically faced by women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
16 pages, 281 KiB  
Article
Feminization of Resistance: Reclaiming the Affective and the Indefinite as Counter-Strategy in Academic Labor Activism
by Aslı Vatansever
Publications 2022, 10(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010001 - 21 Dec 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3920
Abstract
‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction [...] Read more.
‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
16 pages, 3519 KiB  
Article
Open Access Publishing Probabilities Based on Gender and Authorship Structures in Vietnam
by Huyen Thanh T. Nguyen, Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Tam-Tri Le, Manh-Toan Ho and Quan-Hoang Vuong
Publications 2021, 9(4), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9040045 - 5 Oct 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 5930
Abstract
Open access (OA) publishing is beneficial for researchers to improve recognition, representation, and visibility in academia. However, few studies have been conducted for studying the association between gender and OA publishing likelihood. Therefore, the current study explores the impacts of gender-based authorship structures [...] Read more.
Open access (OA) publishing is beneficial for researchers to improve recognition, representation, and visibility in academia. However, few studies have been conducted for studying the association between gender and OA publishing likelihood. Therefore, the current study explores the impacts of gender-based authorship structures on OA publishing in Vietnamese social sciences and humanities. Bayesian analysis was performed on a dataset of 3122 publications in social sciences and humanities. We found that publications with mixed-gender authorship were most likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31–31.65%). In contrast, the likelihood of publications with the solely male or female author(s) was lower. It is also notable that if female researcher(s) held the first-author position in an article of mixed-gender authorship, the publication would be less likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31% compared to 31.65% of male-first-author structure). In addition, publications written by a solo female author (14.19%) or a group of female authors (10.72%) had lower OA publishing probabilities than those written by a solely male author(s) (17.14%). These findings hint at the possible advantage of gender diversity and the disadvantage of gender homophily (especially female-only authorship) on OA publishing likelihood. Moreover, they show there might be some negative impacts of gender inequality on OA publishing. As a result, the notion of gender diversity, financial and policy supports are recommended to promote the open science movement. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
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Review

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13 pages, 285 KiB  
Review
The COVID-19 Pandemic, Academia, Gender, and Beyond: A Review
by Pınar E. Dönmez
Publications 2022, 10(3), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10030030 - 5 Sep 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2837
Abstract
This article aims to engage critically with the scholarly narratives and the emerging literature on the gender impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in academia. It outlines the key contours and themes in these scholarly discourses and conceptions, acknowledging their richness, depth and strengths [...] Read more.
This article aims to engage critically with the scholarly narratives and the emerging literature on the gender impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in academia. It outlines the key contours and themes in these scholarly discourses and conceptions, acknowledging their richness, depth and strengths especially given the short timespan within which they have developed since 2020. The article then suggests broadening and historicising the critique advanced by the literature further. In doing so, the hierarchies and vulnerabilities exposed in the academic domain by the pandemic are positioned within a holistic understanding of crisis-ridden characteristics of social relations under capitalism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender Research at the Nexus of the Social Sciences and Humanities)
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