The social sciences are essential to creating knowledge about the ways in which people interact with and create their environments. Thus, it is imperative that the academy of scholars include people whose perspectives and experiences reflect the world they seek to explain. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that although these disciplines have the capacity to describe how inequities are manifest and can be mitigated in our social world, they may be subject to the very biases they aim to uncover. Despite expressions of egalitarian and social justice goals, research is increasingly demonstrating profound disparities in gender representation at different career junctures, within different subfields, and within critical spaces of power and prestige.
In tandem with increased understanding of the causes of gender disparities, evidence-based programs to remedy these disparities are emerging. These programs may draw on theories developed by social scientists such as goal affordances, bias literacy, mindset, and belongingness to create and change cultures and environments in ways that welcome and sustain women scientists.
In this Research Topic, we aim to bring together the most current findings regarding women’s representation across academia, and within psychology and psychology-related disciplines in particular. The body of evidence demonstrating the numerous ways in which women are underrepresented and the consequences of that underrepresentation continues to grow. Having demonstrated exclusion, we believe that the consequences of that exclusion to the health and validity of the academic world, and the social sciences in particular, should be examined. We explicitly seek new research illuminating how intersectional identities influence representation, equity, and prestige. The experiences of women in minoritized and racialized groups provide essential contributions to social science theory and scholarship and scholars from those groups face unique challenges in academia. This collection gathers research from a range of social sciences employing a variety of methodological approaches to describe these challenges and consequences.
As the evidence of women’s underrepresentation grows, so have small- and large-scale programs and initiatives. This collection also gathers scholarship that documents these programs and provides solutions to institutions and disciplines. By gathering this work into a single collection and coupling the findings with examples of programs to mitigate gender disparities, we hope to provide both the impetus and solutions.
Thus, we welcome original brief reports, empirical studies, policy and practice reviews, and case studies that address (but are not limited) related to the following themes. We welcome submissions from any academic field, with a preference for social science and psychological disciplines.
• Intersectional influences on prominence and prestige
• Gender representation in publications, citation counts, sponsored programs, or awards
• Impact of gender representation on research topics
• Gender representation in social networks
• Gender and intersectional influences on the professional preparation pipeline
• Gendered experiences of evaluation
• The gendering of academic leadership
• Cultural and national influences on gender representation
• Interdisciplinary comparisons of gender representation
Image Copyright: Chatanika Photography 2021
The social sciences are essential to creating knowledge about the ways in which people interact with and create their environments. Thus, it is imperative that the academy of scholars include people whose perspectives and experiences reflect the world they seek to explain. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that although these disciplines have the capacity to describe how inequities are manifest and can be mitigated in our social world, they may be subject to the very biases they aim to uncover. Despite expressions of egalitarian and social justice goals, research is increasingly demonstrating profound disparities in gender representation at different career junctures, within different subfields, and within critical spaces of power and prestige.
In tandem with increased understanding of the causes of gender disparities, evidence-based programs to remedy these disparities are emerging. These programs may draw on theories developed by social scientists such as goal affordances, bias literacy, mindset, and belongingness to create and change cultures and environments in ways that welcome and sustain women scientists.
In this Research Topic, we aim to bring together the most current findings regarding women’s representation across academia, and within psychology and psychology-related disciplines in particular. The body of evidence demonstrating the numerous ways in which women are underrepresented and the consequences of that underrepresentation continues to grow. Having demonstrated exclusion, we believe that the consequences of that exclusion to the health and validity of the academic world, and the social sciences in particular, should be examined. We explicitly seek new research illuminating how intersectional identities influence representation, equity, and prestige. The experiences of women in minoritized and racialized groups provide essential contributions to social science theory and scholarship and scholars from those groups face unique challenges in academia. This collection gathers research from a range of social sciences employing a variety of methodological approaches to describe these challenges and consequences.
As the evidence of women’s underrepresentation grows, so have small- and large-scale programs and initiatives. This collection also gathers scholarship that documents these programs and provides solutions to institutions and disciplines. By gathering this work into a single collection and coupling the findings with examples of programs to mitigate gender disparities, we hope to provide both the impetus and solutions.
Thus, we welcome original brief reports, empirical studies, policy and practice reviews, and case studies that address (but are not limited) related to the following themes. We welcome submissions from any academic field, with a preference for social science and psychological disciplines.
• Intersectional influences on prominence and prestige
• Gender representation in publications, citation counts, sponsored programs, or awards
• Impact of gender representation on research topics
• Gender representation in social networks
• Gender and intersectional influences on the professional preparation pipeline
• Gendered experiences of evaluation
• The gendering of academic leadership
• Cultural and national influences on gender representation
• Interdisciplinary comparisons of gender representation
Image Copyright: Chatanika Photography 2021
