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Academic

Why do women do less well in academia?

“Women produce fewer papers than men over a lifetime and are still scarce in senior positions, especially in science. Dispelling myths of innate difference between the sexes, Amanda Goodall offers advice on how they can raise their research productivity and status in the academy

I knew nothing about the subject of women’s research productivity until Grace Neville, the charismatic vice-president for teaching and learning at University College Cork, invited me to chair a seminar on the topic.

The facts are plain. Data show that men are more productive than women – male scholars publish more articles and accrue more citations over a lifetime.

Why is this? Is it the child-bearing effect leaving women less time for research? Could discrimination partly explain the difference? Or are women’s brains “wired differently”, making us less intellectually productive? Is it, instead, the way we do our research?

To try to get the complete picture, first we need to dispel the myth that women’s brains are somehow less efficient than men’s.”

Read the full story.

By admin

Dr Bex Lewis is passionate about helping people engage with the digital world in a positive way, where she has more than 20 years’ experience. She is Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Research Fellow at St John’s College, Durham University, with a particular interest in digital culture, persuasion and attitudinal change, especially how this affects the third sector, including faith organisations, and, after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, has started to research social media and cancer. Trained as a mass communications historian, she has written the original history of the poster Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster (Imperial War Museum, 2017), drawing upon her PhD research. She is Director of social media consultancy Digital Fingerprint, and author of Raising Children in a Digital Age: Enjoying the Best, Avoiding the Worst  (Lion Hudson, 2014; second edition in process) as well as a number of book chapters, and regularly judges digital awards. She has a strong media presence, with her expertise featured in a wide range of publications and programmes, including national, international and specialist TV, radio and press, and can be found all over social media, typically as @drbexl.

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