Our Picks for December 7, 2018

Our Picks for December 7, 2018

This interesting article, a collaboration between Violeta Politoff, Senior Researcher for ANROWS (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety) and the National Community Attitudes Survey on Violence against Women, reports recent survey results about public response towards sexual assault and violence against women carried out in Australia. The report includes surprising results, such as 30% of Australians believing that if a woman sends a nude image to her partner, she is partly responsible if he shares it without her permission, 8% attributing responsibility and blame to women who were raped while alcohol- or drug-affected. Moreover, 12% of Australians absolve men of blame if they are alcohol- or drug-affected at the time they perpetrate rape.The article also discusses the disregard for consent and mistrust of women's reports.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to promote faculty mentoring for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, as reported by the University Gazette. This grant, lead by the Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence, Erin Malloy, was resubmitted several times (perseverance matters!) and "seeks to promote the success of women, and in particular women of color, in STEM fields across the University."

In this report, author Virginia Gewin briefly presents the results of a recent study that analyzed the educational impact of female- vs male-authored research. The author of the study, Mike Thelwall, gathered information using the reference manager program Mendeley. After analyzing 2014 articles in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, he reached the conclusion that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India.

The #MeToo movement as allowed to highlight and fight deep disparities between man and women in society. However, this article suggests that not all changes are good, since in certain working environments such as Wall Street finance, men appear to fear women and prefer to exclude them to prevent any possible harassment allegation. The article mentions the big loss this attitude entails for women, and touches on the disparities in mentorship in the finance fields. 

A cool new tool has emerged on twitter to estimate the gender distribution of your followers and those you follow, based on their profile descriptions or first names. The PWN Blog team found it thanks to Maciej Kosiło's post. If you notice an imbalance, don't hesitate to follow more people (men or women) and compensate! 

 

Finally, when visiting this link, you can be redirected to several free PDF books dealing with race, gender, sexuality and culture. Some links are expired but most of them work and can provide interesting reads during the holidays!