|Talks|

Diversity and gender equity in networks of knowledge production and dissemination

Virtual
Dissertation defense
Past Talk
Syed Arefinul Haque
Jul 14, 2022
12:00 pm
Jul 14, 2022
12:00 pm
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

In knowledge production and dissemination processes, participation from diverse populations matters; without inclusion of voices across all spectrums of society, produced knowledge remains incomplete. In this dissertation, I present three projects related to the identification of inequity in the production of knowledge and its dissemination. In the first project, I look at the diversity of network science scholars. With the help of volunteers at the Network Science Institute, I identified the race and gender of highly cited authors of the most highly cited papers in the discipline based on a dataset collated from Microsoft Academic Graph. This list is augmented with invited speakers at NetSci, the most prominent conference in network science. We find that both women and non-white researchers continue to be underrepresented in both publication and citation rates. In the second project, I created a list of 4,469 experts mentioned in news articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic and hand-coded the expertise, gender, and race of these individuals with the help of volunteers from the COVID-19 Dispersed Volunteer Research Network. By creating a co-mention network between these experts, I explore the gender and racial imbalance in quoted experts, and the intensity of interaction we see between public health experts and policymakers during a crisis. Finally, in the third project, I construct a network between US institutions of higher education who received NSF ADVANCE grants, awarded to help implement institutional level intervention to reduce gender inequity in STEM fields. Using a mixed effect model, I examine the effect of organizational characteristics and network position on the diffusion of innovative change strategies.

Dissertation Committee:

  • Laura K. Nelson, Chair Assistant Professor of Sociology University of British Columbia
  • David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor Network Science Institute Northeastern University
  • Kathrin S. Zippel, Professor of Sociology Northeastern University
  • Maimuna S. Majumder, Faculty of the Computational Health Informatics Program Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School
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Jul 14, 2022