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March 8th, 2017

Newly updated for International Women’s Day – Gender Bias in Academe bibliography

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Blog Admin

March 8th, 2017

Newly updated for International Women’s Day – Gender Bias in Academe bibliography

3 comments | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

danica savonickOn this International Women’s Day, and the first anniversary of the post originally appearing on the Impact Blog, Danica Savonick and Cathy N. Davidson have updated the Gender Bias in Academe bibliography with 17 new studies. Here, they offer a brief insight into some of these additions and also appeal to readers and collaborators to continue to share details of new studies so the bibliography can remain thorough and up-to-date.

All new studies have been added to an updated version of the original post. You can navigate directly to the new content here.

In honour of Women’s History Month, we have updated the Gender Bias in Academe bibliography with 17 new entries for a total of 40 studies. Many of these new entries address the presence of gender bias in teaching evaluations and academic publishing. They confirm, for instance, that teaching evaluations more accurately measure gender bias rather than teaching effectiveness. Several of the newly added studies analyse gender bias in specific countries, such as grant funding in the Netherlands, and the percentage of women professors in Polish art academies.

One particularly important study by Handley et al. (2015) assesses bias in men’s undervaluation of the quality of research on gender bias (i.e. the kind of rigorous studies that fill this bibliography) and their reluctance to accept findings of gender bias even when there is abundant empirical evidence.

We have also added a section with studies that have found a lack of gender bias in certain areas of STEM hiring practices or that point to cultural factors as the primary cause for the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields.

Some of these studies are very recent, but many are not; they only recently reached our attention thanks to our generous readers and collaborators. Please continue adding studies to our Google Doc so that the bibliography can remain as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible.

Overall, this bibliography demonstrates the pernicious presence of gender bias throughout academe. These studies are a chilling reminder that despite the noble aspirations of many institutions, much of higher education continues to replicate rather than rectify gender inequity. For women’s history month, we challenge you to counter systemic gender bias by creating structures that ensure equity in hiring, tenure, and promotion procedures. Let us know what strategies you come up with – either via the Google Doc or by adding your comments underneath the bibliography itself – so we can share best practices for producing a more just and equitable future.

All new studies have been added to an updated version of the original post. You can navigate directly to the new content here.

This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

About the authors

Danica Savonick is a PhD candidate in English and a Futures Initiative Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies the relationships among pedagogy, aesthetics, and social justice. Her dissertation examines how aesthetics fundamentally shaped classroom practices in the late twentieth century and how teaching in CUNY’s free and open classrooms inspired important feminist and antiracist authors to produce some of the most powerful literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Savonick’s work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and American Literature, and in 2017 she was awarded the AAC&U K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award. She teaches at Queens College and is an editor of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Read her blog at danicasavonick.com

Cathy N. Davidson is director of the Futures Initiative and a distinguished professor in the PhD Program in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a renowned scholar of cultural history and technology, including the history of the book, the history of industrialism and postindustrialism, digital humanities, and the impact of new technologies on culture, cognition, learning, and the workplace. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to the National Council on the Humanities, and in 2016 she received the Ernest J. Boyer Award for Significant Contributions to Higher Education. Davidson’s new book, ‘The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux’ (forthcoming September 2017, Basic Books), shows why we need a “new education” for the world we live in now and helps us see the best ways to make that transformation.

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Posted In: Academic publishing | Equity Diversity and Inclusion

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