Higher education is often presumed to be a uniquely egalitarian and meritocratic field. However, persistent inequalities within academic work and increasingly the current and historic mechanisms underlying them that disadvantage women have been recognised and studied in detail. Drawing on the archives of the LSE Impact Blog, this review brings together ten posts that explore the gendered nature of research and scholarly communication.

Compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment – why women do more academic service work

Drawing on qualitative data and CV evidence Margaretha Järvinen and Nanna Mik-Meyer explore the gendered nature of academic service work and highlight how different expectations and strategies effect the workloads and career prospects of academic women.

Impact a-gender? Calling out the gendered nature of research impact and assessment

Discussions about research impact are often littered with particular language that serves to demonstrate how different forms of impact are valued, promoted and sustained. Drawing on evidence from qualitative datasets, comprising interviews with researchers and research impact evaluators, Jennifer Chubb and Gemma Derrick argue that the language of research impact and assessment is frequently structured along gender lines, and that this is both unhelpful to the generation and evaluation of research impact in and of itself, but also to the development of an inclusive, diverse and supportive research culture.

Altmetric scores in Political Science are gendered – does it matter?

Altmetrics are generally seen as indicators for online engagement and attention. However, taking the field of political science as an example, Gustav Meibauer, Kiran Phull, Audrey Alejandro and Gokhan Ciflikli use altmetrics to analyse the dynamics of knowledge production in the field. Finding that altmetrics show a highly hierarchical and gendered spread of attention to work in political science, they ask how and why these metrics can be used responsibly.

Giving Credit: Gender and the hidden labour behind academic prestige

A number of high profile cases have focused attention on how credit is attributed to the creation of academic research and in particular the way in which the role of women is often diminished or effaced as part of this process. In this post Donica Belisle and Kiera Mitchell highlight the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis and the unrecognised impact she had on her husband Harold Adams Innis’ career and suggest that the social sciences and humanities would benefit from a wider interpretation of scholarly attribution than is currently practiced.

Changing the gender narrative with open access

Academic success is regularly framed in terms of a particular set of publishing activities that disadvantages women. In this post, Katie Wilson and Lucy Montgomery discuss their recent research into how women researchers have pioneered the use of open access and the potential this could have for developing programmes that support more diverse and equitable forms of success for all researchers.

Who gets to be a classic in the social sciences?

Of all the ideas produced by researchers in the social sciences, only a relatively small number of key ideas and researchers will become canonised as classics, objects of continued interest and key learning points for new researchers. However, the processes by which these scholars and ideas are recognised and filtered out from those of their contemporaries are little understood. Drawing on a quantitative study of sociologists in the 20^th century, Nicole Holzhauser, argues that not only the content of scientific work, but also social capital has historically played a significant role in allocating recognition and power within the field, although, social capital alone is insufficient to achieve lasting success. Taking this historical example into account, contemporary researchers might carefully consider the factors that shape how they allocate recognition through citation.

Female researchers are more read and less cited because they more often engage in research for societal progress

The gender gap in citations between male and female researchers is well documented. However, the reasons for this gap are less certain and widely contested. Discussing findings from a mixed methods analysis of research publications from Norway, Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen find that whilst papers authored by female researchers are less cited, they are more frequently engaged with by readers. Through closer analysis of the abstracts of these papers, they argue that these papers more often involve projects aimed at societal progress, which overall are less valued by academics and receive fewer citations.

Book Review: Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs and Carmen G. Gonzalez

In Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia, editors Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs and Carmen G. Gonzalez offer a new collection of essays highlighting challenges to access, survival and success in the academy, focusing on the experiences of women from Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities. Tracy McFarlane welcomes this important book for contesting the fabled view of the equitable educational environment, while calling for the need for more radically critical national, regional and transnational analysis to better understand how racism, sexism and classism are being reproduced in the academy worldwide, with devastating effects.

The bias puzzle – Understanding gender differences in academia

Bias in academia can often be difficult to pinpoint and separate out from difference. Responding to a recent call from the journal Nature to set new guidelines for studies dealing with race and ethnicity, Vincent A. Traag and Ludo Waltman, outline how concepts from causal inference can clarify approaches to studying gender bias in higher education.

Aspirational metrics – A guide for working towards citational justice

Is it possible to have a just politics of citation? Reflecting on their work to create a guide to fairer citation practices in academic writing, Aurélie Carlier, Hang Nguyen, Lidwien Hollanders, Nicole Basaraba, Sally Wyatt and Sharon Anyango, highlight challenges to changing citation practices and point to ways in which authors and readers can work towards equitable citations.

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