Projets de recherche

Description

Although women have been matriculating at a higher rate than men for decades, they are still underrepresented in elite scholarly positions, produce proportionally less, and receive fewer citations to their work. One possible explanation is the allocation of resources to female scientists: women fare poorly in disciplines where research is expensive, and male authorship is disproportionately associated with contributing resources, whereas female authorship is significantly more likely to be associated with labor roles, such as performing the experiment. This research analyzes the role that federal funding plays in either mitigating or exacerbating gender disparities in the scientific workforce. The research examines potential disparities and seeks to understand how interventions through federal funding could address disparities and allow for better utilization of the scientific workforce. The short-term goal of this project is to illuminate the relationships between science funding, sector of employment, gender, and outcome metrics. The longer-term goal is to provide data that can be used for further study of the scientific funding system.

A multivariate analysis is used to analyze the role of funding on scientific productivity and impact. Data is analyzed over a decade to estimate effects of funding concentration and returns to scale in funding. This project is dependent upon the integration of heterogeneous data sources. Novel methodological techniques are used that allow for robust analyses of the highly contextual environment of science funding and scientific productivity. This work advances knowledge in numerous fields. The integration algorithms have many potential applications in an era of big data--providing novel methodological innovations for the analysis of large-scale heterogeneous data; the outcomes of the project informs research in fields such as informatics, sociology, and economics and will have practical implications for science policy.