Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Structure, Status, And Span: Gender Differences In Co-Authorship Networks Across 16 Region-Subject Pairs (2009–2013), Kjersten Bunker Whittington, Molly M. King, Isabella Cingolani

Sociology

Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- …

Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch

Sociology

Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize …

The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects Of Covid-19 On Scientific Productivity, Molly M. King, Megan E. Frederickson

Sociology

Academia serves as a valuable case for studying the effects of social forces on workplace productivity, using a concrete measure of output: scholarly papers. Many academics, especially women, have experienced unprecedented challenges to scholarly productivity during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors analyze the gender composition of more than 450,000 authorships in the arXiv and bioRxiv scholarly preprint repositories from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis reveals that the underrepresentation of women scientists in the last authorship position necessary for retention and promotion in the sciences is growing more inequitable. The authors find differences between the …

Pushing And Pulling Emerging Adults Through College: College Generational Status And The Influence Of Parents And Others In The First Year, Laura Nichols, Ángel Islas

Sociology

Interview, survey, and academic transcript data with a diverse sample of first-generation college (FGC) and continuing generation college (CGC) premedical intended emerging adults are analyzed to study academic outcomes and any differences in the availability and use of social capital the first year of college. CGC students know many people with college degrees including those in careers they aspire to obtain, while FGC students do not. All students identify parents as very important forms of social capital who contribute to their success in college, but the types of support differs by educational background. Students whose parents have at least a …

The Role Of Gender In Scholarly Authorship, Jevin D. West, Jennifer Jacquet, Molly M. King, Shelley J. Correll, Carl T. Bergstrom

Sociology

Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first …

Homelessness And The Mobile Shelter System: Public Transportation As Shelter, Laura Nichols, Fernando Cázares

Sociology

Those without housing often use public space differently than those who are housed. This can cause dilemmas for and conflicts among public officials as guardians of public space and goods. In this paper, we look at one such utilisation of space from the perspective of those who board 24-hour public transportation routes and ride the bus all night for shelter. We describe the results of a preliminary survey, observations and informal conversations with unhoused riders on the bus over three nights in one county in the United States. We found that a substantial number of the unhoused riders we surveyed …

Homeless Women With Children In Shelters: The Institutionalization Of Family Life, Kathryn Feltey, Laura Nichols

Sociology

In this chapter, we examine the shelter experience for homeless mothers, particularly those with young children. We review the literature on women with children living in homeless shelters and draw from the findings of our research on homeless women living in shelters and transitional housing in the midwestern United States from 1990 through 2002. This research included in-depth interviews conducted over a twelve-year period with almost 200 women residing in emergency homeless shelters, battered women's shelters, or transitional housing for single-parent families. For this chapter, we draw from the data on sheltered homeless mothers living with or separated from their …

The Economic Resource Receipt Of New Mothers, Laura Nichols, Cheryl Elman, Kathryn M. Feltey

Sociology

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage …

The Only Thing You Really Got Is This Minute: Homeless Women Re-Visioning The Future, Kathryn M. Feltey, Laura Nichols

Sociology

As we enter the millennium, growing numbers of women and children join the ranks of the homeless around the globe. ¹ Common factors contributing to homelessness include the feminization of poverty, a shortage of affordable low-income housing and welfare policies focused on short-term relief. Unique factors include war and political upheaval that produce a mobile population of refugees who are homeless.

In thinking about the corning millennium, feminists are challenged to envision a future where the economics and politics of gender do not inevitably produce poverty and homelessness. Homelessness in women's lives is both a symptom and an outcome of …

Involving Students In The Development Of A Peer Education Program For College Women, Laura Nichols, Linda Lumley

Sociology

The main purpose of this study was to assess the potential interest of college women in participating in a new peer education program on a college campus of approximately 18,000 students in the Midwest while a lso involving students in the instrument design. We expected that students would be interested in such a program and that their inclusion in the research process would also serve as a means to recruit future peer educators. The research was conducted in four stages: (a) An initial survey was developed based on peer education topics used at other universities, (b) this instrument was presented …