WISE@QMUL: MOVIE SCREENING: CODE-DEBUGGING THE GENDER GAP

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Date: 11th May 2016
Time: 6pm
Room: Fogg Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus
The movie is 80 minutes long and will be followed by a discussion. There is also going to be wine and nibbles, so please RSVP so that we can provide enough catering:
The CODE documentary exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?
The film highlights breakthrough efforts that are producing more diverse programmers and shows how this critical gap can be closed.
We welcome both men and women, and academics from undergraduates to professors.
Please note we are aware that this event falls outside of Athena SWAN core hours. We strive to provide events that fulfill the Athena SWAN criteria but are also aware that longer events in the middle of the day can be very intrusive to working schedules and therefore try to have a mix of both lunchtime and evening events. Our next event on June 17thwill be a lunchtime panel discussion “Experiences of getting to the top in academia”. If you are interested in a repeat screening of “CODE” during Athena SWAN core hours, we are happy to organise this, please email us so that we can gauge interest.

NYTimes: Trump plays the Man’s Card

Source: www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/opinion/sunday/trump-plays-the-mans-card.html

Quotes:

“The evidence is that the woman’s card is less than worthless: There’s abundant research showing that men and women alike tend to judge women more harshly than men. One of the best-known experiments is called the Goldberg paradigm, and it asks research subjects to evaluate an essay or speech. In countries all over the world, both men and women judge the same piece more negatively when they are told it is by a woman, more positively when they believe it is by a man.”

“Today it’s not a clear-cut case of men oppressing women. It seems to be more about unconscious bias, a patriarchal attitude that is absorbed and transmitted by men and women alike — which is one reason women often aren’t much help to other women.”

“… in Spain, researchers found that having more women randomly assigned to a committee evaluating judiciary candidates actually hurts the prospects of female candidates. A similar study found that on Italian academic evaluation committees, women evaluate female candidates more harshly than men do.”

“A central challenge is that it’s difficult for women to be perceived as both competent and likable”

“It has been said that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did — just backward and in high heels.”

LATimes: Angry While Female

Source: www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-critics-notebook-angry-women-20160428-snap-htmlstory.html

Quote:

“But it was Ripa who sparked a direct conversation about the issue of anger itself. … Like Ann Curry (unceremoniously pushed out as “Today” show co-host in 2012) and MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry (who told her staff she would not be used as “a token, mammy or little brown bobble head” for the network’s election coverage after her show was preempted without discussion), Ripa was seen by many as yet another woman being kept out of the loop of her own career by male bosses and colleagues.

“Why, asked thousands of Twitter and Facebook users, can’t a woman be outraged without being labeled a diva? … As clashing reactions to Ripa and far too many studies reveal, women are still often penalized for getting angry, even when anger is the appropriate reaction to the situation.”

“Men shout in righteous rage, but women who raise their voices are still often seen as losing control or, heaven forbid, “shrill.””

WISE@QMUL: WISE QUIZ NIGHT ON MARCH 8TH

WHEN:Tuesday 8th of March, 6:00 – 8:00pm
WHERE: Senior Common Room Bar, Queens’ Building, Mile End Campus
RSVP AT: https://goo.gl/jxu6f1(Please RSVP so that we can provide enough catering)
WISE@QMUL are delighted to host a Pub Quiz at the SCR bar for international women’s day. This is a great excuse to get all of your friends together for a catch up and a laugh. A pub quiz is a fun evening and if you’re lucky you could be going home with some top prizes!
Form your teams and come to have fun and challenge the finest minds in Queen Mary. Teams will be formed of 4 to 5 people. Teams can be formed in advance or you can find teammates on site but don’t forget to register.
Entry is free. All are welcome.
Will you be WISE enough and win the quiz? Let’s see that next Tuesday.

WISE@QMUL: EVENING TALK AND DISCUSSION: AMRITA AHLUWALIA

WISE@QMUL hosted an evening talk and discussion with Amrita Ahluwalia at Charterhouse Square Campus, at 5-7 pm, on Wed 24th Feb .
As a beginning of her talk, Amrita gave an overview of her career path. It was inspiring to hear how she grew up as an individual researcher, especially the change from the isolate work as a PhD student to the collaborative work as in a group. Her research focuses on new prevention therapies for hypertension, using dietary interventions as well as pharmacology. She is the first female recipient of the GlaxoSmithKline prize in Clinical Pharmacology and the Winner of the WISE 2015 research award.
She encouraged young researchers to volunteer in and contribute to the learned society of theirs disciplines, as a good way to stay in touch with the academic communities. As a longstanding member of the British Pharmacological Society since 1989, she has contributed to and enthusiastically supported new initiatives that have promoted and advanced pharmacology in all its forms. She is the first Chair of the Society’s Women in Pharmacology group and as the editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Pharmacology.
With the statistics of career progression by gender at Queen Mary, UK and EU, she revealed a systemic problem, that of women achieving senior roles in research and academia. The number of women in the career ladder falls down drastically when it comes to the senior researcher level. She mentioned a lot of women researchers leave academia in their 30-35-year-old stage. There are various reasons for attrition, such as family, lack of support after career break, research assessments not considering the career break, difficult career progression- unconscious bias, perception about women and science – many feel like ‘imposters’. 
Amrita then talked about the gender equality promoting initiatives she has been involved in, aiming to tackle the above systemic problem and to support other women in the profession. She established a Prize for Excellence in Pharmacology for Women, developed a mentoring scheme for the British Pharmacological Society and is campaigning for medical research charities to improve the position for women winning fellowships to take maternity leave. She also played a key part in QMUL’s School of Medicine and Dentistry receiving the Silver Athena SWAN award in April 2015.
At the end of her talk, she mentioned the work-life balance. She is very proud of her two sons and she said it is possible to work full time and succeed in both career and family. “It is very hard, though, so you need to have people to help you navigate in your career path.” She has received help from several brilliant mentors along the way; now as a role model, she is dedicated to mentoring and championing female researchers. 

The audiences were from various career levels, from PhD students to senior researchers. The talk was highly praised and there were a lot of questions asked in the open discussion. Some feedbacks from the audiences: “excellent talk”, “fantastic speaker”, “very interesting and informative”, “very inspiring”, ”like most the statistical data”, “would like more talks like this about equality”.

The Royal Society International Women’s Day Event – Women Writing Science

Quotes “Join us as we celebrate International Women’s Day by exploring the history of women writing about science.”
“How did early women scientists use writing in order to further their careers? In which ways were they limited by their gender? What influence did subject specialisation and limited access to education have on their careers?”
“Guided by host Helen Arney, historians Dr Patricia Fara, Dr Emily Winterburn and Dr Claire G. Jones explore the history of women publishing in journals, writing popular science and corresponding with the Royal Society.”
“This event will also include a viewing of the video short Where are the women? created as part of the Philosophical Transactions 350th anniversary and the unveiling of our newly acquired bust of Dr Lucie Green, created and gifted to the Society by sculptor Marcus Cornish.”
 When: 6:30 pm — 8:00 pm on Tuesday 10 March 2015
  • Free to attend, no registration required
  • Seats allocated on a first-come-first-served basis
  • Doors open at 6pm

Guardian: Women considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender

Source: www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github

Reference: J. Terrell1, A. Kofink, J. Middleton, C. Rainear, E. Murphy-Hill​, C. Parnin (2016). “Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men.” PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1733v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1733v1

Quote:

The researchers looked at approximately 3m pull requests submitted on GitHub, and found that code written by women was approved at a higher rate (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%).

… “Women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top 10, to various degrees,” the researchers found.

… they made the disturbing discovery: women’s work was more likely to be accepted than men’s, unless “their gender is identifiable”, in which case the acceptance rate was worse than men’s.