This is the first in a series of talks centred on the 'Science of Science' that IceLab is arranging. If you are interested in this topic, join IceLab's Update email list to hear about the next ones. Contact Gabrielle Beans.
Stress Response Modeling at IceLab guest researcher Aaron Clauset will give a talk titled 'Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists' on October 8th at 13.30, in Galaxen (Sirius) and in Zoom (zoom link provided to those who register).
Fika will be provided to those that attend in person; please register to help us order the right amount.
Register for the seminar
The productivity of scientists shapes the pace and direction of scientific discovery. You might think that we scientists would know a great deal about makes us more or less productive. The trouble is that simple measures of productivity and prominence, like the number of papers written or the number of citations received by those papers, vary enormously across both individual scientists and across institutions, and it has been observed for more than 60 years that men are generally more productive and prominent than women in science.
In this talk, I will show that gendered differences in the size and composition of scientific collaborations networks, and not inherent differences to scientists themselves, largely explain the gendered "productivity gap." I'll introduce a Bayesian model that allows us to untangle the network effects of collaboration on individual productivity and prominence. First, I'll apply these models to large-scale collaboration network data in STEM fields to investigate differences by gender, institutional prestige, and the effects of mentors on early-career success. And second, I'll apply them to elite physicists specifically to examine whether the physics community values its most prominent scientists equally. I'll then close with a discussion of how knowing the systemic and structural sources of bias in science can help us reconnect with our meritocratic principles, to both diversify the academy and broaden its contributions to society.
Aaron Clauset is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. He was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science in 2016, and was named a Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2023. Since 2017, he has been a Deputy Editor responsible for the Social, Computing, and Interdisciplinary Sciences at Science Advances.
Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and machine learning for complex systems. His research program is around two general themes: identifying fundamental principles of the organization and behavior of complex social and biological systems, and developing approaches for using data and computation to illuminate those ideas. A recent major focus of this work has been on the "science of science," where he studies the shape, origins, and consequences of social and epistemic inequalities on scientific careers, productivity, the spread of ideas, and the composition of the scientific workforce. His research results have appeared in many prestigious scientific venues, including Nature, Science, PNAS, SIAM Review, Science Advances, Nature Communications, and Physical Review Letters. His work has been covered in the popular press by Quanta Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, Wired, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.
Aaron Clauset will be visiting IceLab the week of October 7th. If you would like to meet with him, please get in touch with Martin Rosvall.
This is the first in a series of talks centred on the 'Science of Science' that IceLab is arranging. If you are interested in this topic, join IceLab's Update email list to hear about the next ones. Contact Gabrielle Beans.
Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.