[Air-L] additional pieces of bias against women in journalism

[Chris Peterson]

One thing on my “list of future grad school projects” for awhile has been to take the gender-name-detection tools that Nate Matias and Sarah Szalavitz built for news/Twitter and try to modify them to run over citations. 

There are some technical challenges (especially for those journals that don’t include full name) and epistemic ones (for a load of reasons, including not only ‘decoding’ as Julie mentions but also presuming the assignation), but it seems like it could be a good way to approximately gauge patterns and try to suggest to authors how their work might be skewed (I for one would love a tool that reminded me as I’m researching/writing an article what the demography of my research pool looks like). And you could imagine trying to add other intersections (e.g. race) in as well. 

— Chris 

ps and if anyone wants to steal this idea, please do it, since even though this project is fairly high up the list I don’t know how far I’ll ever get anywhere on it! 

> On Feb 24, 2016, at 1:42 PM, Julie Cohen <jec at law.georgetown.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Biella,
> 
> Not a piece but still an enlightening read: go to ssrn.com and peruse the lists of top authors by downloads and abstract views. (You may have to set up an account to see this information.) In law, 2 of the top 100 are women; taking it through the top 200 gets you up to 22ish (apologies but I can't fully decode all of the names). In top authors overall, looks like ~8ish in the top 100 and 14ish in the top 200; again, there may be a few more that I'm just not recognizing. They also do an eigenfactor column and the rankings do shift a bit there, but not enough to disrupt the overall imbalance.
> 
> Best, Julie
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Gabriella "Biella" Coleman
> Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 9:54 AM
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] additional pieces of bias against women in journalism
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have heard back from some folks claiming that the case Meryl highlighted was not indicative of larger trends. I thought I would pass on a few pieces that do deal with the fact that the omission and invisibility of female voices in journalism and journalistic writing is not a sporadic occurrence but a systematic one. If others have good pieces on the topic, I would love to see them.
> 
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/gender-diversity-journalism/463023/
> 
> http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/31/closed-network/
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/even-famous-female-economists-get-no-respect.html?_r=0
> 
> All best,
> Gabriella
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Gabriella Coleman
> Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy Department of Art History & Communication Studies McGill University
> 853 Sherbrooke Street West
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> 
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