EValuating gender policies in academia through the Analysis of scientific collaboration networks (EVA)

Context

The ANR projectEVA (2024-2028)is dedicated to addressing gender disparities withinthe realm of academia and research. Focused on the fields of computer science, political science,economics, and sociology, which align with our consortium's research areas, EVA will conduct ananalysis of gender dynamics within the geographical scope of France and the broader Europeanspace. This project aims to contribute to the ongoing efforts to promote gender equality in thescientific community by objectively assessing the impact and effectiveness of gender-relatedpolicies and best practices on scientific publication activity.

To bridge the gap between existing research on gender dynamics in collaboration networks andevolving policy landscapes, EVA adopts an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together researchersfrom political science and network analysis. This collaborative initiative produces a sharedbibliometric dataset and maps gender policies and recommendations implemented by politicalinstitutions and the scientific community within the same specific temporal, disciplinary, andgeographical context.

Objectives of the Internship

This internship covers the work related to the extraction and analysisof the collaboration networks. It consists in exploring the different ways these graphs can be builtbased on an already existing database hosting the collected publication records, as well asconducting their descriptive analysis. The final goal of this internship is to identify features of thecollaboration networks that differ depending on gender, and to cross-reference them with our othervariables of interest: research domain and country. This can be formulated as a prediction problem,in which one wants to train a model into determining the gender of a researcher. We will first focuson leveraging interactions and individual information to perform this prediction, before turning tothe representation of time to better capture the system dynamics. Due to the sparsity of methodsdesigned for this purpose in the literature, this is the most exploratory task in this internship

Profile Required

• Research internship for 3rd-year engineering students or 2nd-year Master’s students.
• Interest in research, data science, complex networks, and interdisciplinarity.

Duration and Start Date

• 5 to 6 months, starting in early 2025.

Perspectives

The internship may lead to a PhD funded by the EVA project.

Supervision

• Rosa Figueiredo & Vincent Labatut

Contact

The internship will take place at LIA in Avignon.
Interested students should send an email to rosa.figueiredo@univ-avignon.fr, including their CV and recent marks.