Indicating gender relations in e-science

Objectives

The project will address the following questions:

• Does the increased usage of ICT tools in general and the Internet in particular help decrease existing differences in access to research resources, information and collaboration networks between people of different gender?
• Or are existing differences in resources made more unequal?

Description of work/methodology

The project will consist of the parts:

• a literature study of theoretical and empirical work on the gender structure and characteristics of e-science- finding possibilities to extract gender information from data gathered in other task forces (e.g., homepages of male, female scientists; relating co-link structures between institutions to gender profiles inside these institutions) (in close connection to WP1/1, WP 2/2 and WP 2/3)
• on the theoretical level discussion of the relationship between specific groups in large ensembles and the skewness of statistical distributions (stratification inside of stratification).

In a case study

• a series of focused interviews with selected research groups in a number of different fields across 4 different countries on gender relationships
• a comparison of the Web visibility and presence of female scientists in those research groups with the actual composition of those research groups (does the Web have a gendered filter?)
• an overview of Web based initiatives on gender in e-science
• an outline of potential Web indicators of gender in e-science.