POPNET Connects with Ana Macanovic

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Limits to Gender Equity in Science Communication

The public continuously seeks scientific expertise on pressing issues and the scientists are becoming increasingly conscious of the importance of engaging with the public through different media outlets. Understanding and addressing contemporary societal challenges crucially depends on hearing diverse perspectives of a wide variety of scientists. Yet, past research has shown that time in the media spotlight is unequally distributed between researchers belonging to different social groups.

Here we focus on the representation of men and women scientists in the media. To better understand the complex landscape of gender differences in media representation, we present a newly curated and fine-grained dataset, the Dutch Professors in Media database (DPM). DPM contains information on scientific careers, media attention across several media channels, and co-authorship networks of almost 7 thousand full professors in the Netherlands. We start by evaluating gender inequality in professors’ media presence controlling for indicators of their own scientific prominence, as well as the prominence of the collaborators in their scientific network.

We find that women receive significantly less attention than men in printed media, but not in online news and on the social media across most scientific fields. Furthermore, we evaluate the extent to which the features of one’s collaboration networks, as well as the processes of cumulative advantage, are associated with (gender differences in) professors’ consecutive media presence.

About Ana Macanovic

Ana Macanovic is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Her interests include economic sociology, study of inequalities, and understanding of trust and cooperation in diverse groups. Ana is interested in how structural inequalities arise in societies and how they can be addressed. She has recently worked on gender representation of Dutch professors in newspapers and online media with Bas Hofstra. Currently, Ana is working on several projects examining the accumulation of inequalities and innovation in academia, as well as understanding the predictability of life outcomes of different social groups.