A case study of gender bias in science reporting

Physics Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 0806a
Author(s):  
Chayanika Mitra

This article attempts to capture gender bias in education expenditure among the religious (Hindu, Muslim and others) and the social groups (SC, ST and General) in West Bengal. Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition technique is used to obtain gender bias for a specific demographic group. Further, an attempt has been made to identify the religious or social groups with the acute problem of gender bias. In this work, 71st round (January–June 2014) education expenditure data (individual level) provided by NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) is used. JEL: I24, R1, C55


Author(s):  
Pablo Badilla ◽  
Felipe Bravo-Marquez ◽  
Jorge Pérez

Word embeddings are known to exhibit stereotypical biases towards gender, race, religion, among other criteria. Severa fairness metrics have been proposed in order to automatically quantify these biases. Although all metrics have a similar objective, the relationship between them is by no means clear. Two issues that prevent a clean comparison is that they operate with different inputs, and that their outputs are incompatible with each other. In this paper we propose WEFE, the word embeddings fairness evaluation framework, to encapsulate, evaluate and compare fairness metrics. Our framework needs a list of pre-trained embeddings and a set of fairness criteria, and it is based on checking correlations between fairness rankings induced by these criteria. We conduct a case study showing that rankings produced by existing fairness methods tend to correlate when measuring gender bias. This correlation is considerably less for other biases like race or religion. We also compare the fairness rankings with an embedding benchmark showing that there is no clear correlation between fairness and good performance in downstream tasks.


2021 ◽  
pp. 030908922110190
Author(s):  
Melvin Sensenig

Because of Protestant modernism’s reconstrual of older Protestant views of inspiration around the Romantic notion of the male charismatic prophet, it unintentionally opened doors for the latent gender inequality of its misogynist cultural context when interpreting female religious activity in the prophets. Because of Protestant modernism’s inability to distinguish itself from its 19th-20th century social elite status, it can end up enabling gender stereotypes of its time and thus engage in unexamined gender bias. Vestiges at times remain in literature that assumes the non- or reduced agency of women in Israelite religion. This is a case study in one of the founders of historical-critical Jeremiah study, Sigmund Mowinckel, focusing not on Protestant modernism broadly but rather on Mowinckel’s clear expression of the modernist Protestant notion of the inspiration of sacred speech.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adina I Dudau ◽  
Laura McAllister

This article examines the roles that occupational segregation and gender bias in the welfare professions play in persistent failures in inter-agency and inter-professional collaborations. Drawing on case study evidence from a Local Safeguarding Children Board in England, a ‘serendipity pattern’ of gender dominance is identified within professions affecting inter-professional collaborations such as those prevalent in Local Safeguarding Children Boards. As we assign this pattern ‘strategic interpretation’, we suggest that policy measures taken to augment the effectiveness of welfare partnerships have, so far, paid insufficient attention to the critical variable of gender, due to over-emphasis on the organisations, rather than the professions, involved. The article’s contribution to practice is unravelling the potential of this oversight to contribute to failure to establish a collaborative mind-set. Our contribution to theory is highlighting specific cultural barriers to inter-professional collaborations, unravelling the power differentials rooted in gender inequity in public sector workforces and challenging professional and organizational traditionalism. In doing so, we offer empirical evidence of the ‘gender hypothesis’ in welfare partnerships and indicate how future investigations might be pursued in this area.


2002 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 157-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gaimster ◽  
Maria Hayward ◽  
David Mitchell ◽  
Karen Parker

This paper combines a study of the typological, technological and constructional attributes of a sample of fifteen dress-hooks and cap-hooks, reported between 1998 and 2000 under the terms of the Treasure Act (1996), with a survey of contemporary pictorial sources, probate inventories and associated wills along with a trawl of ‘small wares’ in the records of the Goldsmiths' Company in order to assess the role of these accessories in vernacular dress of sixteenth-century England.Of particular interest are questions of manufacture and design, followed by the questions of how these objects functioned in relation to the closure and decoration of dress, their noteworthiness in contemporary accounts, their social status, their ranking in the output of contemporary goldsmiths and whether there was a gender bias in terms of their ownership. This cross-examination of excavated finds with contemporary iconographie and documentary sources represents an interdisciplinary case study in historical archaeology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne O’Brien ◽  
Jane Suiter

This article focuses on the gender of voices chosen as sources and presenters of radio news coverage in Ireland. The study examines the best and worst case studies across public and private sector broadcasters and argues that the question of gender balance in broadcasting goes beyond the simple issue of quantitatively proportionate participation to require a more complex and qualitatively fair and balanced presentation of women within news programming. We find a very clear gender bias with male-dominated coverage in both public and private sectors but with greater stereotyping by the latter.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lisa Schor

Während sich geschlechtergerechter Sprachgebrauch im deutschen Sprachraum bereits mehr oder weniger etabliert hat, steckt die Forschung zur sprachlichen Gleichbehandlung in der arabischen Welt noch in den Kinderschuhen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird zunächst der aktuelle Forschungsstand rund um Gender Bias und geschlechtergerechte Sprache im Arabischen skizziert. Im Anschluss folgt eine Einzelfallstudie, in der 15 Behördentexte bayerischer Staatsministerien und deren arabische Übersetzungen einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse unterzogen werden. Anhand eines eigens erstellten Kategoriensystems wird analysiert, welche Strategien derzeit bei der Übersetzung geschlechtergerechter Formulierungen ins Arabische angewandt werden. Aus der Skizzierung des Forschungs-stands geht hervor, dass die arabische Sprache sowohl auf formaler als auch auf soziolinguistischer Ebene viele androzentrische Elemente enthält. Verschiedene Möglichkeiten für einen geschlechtergerechten Sprachgebrauch werden dargestellt. Es wird ersichtlich, dass in der arabischen Welt eine zunehmende Sensibilisierung für sprachliche Gleichbehandlung zu beobachten ist. Die Einzelfallstudie zeigt, dass geschlechtergerechte Formulierungen bei der Übersetzung ins Arabische bevorzugt ins generische Maskulinum übertragen werden. Gelegentlich finden sich zwar auch Beidnennungen, diese sind jedoch als wörtliche Übersetzung der Ausgangsformulierungen zu interpretieren. Die Intention der Ausgangstexte für sprachliche Gleichbehandlung spiegelt sich in den arabischen Übersetzungen nicht wider, daher wird geschlussfolgert, dass den Übersetzenden das Konzept geschlechtergerechter Sprache nicht hinreichend bekannt ist. While gender-inclusive language use is already more or less established in the German-speaking society, research on linguistic equality in the Arab world is still in its early days. This paper first outlines the current state of research on gender bias and gender-inclusive language in Arabic. It is then followed by a case study in which 15 official texts of Bavarian state ministries and their Arabic translations are subjected to a qualitative content analysis. Through a system of categorization, the study analyzes which strategies are currently used in translating gender-inclusive phrases into Arabic. From the outline of the state of research, it is clear that the Arabic language contains many androcentric elements, both on a formal and sociolinguistic level. Various possibilities for gender-inclusive language use are presented. It becomes apparent that there is an increasing awareness of linguistic equality in the Arab world. The case study shows that gender-inclusive phrases are preferably transferred to the generic masculine when translated into Arabic. Occasionally, pairing is also found, however it is to be interpreted as a literal translation of the source material. The intention of the source texts for linguistic equality is not reflected in the Arabic translations. Thus, it is concluded that the translators are not sufficiently familiar with the concept of gender-inclusive language.


There is a magnanimous change in attitude towards taboo subjects in India which is evident in the attitude adopted by content creators and users. The core concern of this research is to analyse the change in visual strategies adopted in the current decade towards subjects such as gender bias, menstruation and homosexuality. This is a qualitative research where data collection encompasses case study of short films uploaded on You Tube since 2010. Analysis of the visual approach is done on the parameter of appeal adopted, selection of cast, broad societal context represented and its overall aesthetics. The results decipher that more celebrity actors and directors have recently opted for the impudence of short films and a backdrop of a middle class background for maximum reach. The visual approach is a balanced mix of pragmatism and emotions. The count of viewership and outnumbering likes are indicative of change in social attitudes.


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