The Department of Informatics and Networked Systems is pleased to welcome Dr. Kristina Lerman of the University of Southern California as the featured speaker for the next installment of the DINS Seminar Series. On October 26, Dr. Lerman will discuss “Gender Disparities and the Glass Ceiling Effect in Science.” This virtual presentation will take place from 11 am to 12 noon (EST) via Zoom (https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94529250331).
Abstract: Gender disparities persist in science, systematically reducing career opportunities for women. As a result, women remain a small minority in many fields, especially in senior positions. The dearth of elite women scientists, in turn, leaves fewer women to serve as mentors and role models for the younger generation. We explore gender disparities in citations, showing that women receive less recognition for their work relative to men, and that this cannot be explained purely by their minority status. Instead, gender disparity arises from biased individual preferences about who to cite, that are amplified by cumulative advantage. We present a model for the growth of citations that captures this mechanism and analyze it to show that its predictions align with real-world observations. In the second part of the talk, I present a study of prominent scholars who were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. I identify gender disparities in the structure of citation networks of these researchers and show that these differences are strong enough to accurately predict the scholar's gender. These results provide further evidence that a scholar's gender plays a role in the mechanisms of success in science.
Bio: Dr. Lerman is Research Professor of Computer Science and Principal Scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute. She is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of USC, and a Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department. An expert in complex multi-agent systems, Dr. Lerman has received numerous grants on social data and other topics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Information Sciences Institute (ISI) early in her career. Dr. Lerman earned her Doctoral Degree in Physics, at the University of California - Santa Barbara; she also earned her Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Princeton University.
Her current work revolves around deciphering the structure and dynamics of "social web" sites such as Twitter, Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Among her goals: automatically organize collective knowledge, discover the structure of user-generated communities, and predict emerging trends and group behavior. Her empirical and experimental studies identified the importance of cognitive biases to understanding individual and collective behavior online.
For more information about the DINS Seminar Series, please visit this site: DINS Seminar Series: 2022-23 | Department of Informatics and Networked Systems | University of Pittsburgh