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Gender Inequality and the Research Imperative – What Is the Impact of the Internet?

Gender Inequality and the Research Imperative – What Is the Impact of the Internet?. Anne Manuel University of Bristol. What is This Paper About?. Aim – to consider the effect that increased use of the Internet might have had on gendered research culture in UK academe

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Gender Inequality and the Research Imperative – What Is the Impact of the Internet?

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  1. Gender Inequality and the Research Imperative – What Is the Impact of the Internet? Anne Manuel University of Bristol

  2. What is This Paper About? • Aim – to consider the effect that increased use of the Internet might have had on gendered research culture in UK academe • Part of a larger mixed methods study • Quantitative data from a survey looking at several aspects of Internet use amongst a sample of male and female academics

  3. Background 1 – Why is it important? • Unequal academy (Knights and Richards 2003) • Research and the RAE (Harley 2003, Court 1999) • The Digital Divide (Liff and Shepherd 2004)

  4. Background 2 – Research Culture and Gender • Publish or perish – RAE • The Game (Lucas 2001) • The stakes (Court 1999) • Meritocracy (Knights and Richards 2003, Harley 2003)

  5. Background 3 – Internet and Gender • Digital gender divide (Ford and Miller 1996, Schumacher and Morahan-Martin 2001) • Differences in use (Liff and Shepherd 2004) • Technofeminism – communicating and networking

  6. Background 4 – the survey • Initial data gathering exercise • Informing interview series • Developing some initial indicators • Making contacts in the community

  7. Method • Online survey using a tool developed at ILRT • 12 pre and 11 post 1992 universities • 3 disciplines economics, history, biology • Three separate contacts • 214 responses

  8. Responses • Approx 11% rate • 71:29 ratio male to female • Age • Part-time/fulltime • Pre-post 1992 universities • Focus of roles

  9. Use of New Technologies - range

  10. Use of New Technologies - extent

  11. Importance of the Internet to Academics • What would suffer most if no Internet for 1 month? • 7% of women and 19% of men said ‘nothing’ • Literature searching only significant association

  12. Comments • ‘I would be able to get on with real research’ • ‘Too scary to think about’ • ‘All of it but I would be a much happier person’

  13. Home Access

  14. Attitudes towards the Internet

  15. Conclusions • Isolated differences between men and women • Some significant departures: • Home pages • Searching for conferences and publishers/journals • Reliance on the Internet

  16. Conclusions • Home access – qualitative analysis • Attitudes – quality vs quantity

  17. Anne Manuel Anne.manuel@bristol.ac.uk http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/ilrt/internetsurvey

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