Uppsala University, Lund University and Umeå University is jointly funding a postdoc project in gender studies led by Professor Gabriele Griffin at Uppsala University. Öznur Karakas, PhD in Information Knowledge and Society will work in this project, with one of the goals being to explore how the issue of gender is addressed in eSSENCE.
About the project: The Future is Now: Gender Mainstreaming as eSSENCE
The purpose of this project is to explore how the issue of gender is addressed in eSSENCE in order to suggest how a more gender-inclusive approach to e-science research might be achieved. Existing gender research shows that ‘adding more women’ may be a laudable aim but it is vital to analyse how this can be achieved in actuality. Recent work by Johanssen (2018) indicates that women are not necessarily absent from physics, for example, but unevenly distributed across different sub-domains. The first research question therefore is: how and why do different e-science domains attract different gender profiles? Second, research also repeatedly points to the ‘leaky pipeline’ (e.g. Payne 2018 in Nature blogs) of women exiting from science careers post-PhD. The second research question therefore is: how can conversion rates from PhD into early and mid e-science careers be improved to retain promising young female researchers? Thirdly, we know that different e-science domains attract diverse gender profiles so how can collaboration across disciplines and research sites help to generate more effective gender mainstreaming? Apart from research publications (articles in international peer-reviewed research journals), the outcomes of this postdoc research project will include i) policy recommendations regarding the improvement of conversion rates from PhD status to e-science careers among women; ii) a strategy for developing e-science related collaborations across disciplines and research sites; and iii) a strategy for science-society collaboration with a focus on gender integration.
About Dr Karakas
Öznur Karakaş is a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Center for Gender Research, working on gender mainstreaming in e-science. She completed her PhD at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Information and Knowledge Society in 2018. Her research interests include social movement studies, science and technology studies, philosophy of technology, information theory and new materialism.