No Arabic abstract
This report summarises the work and results produced at the 146th European Study Group with Industry/co-creation event with society on the challenge textit{Breaking barriers for women in Science}. The aim of this challenge, proposed by the Cyprus-based non-profit AIPFE Cyprus-Women of Europe, was to quantify the barriers that women face in science so that eventually policy changes can take place in Cyprus and elsewhere. Two distinct but related challenges were considered. The first challenge was to quantify the wage gap between men and women in 28 European countries. In this connection, we analysed Eurostat data and developed a mathematical model quantifying how probable it is for countries to decrease their wage gap. Secondly, we analysed data provided by the University of Cyprus and determined the percentage of women and men in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) departments as they move up the academic ladder, starting from the undergraduate level. Studying the latter challenge is a first step in studying the wage gap in all Cypriot universities and in other universities abroad. This work was supported financially by the EU project SciShops.eu, the EU Mathematics for Industry Network (MI-NET) and several other organisations.
We present a sampling of analyses concerning the gender ratio of plenary speakers during the years 2000--2016 and make comparisons with other conferences, such as the APS April meeting. We hope this will invite discussion of ideas for how to make our field more accessible to women and minorities. We are preparing for an in-depth survey of the lattice field and welcome any ideas or suggestions. To leave post-conference comments and read about news affecting women in our field, see our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WLQCD
With Cyrano, Voltaire, and Verne, France provided important milestones in the history of early science fiction. However, even if the genre was not very common a few centuries ago, there were numerous additional contributions by French-speaking writers. In this paper, we review two cases of interplanetary novels written in the second half of the eighteenth century and sharing a rare particularity: their authors were female. Voyages de Milord Ceton was imagined by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert whereas Cornelie Wouters de Wasse conceived Le Char Volant. While their personal lives were very different, and their writing style too, both authors share in these novels a common philosophy in which equality -- between ranks but also between genders -- takes an important place. Their works thus clearly fit into the context of the Enlightenment.
The Stable Marriage Problem is to find a one-to-one matching for two equally sized sets of agents. Due to its widespread applications in the real world, especially the unique importance to the centralized match maker, a very large number of questions have been extensively studied in this field. This article considers a generalized form of stable marriage problem, where different numbers of men and women need to be matched pairwise and the emergence of single is inevitable. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations confirm that even small deviations from equal number of two sides can have a large impact on matching solution of Gale-Shapley Algorithm. These results provide insights to many of the real-world applications when matching two sides with unequal number.
Women are set back in the labor market after becoming mother. Intuitively, childcare services are able to promote women employment as they may reconciliate the motherhood penalty. However, most known studies concentrated on the effects of childcare services on fertility rate, instead of quantitative analyses about the effects on women employment. Using worldwide panel data and Chinese data at province level, this paper unfolds the quantitative relationship between childcare services and women employment, that is, the attendance rate of childcare services is positively correlated with the relative employment rate of women to men. Further analysis suggests that such a positive impact may largely resulted from breaking the vulnerable employment dilemma.
John Desmond Bernal (1901-1970) was one of the most eminent scientists in molecular biology, and also regarded as the founding father of the Science of Science. His book The Social Function of Science laid the theoretical foundations for the discipline. In this article, we summarize four chief characteristics of his ideas in the Science of Science: the socio-historical perspective, theoretical models, qualitative and quantitative approaches, and studies of science planning and policy. China has constantly reformed its scientific and technological system based on research evidence of the Science of Science. Therefore, we analyze the impact of Bernal Science-of-Science thoughts on the development of Science of Science in China, and discuss how they might be usefully taken still further in quantitative studies of science.