Sheppard, Laura Harriet;
(2024)
Gendering the research pipeline: A quantitative feminist geographical approach.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Women are underrepresented in UK academia, with only 29% of full professors identifying as women, despite more women than men studying at the undergraduate (57%) and postgraduate-taught (60%) levels in the UK. Much of the current research focuses on either the micro-scale of a handful of women’s experiences, or macro-scale studies on entire regions or disciplines, often looking only at senior academics. Geography and place and the experiences of PhD students are rarely considered. Therefore, the aim of my PhD is to examine how gendered patterns in UK PhD study have evolved over time and across intellectual space within departments, institutions, and disciplines. The British Library’s EThOS metadata was used in this research as it offers a unique opportunity to explore UK PhDs due to its size. The gender of each PhD student was inferred from their name using name-to-gender inferencing algorithms. After this, a series of multilevel models were used to examine the platial and temporal patterns from 1990 onwards. From a series of variance components models, the model for sub-disciplines accounted for the most variation in the likelihood that PhD students are female, compared to the other variables like universities or year. Creative Arts and Education are skewed towards female PhDs, whereas Computer Science and Engineering & Technology are skewed towards male PhDs. The ‘places’ that are skewed towards female PhDs were Roehampton and Queen Margaret and the male skewed institutions were Cranfield and Heriot-Watt, all with long histories in specialising in highly gendered disciplines. Using gender-skewed disciplines and institutions, senior female academics were selected and interviewed on their experiences as PhD students and supervisors. The results of the research paint a picture of the multi-scalar dynamics at play within Higher Education for PhD students, rather than simply looking at HE as a whole.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Gendering the research pipeline: A quantitative feminist geographical approach |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | Data Science, Gender, Higher Education, Inequalities, Quantitative Human Geography |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10188128 |
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