Gendering the Research Pipeline

Women, transgender, and non-binary people are underrepresented in senior roles within academia with only 25% of UK professors identifying as women. At every part of the academic leaky pipeline, female researchers leave in larger numbers than their male colleagues because of systematic biases and discrimination within academia. Laura's PhD research examines the beginning of the leaky pipeline and the gender diversity of UK doctoral students, as they are not often the focus of research. Using the British Library's records on PhD theses (EThOS), a collection of over 500,000 doctoral theses from UK universities, the sex of the author will be inferred from their name on the EThOS record using name-to-gender detection algorithms and image processing. Following this a multilevel model will be built to establish the gender diversity of PhD students across disciplinary, departmental, and institutional levels to examine how diversity has varied across intellectual and geographical spaces.