Early evidence indicates that the pandemic has profoundly and disproportionately impacted women, according to Professors Michelle Alexopoulos (Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts &Science) and Kelly Lyons (Faculty of Information), who have just been awarded a Catalyst Grant by the University’s Data Sciences Institute.
Alexopoulos and Lyons are among the 17 cross-disciplinary research teams to be funded for work using the transformative nature of data sciences to solve complex and pressing problems.
While many are predicting that the social and economic burden of the pandemic will be shouldered by women and girls worldwide, the differential impacts “are not yet fully documented, and it is not clear yet what this means for these communities going forward,” say Professors Alexopoulos and Lyons. More specifically, they will use data science methods to understand how Covid may have impacted male and female researchers and inventors differently.
“Our research will attempt to quantify the pandemic’s impacts on researchers and inventors across gender, location, and discipline by creating yearly measures of their productivity and research team diversity pre- and post-COVID,” the professors said in their proposal, emphasizing that to help policymakers mitigate the damage, it is important to have up-to-date accurate information and data.
The DSI Catalyst Grant will support their collaborative research team to apply data mining and natural language processing techniques to data on publications, grant applications and patents. The resulting metrics, and extracted location and gender identifiers, will be combined with socio-economic information on outbreaks, government interventions across jurisdictions (such as lockdowns and school closures), locations of researcher’s team members, and measures of gender diversity within research teams to explore how the magnitudes of the pandemic’s impacts are influenced by these factors.
“The global and research challenges we face today are increasingly complex. The DSI Catalyst Grant projects bring together collaborative research teams focused on the development of new data science methodology or the application of existing tools in innovative ways to address these challenges,” says Lisa Strug, director of the DSI. “We were floored by the cutting-edge advances proposed in the applications we received for our inaugural competition.”
Read more about the other Catalyst Grant projects and the earlier work of Professors Alexopoulos and Lyons.
