The Inequalities and Democracy Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invites you to its public seminar. You can check our past events here.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
Please keep in mind that external guests will not be able to enter the building without prior registration.
The seminar starts with a 25-minute paper presentation followed by comments from the discussant. Discussion open to the audience follows. To actively take part in the discussion, please read the draft paper beforehand. The paper is available upon request from the authors.
Abstract:
Collaboration platforms on the Internet have become crucial tools for independent creative workers, facilitating connections with collaborators, users, and buyers. Such platforms carried the promise of better opportunities for women and other under-represented groups to access markets and collaborators, but evidence is mounting for that they rather perpetuate existing biases and inequalities. In previous work, we had found that the majority of women’s disadvantage in success and survival on GitHub stems from what they do – the gender typicality of their behavior in open source programming – rather than from a categorical discrimination of their gender. In this article we replicate our findings on another platform with a markedly different focus: Behance, a community for for graphic artists. We also study attention as a new outcome on both platforms. We found that female typicality of behavior is a significant negative predictor of attention, success, and survival on creative platforms, while the impact of categorical gender varies by outcome and field. We found support for the visibility paradox of women in technical fields: while female typicality of behavior is negatively related to attention, being female predicts a higher level of attention. We quantified the indirect impact of gender homophily on success via gendered behavior that accounts for 37% of the disadvantage of women in success. Our findings suggest that the negative impact of the gender typicality of behavior is a more general phenomena than our first study indicated, underlining the scope of the challenge of countering unconscious gender bias in the platform economy.
Speakers:
Balazs Vedres is the director of the PhD programme in Network Science at the Central European University, Vienna and a Senior Research Fellow at the Democracy Institute. Vedres' research furthers the agenda of developing data science and network science with social theoretical insight. His research results were published in the top journals of data science, network science, and sociology, with two recent articles in the American Journal of Sociology developing the pragmatist notion of structural folds: creative tensions in intersecting yet cognitively diverse cohesive communities. Vedres' recent research follows entrepreneurs, video game developers, jazz musicians, programmers, and graphic designers as they weave collaborative networks through their projects and recording sessions, analyzing questions of the sources of creativity, gender inequality, and the historical sustainability of innovation systems.
Orsolya Vasarhelyi obtained her doctoral degree from the Central European University in Network Data Science in 2020. Orsolya's research focuses on the underlying processes of women's marginalization in technical fields, using big data taken from collaborative platforms. She has had the privilege to participate in fellowships such as the Data Science for Social Good and Bridge Budapest, and she is an active organizer of the Hungarian branch of Women in Data Science Conference
Discussant:
Anna Adamecz is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University College London Social Research Institute (UCL SRI) in London and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics of the HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (KRTK KTI) in Budapest. She completed her PhD in Economics at the Central European University (CEU) with a focus on education economics and program evaluation. She uses state-of-the-art microeconometric methods and large-scale survey and administrative data to look at the causal effects of education policy, intergenerational educational mobility (in particular, first in family university graduates), gender gaps in education and the labor market, non-cognitive skills, fertility, and the effects of economic and social shocks on women and the next generations.
Chair:
Andrea Krizsan is Senior Research Fellow, Lead Researcher of the Inequalities and Democracy Working Group at the Democracy Institute and Professor at the Department of Public Policy and the Gender Studies Department. She works on the politics of inequalities and equality policy interventions in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Her current research focuses on gender equality aspects of de-democratization processes and the role of civil society in building democratic resilience and inclusive democratization processes. Besides her academic work Andrea also acts as the Chair of the CEU Senate Equal Opportunity Committee. Andrea has a PhD in Political Science from the Central European University.