Abstracts

Gender differences in collaboration and career progression in physics. (Mingrong She)

We examine gender differences in collaboration networks and academic career progression in physics. We use the likelihood and time to become a principal investigator (PI) and the length of an author’s career to measure career progression. Utilising logistic regression and accelerated failure time models, we examine whether the effect of collaboration behaviour varies by gender. We find that, controlling for the number of publications, the relationship between collaborative behaviour and career progression is almost the same for men and women. Specifically, we find that those who eventually reach principal investigator (PI) status tend to have published with more unique collaborators. In contrast, publishing repeatedly with the same highly interconnected collaborators and/or larger number of co-authors per publication is characteristic of shorter career lengths and not attaining PI status. We observe that women tend to collaborate in more tightly connected and larger groups than men. Finally, we observe that women are less likely to attain the status of PI throughout their careers and have a lower survival probability compared to men, which calls for policies to close this crucial gap.

Additionally, I will briefly introduce my ongoing project on the temporal evolution of collaboration networks and scientific outcomes.

Gender Equality Policies within Universities (Camille Gillet)

Since 2013, universities have been required to establish officers dedicated to gender-equality issues in order to enable local steering of this categorical policy. Here, I focus on the way in which gender-related issues intersect with a traditional domain of public policy: higher education. The aim of this work is to analyse the emergence, institutionalisation, and implementation of policies dedicated to gender equality within university governance. These equality missions have a cross-cutting role: combating sexist and sexual violence, promoting professional equality, providing training, and raising awareness around these issues. They are carried out by academic staff within their home universities.

The gender-equality officers in universities intervene directly in their institution and its functioning. Their positioning within the university is ambivalent: they are both members of the institution and expected to adopt a critical stance toward its practices. They are situated at the interface of several social worlds: on the one hand, the institution, and on the other, the spheres of social policy or activism, similar to equivalent roles in companies such as “diversity managers,” which are “strongly shaped by issues and principles exogenous to the managerial world” (Bereni, 2019). The sociology of gender policies characterises this embeddedness in diverse networks—both institutional and activist (Katzenstein, 1998) and highlights the specific position of feminists within institutions, who are neither fully insiders nor fully outsiders. It is this tension stemming from the positioning of the equality-mission project at the interface of different social worlds that interests me here, a tension between the potentially subversive nature of gender-equality policies in universities (embodied by the mission officers) and their anchoring in institutional logics.

Biography

Mingrong She

Mingrong is a PhD candidate at the Department of Data Analytics and Digitalisation (School of Business and Economics) of Maastricht University since October 2021. Previously, she graduated with double master degrees in Economics both from University of Nottingham and University of Konstanz. Currently her research lays in applying statistical inference and network analysis to large-scale gender-annotated bibliometric datasets to investigate gender mixing and its impact on dropout, which could develop agent-based models of enrollment, promotion, and dropout in academia and use these to investigate mitigation strategies.

Camille Gillet

-Member of RT 1 of the French Sociological Association (AFS): Knowledge, Work, Professions
-Co-founder of the seminar Les Terrains du genre? (Gemass, Philomel, Sorbonne University, 2022–2024)
-Co-organizer of the seminar Actualité des sciences sociales (GEMASS – Sorbonne University, with Hugo Touzet, 2021–2022)
-Member of the national coordination team of the Acadiscri survey (Inequalities of treatment, study and working conditions in higher education and research)
-Member of the collective Jeunes Chercheur·ses Philomel

PhD supervisor: Anne Revillard (Sciences Po – CRIS et LIEPP) 
Funding: Doctoral contract, Sorbonne University (2019–2022); Teaching and Research Assistant (ATER), Sorbonne University (2022–2024)

PhD defense scheduled for October 13, 2025, at Sciences Po
Gender Equality Policies within Universities
Jury: Jérôme Aust (Sciences Po – CSO), Laure Bereni (CNRS – CMH), Sophie Jacquot (UCLouvain), Christine Musselin (Sciences Po – CSO), Anne Revillard (Sciences Po – CRIS & LIEPP, PhD Supervisor), Elise Verley (Sorbonne University – GEMASS)