Impact of Gender and Conference Size on Conference Preferences – Employing Natural Language Processing
This pilot study focuses on the impact of academic conferences from a gender-based perspective. What motivates faculty members to attend conferences? .
- Pub. date: February 15, 2018
- Pages: 45-52
- 405 Downloads
- 1164 Views
- 6 Citations
This pilot study focuses on the impact of academic conferences from a gender-based perspective. What motivates faculty members to attend conferences? Which conferences do they choose? Can differences be found between men and women in their attitude to the effect of the conference and its contribution to their academic work, in light of many studies on the significance women attach to the value of family and its prioritization over their career? The study dealt with a case study of one university in Israel. Ninety four academic faculty members from a variety of departments completed a questionnaire, including 60.9% women and 39.1% men. The main finding is that, among both men and women, academic conferences are perceived as contributing to their professional development. Faculty members addressed the contribution of conferences to their professional development. Findings showed that professional focusing during conferences results in publications and develops interest in the conference – and not vice versa, i.e., it is not interest in the conference that leads to publications. It was also found that the size of the conference predicts the significance of the focus on professional aspects. From a gender perspective, women prefer small conferences. In addition, for women, although they prefer small conferences they attach significance to collaborations that lead to professional focusing on their fields of research. Women appear to bring their "family-oriented patterns" to their work, explaining their inclination to small and more intimate conferences. The research findings might have an impact on the consideration given to planning academic conferences in order to reach the academic outcomes expected by faculty members who perceive conferences as an essential platform for their professional development.
Keywords: Gender, conference, natural language
6
References
Akbar, M. M., & Parvez, N. (2009). Impact of service quality, trust, and customer satisfaction on customers loyalty. ABAC Journal, 29(1), 24-38.
Alterman, R. (2002). Women and Men at the Technion - Faculty and Students, Annual Report. [Hebrew]
Ariel, M. (winter, 1989). Worker, workers, female, male. Noga: Feminist Journal, 17. [Hebrew]
Babcock, L. & Laschever, S. (2003). Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Princeton University Press.
Churchman, A. (2006). Women and Men at the Technion - Faculty and Students, 2006. Annual Report.
Committee for examining the gender composition at the Hebrew University (November, 2004). Summary report. Jerusalem. [Hebrew]
Cooper, J. & Weaverm K. D. (2003). Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dang, A., Moh'd, A., Islam, A., Minghim, R., Smit, M., & Milios, E. (2016). Reddit temporal n-gram corpus and its applications on paraphrase and semantic similarity in social media using a topic-based latent semantic analysis. Paper presented at the Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers.
Davidovitch, N., & Druckman, E. (2017). Utilization of leisure time and academic careers – A multidisciplinary gender-based perspective. Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 75(5). 452-466. ISSN 1822-7864.
Eckhaus, E. (2016). Corporate transformational leadership's effect on financial performance. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 13(1), 90-102.
Eckhaus, E., & Ben-Hador, B. (2017). Gossip and gender differences: A content analysis approach. Journal of Gender Studies, 1-12. doi:10.1080/09589236.2017.1411789
Ghasempour, Z., Bakar, M. N., & Jahanshahloo, G. R. (2014). Mix-method design in educational research: Strengths and challenges. International Journal of Pedagogical Innovations, 2(2), 83-90.
Gray, R., Fitch, M., Davis, C. & Phillips, C. 1996. Breast cancer and prostate cancer self-help groups: Reflections on differences. Psycho-oncology, 5(2), 137–42.
Haberfeld, Y. & Shenhav, Y. (October, 1990). The effect of organizational characteristics on sex-based stratification in academic departments in Israel – longitudinal analysis. Series of discussion papers. Pinhas Sapir Center for Development, Tel Aviv University. [Hebrew]
Hilsen, L.R. & Wadsworth, E.C. (2002). A guide to faculty development. Gillepsie, K.H. Eds. Anker Publishing: Bolton, MA.
Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling, 6(1), 1-55.
Izraeliy, D. (2003). Gender politics in Israel: The case of affirmative action for women directors. Women’s Studies International Forum, 26(2), 109–128.
Kongsgard, K. W., Nordbotten, N. A., Mancini, F., Haakseth, R., & Engelstad, P. E. (2017). Data leakage prevention for secure cross-domain information exchange. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(10), 37-43.
Layton, R., Watters, P. A., & Dazeley, R. (2015). Authorship analysis of aliases: Does topic influence accuracy? Natural Language Engineering, 21(4), 497-518.
Messer Yaron, H. & Kahanovich, S. (December, 2003). Women and science – Review of the situation in Israel. Council for Advancement of Women in Science and Technology. [Hebrew]
Razavi, A. H., Matwin, S., De Koninck, J., & Amini, R. R. (2014). Dream sentiment analysis using second order soft co-occurrences (SOSCO) and time course representations. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 42(3), 393-413.
Toren, N. (2005). Women in Israeli academy: Images, numbers, discrimination. Tel Aviv: Ramot, Tel Aviv University. [Hebrew]
Wadsworth, E.C. (ed.) (1994). To improve the academy resources for faculty. Instructional and Organizational Development, 13, New Forms Press.
Weinreb, G. (2016). The gaps between men and women in academia - especially in the exact sciences (September 30, 2016). Available at: https://www.globes.co.il/news/article.aspx?did=1001155220