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Why women academicians don't flex, and why Estonia should?

Why women academicians don't flex, and why Estonia should?
Gender differences in how scientists present the importance of their research: observational study (Lerchenmueller et al., 2019)

Mind the graph

In a 2019 study published in the medical journal the BMJ, the researchers found that male scientific researchers tend to promote themselves and their ideas more than their female counterparts. The superlative term 'novel', as it turns out, is the most used term, along with the words such as 'promising', 'unique', and 'favourable', which are used mainly by male teams, than female teams.

Professors from the University of Mannheim, Yale University and Harvard Medical School conducted the study to see the framing differences between male and female researchers reporting their research findings. They also analysed if positive framing is associated with higher citations by examining over 1,00,000 clinical research papers and approximately more than 6 million articles on general life sciences published between the years 2002 to 2017.

Interestingly, after analysing the language used in the writings, researchers identified 25 words with positive connotations, like 'unique', 'novel', 'remarkable', 'promising', 'excellent', and 'robust' (See the graph).

Sadly, research papers having female lead authors were 21.4% less likely to present the findings positively – frame the language in a way that shows results to be highly significant. For the association between positive framing and citations in the literature, the study found that language of positive frame in findings led to 13% more citations than papers lacking positive words.

Unfortunately, these findings are not limited to clinical research and life sciences. Social science has highlighted the existing gender disparities in the professional labour market (see: Blowing your own trumpet: exploring gendered dynamics of self-promotion in the classical music profession).

The normative beliefs that women are less achievement-oriented and communal have affected their careers. There could be two competing explanations for this, one that men do more original research, but the evidence of that is very hard to come by (a lot of us have tried!), the other which is a good working hypotheses is that men tend to cite themselves more, a study in 2017 which can be found here looked at it. There is also a very interesting scientific truth at work, women researchers tend to get more comments. Consequently they end up making their writing more straightforward and cut out the halo words like novel, promising, unique, and favourable.

The muted language of female researchers may influence their career trajectories regardless of their gender as scientists. Identifying gender differences in the self-presentation of research is important given the connection with career progress in academics and industry. It may significantly influence salaries and its negotiations, pattern of hiring, funding decision of agencies and promotions. Of course, other factors perhaps contribute to differences in career advancements. But to achieve similar presentation and recognition regardless of gender, scientists first have to be able to close the considerable professional gender gap of self-promotion. Women don't apply for the job if they do not check off each item on the list, while men apply even with 60% of the qualifications.

Women hold themselves back and underestimate their skills. Two experiments conducted in 1992 found that female students predicted to receive GPA scores lower than what they received compared to male students. Even when the prediction was supposed to be shared in private, the finding remained the same. The style of self-presentation among women is found to be modest while protecting the self-esteem of others around them and appearing less masculine.

How can we overcome this handicap of confidence and underrepresentation?

It seems to be a pandora's box. Women simply don't ask. Sociological and anthropological studies have widely investigated that. Most social contexts promote particular patterns of behaviour that strengthen gender stereotypes, including conformity to feminine roles, wherein women are expected to have specific characteristics of modesty, passivity and domesticity. The behavioural styles in society continuously prevented women from surmounting lower self-presentation.

Gender bias can even change the way we think of most neutral words such as 'people'. An analysis of approximately 630 billion words showed that 'people' is interpreted as 'men'. A common belief that men can do all kinds of things whereas women can only do stereotypical things is most likely the reason behind this overlap – why we think of men when thinking of people.

Women don't apply for the job if they do not check off each item on the list, while men apply even with 60% of the qualifications.

It is remarkable to see how we have grown up with these prejudices, without many realisations in everyday behaviour. Even after centuries of struggle to be as equally visible and present as men, women still require to shatter glass-ceilings.

Deconstructing the mistaken perception is not only limited to believing what women can do but also about weakening the beliefs around how society is and ultimately cleaning the spillover and delivering influence appeals.

As published in nature 4 days ago: To advance equality for women, use the evidence.


Novel thinking can save lives. Just ask the Estonians. When the economic crisis hit the world in 2007, 08, and 09 it hit the Estonians particularly bad. However, recovering from the crash they have managed to create some of the most innovative, and far reaching policy decisions. Some of the fascinating things they have managed to do can be read here.

One that is particularly fascinating is the one that went into testing in 2019, and it has managed to create a positive spillover. Before we get into that let us take a look at ownership of vehicles per capita in the world, and Estonia.

Motor vehicle ownership excluding two wheelers in the world plotted with GDP.
Zoomed data plotted to illustrate the fact that Estonia sits fairly high up in the vehicle ownership in the world.

Road accidents in Estonia are according to departments concerned caused primarily due to irresponsible driving. As opposed to weather, or other public safety concerns elsewhere. Though the rate of accidents in Estonia compared to the rest of the world was fairly low (see the graph below). The government continues to have an aspirational road safety policy.

Road Traffic Deaths (SDG 3.6) Estonia is way below the world, and also below the EU levels. EU has been prioritising road safety as a function of policy and rewarding cities doing the most.

In 2019 an interesting experiment started between the city of Tallinn and Rapla, those who were caught speeding were given a choice, pay a fine, or take a timeout. The timeout meant the person had to wait for a period of 45 to 60 minutes depending on the limit of over-speeding. If caught over-speeding by 20 km/h they had to wait for 45 minutes, if they were over-speeding by 21 - 40 km/h they had to park and wait for an hour. The idea is they could chose to pay the fine in time, rather than money.

This is interesting as in Estonia speeding fines are not kept on record and therefore there is no cumulative addition leading to revoking of license, or aggrandising the fine to add to the speeding lottery. Unlike their neighbouring country Finland the Estonians do not have a system for scaling up fines with respect to income.

The idea for it came during an inter-departmental innovation meeting between the interior ministry, and the police. The set up of these innovation units is also very interesting. The innovation unit is part of a department and not a separate entity, they have to propose, test out the idea, ensure fieldwork is also done by the, reducing considerably opportunity cost, and the dreaded bureaucracy. The innovation units have to report any issues with scaling up.

One of the biggest issues with scaling it up was the manpower required by the police to mandate and verify the timeout. However, one of the surprising aspect of this experiment was that the people supported it, rather than being upset by it. The project manager for the innovation unit was quoted in The Economist saying the idea was seen as more egalitarian, and reasonable for the offence, and not a way to fill state coffers.

The interesting take from this is to have policy experiments with specific goals aligned with welfare measures, and pro-active interventions to figure feasibility. For example though this is a joint project between two departments it was also discussed post-rollout in a practitioners conference held in Tallinn that year. The presentation by Elari Kassemets on this experiment can be found here. It is detailed, and breaks down the intervention in sum of its parts.

As of 2020 the experiment is being scaled up as a legislation. Keeping to the ethos of the innovation unit, let us first experiment, and change laws later.

The approach to interventions has to be specific to geography, and culture instead of academic ideas taken from cradle to grave in different settings.

& everyone @TBR.

Contribution by Fazli & Everyone @TBR


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