Tag: Oxford

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The Proportion of Women in National Parliament as a Measure of Women’s Status in Society

In 2009, I examined the proportion of women in national parliaments as a measure of women’s status in society. Apparently, we get link rot here, too.

Representation in decision-making (i.e. the share of women in national legislatures) is often used as an indicator of the wider integration of women in political and everyday life. This research note examines whether the proportion of women in national parliament really can be regarded as a measure of women’s status in society. I argue — based on correlations and a scatter plot — that the proportion of women in parliament is a reasonably good indicator of status, with the benefit of being based on readily available data.

Working paper: Ruedin 2009 Status Working Paper

Ruedin, Didier. 2009. ‘The Proportion of Women in National Parliament as a Measure of Women’s Status in Society’. Oxford Sociology Working Papers 2009-05.
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Making an online lecture

Colin Mills has posted some useful advice on preparing online lectures using PowerPoint.

It’s a time consuming job to get even passable results. After I had written the script – which could easily take me 8-12 hours (and I already had the slides prepared) it would take 3 hours to record 50 minutes of material plus the time to turn the Powerpoints into a videos & upload them to YouTube.

The results are here.

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Academic genealogy

There are several projects out there to trace academic genealogy out there, the biggest one is probably the Academic Tree. The idea is to trace who was your supervisor’s supervisor’s … A while ago I looked into what this would look like for me. This being the social sciences, PhD advisors did not exist all the way back. I’m not sure how the Mathematics Genealogy Project go about this: do they include research assistants? (I did so for the ‘ancestors’ of David Glass.)

Funny enough, I’m not quite sure what this means. Sure, your PhD supervisor has a big impact on how you do research and how you see the world, but aren’t we more influenced by what we read and the courses we took before that, for example, and all the research we undertake after that. (I’m not even trying to think of causality here.) Is it at all relevant for me today that one of my academic ‘ancestors’ was quite outspoken against the eugenics movement when it was still quite popular? Whatever.