NASP International and Interdisciplinary Seminars

Kathrin Zippel (Northeastern University of Boston)
Women in global science

25 May 2018, 14.30
Room A
NASP Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences
Via Pace, 10 - Milan

Abstract

Scientific and engineering research is increasingly global, and international collaboration can be essential to academic success. Yet even as administrators and policymakers extol the benefits of global science, few recognize the diversity of international research collaborations and their participants, or take gendered inequalities into account. Women in Global Science is the first book to consider systematically the challenges and opportunities that the globalization of scientific work brings to U.S. academics, especially for women faculty. Kathrin Zippel looks to the STEM fields as a case study, where gendered cultures and structures in academia have contributed to an underrepresentation of women. While some have approached underrepresentation as a national concern with a national solution, Zippel highlights how gender relations are reconfigured in global academia. For U.S. women in particular, international collaboration offers opportunities to step outside of exclusionary networks at home. International collaboration is not the panacea to gendered inequalities in academia, but, as Zippel argues, international considerations can be key to ending the steady attrition of women in STEM fields and developing a more inclusive academic world.

Short bio
Kathrin Zippel is an associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University. Her expertise is on gender, science and organizations. Her research partly funded by NSF has explored gender and global transformations of science and education. In her book, Women in Global Science: Advancing Careers Through International Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 2017), she argues that global science is the new frontier for women, providing both opportunities and challenges as gender shapes the dynamics and practices of international research.
She has also published on gender politics in the workplace, public and social policy, social movements, welfare states, and globalization in the United States and Europe. Her book The Politics of Sexual Harassment in the United States, the European Union and Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2006) won several awards.
Zippel served as Research Director and Co-PI of Northeastern's National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant. She is a Co-chair of the Social Exclusion and Inclusion Seminar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and was a residential fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program J.F. Kennedy School. She held a Humboldt Research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich; was a Guest at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the WZB Social Science Research Center in Berlin, and the European University Institute in Florence. Zippel received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a post-doc at the European Union Center of New York at Columbia University.

This seminar is part of the NASP International and Interdisciplinary Seminars Series 2018.