INGENIO CSIC-UPV, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
Departamento de Sociologia I, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 7;15(12):e0243549. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243549. eCollection 2020.
The importance of participation in academic conferences is well known for members of the scientific community. It is not only for the feedback and the improvement of the work, it is also about career development, building networks and increasing visibility. Nevertheless, women continue to be under-represented in these academic events and even more so in the most visible positions such as speaking roles. This paper presents the development of a tool based on performance indicators, which will allow monitoring and evaluating gender roles and inequalities in academic conferences in order to tackle the underrepresentation of women. The study identifies relevant perspectives (participation, organizational structure and attitudes) and designs specific lists of performance indicators for each of them. The tool is based on a combination of two multicriteria techniques, Analytic Hierarchy Process and Analytic Hierarchy Process Sort, and a qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews and information gathered from a focus group. The use of the AHP multi-criteria decision technique has allowed us to weight the indicators according to the opinion of several experts, and with them to be able to generate from these weightings composite indicators for each of the three dimensions. The most relevant indicators were for the participation dimension. Additionally, the tool developed has been applied to an academic conference which has been monitored in real time. The results are shown as a traffic light visualization approach, where red means bad performance, yellow average performance and green good performance, helping us to present the results for each indicator. Finally, proposals for improvement actions addressed to the red indicators are explained. The work carried out highlights the need to broaden the study of gender equality in academic conferences, not only regarding the participation but also the performance of different roles and functions.
学术会议对于科学界成员的重要性是众所周知的。它不仅是为了获得反馈和改进工作，也是为了职业发展、建立网络和提高知名度。然而，女性在这些学术活动中仍然代表性不足，在演讲等最显眼的职位上更是如此。本文介绍了一种基于绩效指标的工具的开发，该工具将允许监测和评估学术会议中的性别角色和不平等现象，以解决女性代表性不足的问题。该研究确定了相关视角（参与、组织结构和态度），并为每个视角设计了具体的绩效指标列表。该工具基于两种多标准技术（层次分析法和层次分析法排序）的组合，以及基于深入访谈和焦点小组收集的信息的定性分析。使用层次分析法多标准决策技术使我们能够根据几位专家的意见对指标进行加权，并根据这些权重为三个维度中的每一个生成综合指标。最相关的指标是参与维度。此外，还将开发的工具应用于实时监测的学术会议。结果以红绿灯可视化方式呈现，其中红色表示表现不佳，黄色表示平均表现，绿色表示表现良好，这有助于我们展示每个指标的结果。最后，解释了针对红色指标的改进措施建议。所开展的工作强调了需要拓宽学术会议中性别平等的研究，不仅要关注参与情况，还要关注不同角色和职能的表现。
