Al Tamime Reham, Weber Ingmar
Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar.
PeerJ Comput Sci. 2022 Jun 21;8:e994. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.994. eCollection 2022.
Boosting the number of women and girls entering careers involving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) is crucial to achieving gender equality, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Girls and women tend to gravitate away from STEM fields at multiple stages from childhood through mid-career. The leaky pipeline is a metaphor often used to describe the loss of women in STEM and arguably other fields before reaching senior roles. Do interests expressed on social media mirror the leaky pipeline phenomenon? In this article, we collected advertisement data (reach estimates) from Facebook and Instagram disaggregated by US metros, age, gender, and interests related to STEM. We computed the Gender Gap Index (GGI) for each US metro and age group. We found that on Instagram, the GGIs for interest in decrease as users' age increases, suggesting that relatively there is evidence that that women, compared to men, are losing interest in STEM at older ages. In particular, we find that on Instagram, there are plausible relative trends but implausible absolute levels. Nevertheless, is this enough to conclude that online data available from Instagram mirror the leaky pipeline phenomenon? To scrutinize this, we compared the GGIs for an interest in with the GGIs for placebo interests unrelated to STEM. We found that the GGIs for placebo interests follow similar age patterns as the GGIs for the interest in across US metros. Second, we attempted to control for the time spent on the platform by computing a usage intensity gender ratio based on the difference between daily and monthly active users. This analysis showed that the usage intensity gender ratio is higher among teenagers (13-17 years) than other older age groups, suggesting that teenage girls are more engaged on the platform that teenage boys. We hypothesize that usage intensity differences, rather than inherent interest changes, might create the illusion of a leaky pipeline. Despite the previously demonstrated value and huge potential of social media advertisement data to study social phenomena, we conclude that there is little evidence that this novel data source can measure the decline in interest in STEM for young women in the USA.
增加从事科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）相关职业的女性和女孩数量对于实现性别平等至关重要，而性别平等是联合国可持续发展目标之一。从童年到职业生涯中期的多个阶段，女孩和女性往往会逐渐远离STEM领域。“人才流失管道”是一个常被用来描述女性在STEM领域以及其他领域在担任高级职位之前流失情况的比喻。社交媒体上表达的兴趣是否反映了人才流失管道现象呢？在本文中，我们收集了来自脸书和照片墙的广告数据（覆盖范围估计），这些数据按美国大都市、年龄、性别以及与STEM相关的兴趣进行了分类。我们计算了每个美国大都市和年龄组的性别差距指数（GGI）。我们发现，在照片墙上，随着用户年龄的增长，对[具体STEM领域]兴趣的GGI会下降，这表明相对而言，有证据表明与男性相比，女性在年龄较大时对STEM的兴趣正在丧失。特别是，我们发现在照片墙上，存在看似合理的相对趋势，但绝对水平却不合理。然而，仅凭这一点就能得出照片墙上的在线数据反映了人才流失管道现象的结论吗？为了仔细研究这一点，我们将对[具体STEM领域]兴趣的GGI与与STEM无关的安慰剂兴趣的GGI进行了比较。我们发现，在美国各都市中，安慰剂兴趣的GGI与对[具体STEM领域]兴趣的GGI呈现出相似的年龄模式。其次，我们试图通过根据日活跃用户和月活跃用户之间的差异计算使用强度性别比来控制在该平台上花费的时间。该分析表明，青少年（13 - 17岁）的使用强度性别比高于其他年龄组，这表明十几岁的女孩比十几岁的男孩在该平台上更活跃。我们推测，使用强度差异而非内在兴趣变化可能会造成人才流失管道的假象。尽管之前已经证明社交媒体广告数据在研究社会现象方面具有价值和巨大潜力，但我们得出的结论是，几乎没有证据表明这种新的数据来源能够衡量美国年轻女性对STEM兴趣的下降情况。
