Dean Kaye Husbands Fealing Co-Authors Book Chapter on Measuring the Gender Gap in Innovation

Posted October 11, 2023

The gender gap in science, technology, and innovation is a well-documented and persistent problem. According to Kaye Husbands Fealing, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, measuring both the gender gap and the reforms created to address it are necessary first steps in rectifying the problem.  

“Gender equality is No. 5 on the list of 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. From AI and energy innovation to advances in health and medicine, measuring and creating policy to address gender gaps holds enormous value for everyone,” said Husbands Fealing.

In a chapter of the newly released Handbook of Innovation Indicators and Measurement (second edition) entitled “Gender and Innovation: Indicators and Measurement Gaps,” Husbands Fealing and her co-authors, Georgia Tech Public Policy Ph.D. alumna Aubrey DeVeny Incorvaia and Professor Londa Schiebinger at Stanford University, discuss the limitations of current measurement strategies and suggest new ways to quantify and address the underrepresentation of women and marginalized groups in scientific innovation.

Previous scholarship by Husbands Fealing has established the value of gathering data that includes gender. In an article published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2019, Husbands Fealing and her co-authors used a data set of federal workers — which allowed comparison of outcomes by gender — to advance our understanding of the local processes that cause gender pay gaps in U.S. federal science agencies. The article won the Devah Pager Outstanding Article Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association in 2020.

Husbands Fealing noted that reforms which focus only on “fixing women” — for example, with additional training — fail to achieve equitable outcomes. If they are to effect positive change, she said, policies must also address the cultural and institutional issues that present barriers to women’s success — including pay gaps, implicit bias in hiring and promotion, and other factors.

In order to even the scales, researchers need complete and accurate data to help identify where the problems lie and how gender disparities change over time. But of the five most often-used platforms for collecting and analyzing such data, only two address gender. What’s more, none of the existing platforms allow researchers to study intersectional identities that include other factors such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability.

Husbands Fealing also serves as vice chair of the National Science Foundation Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, which delivered its report, Making Visible the Invisible: Understanding Intersectionality, to Congress earlier this year.

As an initial step, Husbands Fealing and her colleagues recommend that all existing data platforms and indicators for innovation collect information that allows researchers to compare outcomes by gender.

“At a minimum, we need to account for gender in our data-gathering,” said Husbands Fealing. “If we are to achieve our goal of equity, we need to advance evidence-based policies that include expectations for intersectional analysis throughout the research and development process.”

The article “Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach” was published September 2019 in the American Journal of Sociology. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/705514.