Gender and academic roles in graduate programs: analyses of brazilian government data.

Abstract

Brazilian researchers affiliated to graduate programs play a major role in scientific and technological development in the country. Hence, they have to cope with various academic roles, especially the core one: teaching. Considering Boudieu’s concept of ‘scientific capital’, this study aims at investigating whether female and male teacherresearchers have an equal share of academic activities with low ‘scientific capital’ return, such as teaching undergraduate courses, and high ‘scientific capital’ return, such as publication of journal articles. Official data from Brazilian Ministry of Education with information about the population of more than 52 thousand teacher-researchers, and available in 6,741 pdf files, were gathered in a single data matrix. Indicators of academic tasks and productivity were generated. Data analyses for the whole population did not how differences between gender and tasks. Nevertheless, analyses focusing on specific scientific areas indicated that in some fields women are having a larger share of less valued tasks than men: a burden that might help to explain the difference in productivity favoring men in these fields. As gender in science and technology is still an issue of high interest, our study aims at contributing to a better understanding of gender boundaries in this field.