Shifting winds: Gendered structures of academic mentorship

Jiabao Li, Houjiang Liu, Jilie Zeng, Di Wu, Ying Ding, Alec McGail

View presentation:2022-10-19T14:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2022-10-19T14:00:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Mentor tree of Francis Galton. Male mentees tilt left. Female mentees tilt right. Unknown genders grow straight. Galton’s tree sits at the base of the widest and tallest tree in this dataset. For a tree to be wide or tall it must be old and enduring.

The live footage of the talk, including the Q&A, can be viewed on the session page, VISAP: Papers 1.

Abstract

Every researcher alive today had their mentors, those who helped assimilate them into a life of scholarly work. And in turn they each had their mentors, and so on to the dawn of knowledge. In the same way, each researcher’s mentees take their perspectives and methods to future mentees, and to their mentees, etc. These comprise the roots and branches, respectively, of the academic tree of a single researcher. If we let these ancestors’ and descendants’ genders affect these trees like a “wind,” most curl nearly to the earth. We depict and describe the structure of these trees, and how this wind has changed over the decades. To set these trees growing upright again we visualize giving differential weight to male and female researchers.