International Women’s Day

The MPIfG’s fourth annual event to mark International Women’s Day took place on March 9 this year with a program featuring talks by two external speakers on structural inequalities in academia. Sabine Trepte, professor of media psychology at Hohenheim University, opened proceedings with a presentation of her gender-related findings on citations in communication science. Despite a significant increase in the number of women publishing in the DACH countries since the year 2000, that increase is not reflected in citation numbers. In response, Trepte codeveloped “Diversity-X,” a tool that analyzes bibliographies for the gender and national diversity of citations and helps to make otherwise invisible imbalances visible. The sociologist Dounia Bourabain (Hasselt University, Belgium) continued the theme with her talk on gender and racial inequalities in contemporary academia. Reporting on interviews she has conducted with women researchers at different career levels, she presented everyday sexism and racism in institutional contexts, reflected in practices such as exclusion, undervaluation, and paternalism, the latter especially experienced by non-white racialized women. Bourabain also criticized what she referred to as a purely symbolic kind of “happy diversity,” which gives the impression of diversity but does little to change existing power structures. Accompanying the talks were various relevant resources, including an information stand, book exchange, suggestion box, and details of charitable organizations supporting women and diversity. The event closed with a film screening of the documentary “The Day Iceland Stood Still,” which tells the story of the 1975 strike by around 90 percent of the island’s women. The Women’s Day organizing committee was made up of Institute members and the gender equality officers.