Smithsonian-001

The loss of skilled women from the STEM workforce in academia has not gone unnoticed…[but] even with policies in place, a change in broader culture will be necessary to precipitate the desired changes.

by Sumana Sharma

The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is usually attributed to the ‘leaky pipeline phenomenon’, according to which an increasing proportion of women leave their occupational fields at each stage along their career paths. This attrition is most pronounced for the academic biological sciences, in which the most significant attrition occurs at the postgraduate-to-group leader transition. To illustrate: in the UK in 2014/15, 66% of bioscience postgraduate students, but only 18% of professors, were female.

A huge gender difference in leadership positions is evident across all STEM fields: overall, 82% of all professors are men, as of 2014. This attrition of women in the STEM workforce raises questions over specific barriers faced by women in this field for career advancement. These barriers can be multi-faceted; thus, accurately identifying the main barriers and designing policies to address them will be essential to resolving gender disparity in the field of STEM.

Read full article ↵

by Victoria Plutshack

Smart technologies, which can communicate and share information, have been hailed as a panacea for a range of our energy problems. The possibilities for energy savings and greater energy efficiency are enormous. The first step in realizing the smart vision of the future is the humble smart meter, which is due to be universally available in British homes by 2020. However, the behavioural science behind the effects of an in-home energy meter is mixed. Pilot tests have returned a range of results, from energy savings to increased consumption and everything in between. Given that there is scientific uncertainty, how should policy makers respond? I argue that the Government must clearly prioritise its reasons for the adoption of smart meters in order to create meters that are most likely to produce a single desired result, instead of solving all the nation’s energy problems.

Read full article ↵

by Declan O’Briain

New forms of media, particularly social media, have been hailed as the great new-age tool of democratic participation while simultaneously being derided for facilitating arm chair politicking and ‘slacktivism’. Global movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring have utilized such technologies in what appears to be innovative and unique ways. Yet day-to-day politics in much of the developed world is met with cynicism, apathy, and voluntary non-participation. Although we recognize the potential of these new technologies, our understanding of the way in which they are shaping the political landscape is incomplete. This article will argue that the conversation needs to move beyond the viewing social media according to the above dichotomy, and instead should see social media as one of many tools that can be utilized in myiad ways. It will then close with some reflections on what this might mean for electoral policy in democratic nations, and how it might be utilized by government’s looking to re-engage their citizenry.

Read full article ↵

by Konstantina Georgaki, Emmanuel Giakoumakis, and Alessandro Rollo

In June 2015, the European Court of Human Rights delivered the final judgment in the Delfi case, where it upheld the decision of an Estonian court to fine a news portal for hosting anonymous defamatory comments. This controversial judgment has a chilling effect on freedom of expression in cyberspace and paves the way for a slippery slope leading to online censorship. The key policy issue is striking a balance between freedom of expression and other protected interests, including privacy, reputation and national security. This paper argues that holding Internet Service Providers (ISPs) liable for third-party content places a disproportionate burden on them and destabilises the architecture of Web 2.0 to the detriment of human rights. To this end, we argue that a new regulatory approach is necessary to address the rights of ISPs in the attempt to balance freedom of expression with new developments in the need for protection of personal data.

Read full article ↵

by Hannah Smith

Limited water resources, weak states and ethnic tensions across Central Asia lead many analysts to believe that the region will bear witness to the world’s first war over water. Through drawing on fieldwork, this study takes the example of the geographically isolated village of Barak (a Kyrgyz exclave) to demonstrate how water resources are manipulated strategically at a local level. This has profound consequences for communities and presents clear violations of basic human rights. The internationally community must act at a micro level to ensure that water does not become another tool of war.

Read full article ↵