Overview
As women in STEM, we look up to every woman who contributes to scientific knowledge and academic publications. However, we are often disheartened by the noticeable gender gap in the distribution of male and female authors. This inspired us to create a tool that can highlight and raise awareness about this disparity, empowering more women to pursue and persist in STEM fields. Built during the EmpowHER Hackathon, the STEMinist Analyzer is a C++ application that analyzes gender representation trends across academic publications.
What I Worked On
- In a 2 person team, co-led the overall design and architecture of the application
- Programmed custom data structures in C++ to efficiently store and process publication and authorship records
- Built the analysis logic that surfaced gender representation trends from the underlying dataset
- Designed the visualization layer to make representation patterns legible at a glance
Why It Mattered
Representation gaps in academic publishing are easy to talk about in the abstract and hard to actually see. We were glad to be able to work towards a tool that can raise awareness, while practicing basic programming skills, earning an Honorable Mention award in the end! Not too shabby for a first hackathon. In the future though, we'd love to enhance STEMinist Analyzer by integrating more advanced algorithms for name-gender classification, including machine learning techniques. This would also allow us to analyze the content of publications to detect any biases towards a specific gender in the actual writing.