Abstract:

The ratio of males and females in senior academic positions in higher education institutions is an issue that is often the subject of concern and - perhaps – debate in academia. Higher education is generally considered a female-friendly professional field, with the total number of female students and academic staff often outnumbering the male population. However, focusing on faculty members, the balance seems to be constantly in favour of men. A review of the relevant literature shows the global nature of this observation as well as a global will towards increasing inclusiveness for female faculty in higher education. Collection, analysis and study of available data regarding the distribution of male and female faculty would be a safe first step towards successful approaches. Towards this aims, Information Visualization (InfoVis) provides techniques for designing visual representations of abstract data to facilitate the increase of knowledge about the internal structure of the data and the causal relationships between them. Thus, InfoVis can significantly help in discoing, understanding or explaining patterns without requiring any strong mathematical background to interpret information.

In this work, we exploit Information Visualization of data concerning the participation of women as faculty members (professors, associate professors, assistant professors and lectures) in higher education institutions in Greece for the period 2010-2019. In particular, we present a responsive online web application where independent users or interested groups can submit queries and instantly obtain visualized information (available also in the form of downloadable charts) regarding gender distribution as a function of factors like time, rank or scientific field. Our data set contains detailed massive data made publicly available annually by the ministry of education in Greece regarding year and rank of initial election and subsequent promotions, area of expertise, university, school and department of service. However, gender information is not explicitly included. To the best of our knowledge, no such information visualization software tool is currently available for the gender composition of faculty members in greek universities. Our web application, currently available in greek and english, can provide quantitative evidence and qualitative insight for facilitating the study of footprint and, thus, raise awareness about male-female aspects of equity and inclusion in higher education in Greece. Moreover, our web application can be used for the visualization and study of other relevant appropriately-structured datasets.

Keywords:

Gender aspects of faculty equity and inclusion in higher education, data analysis, Information Visualization, online web application.